Cloudflare CEO pledges to double 2020 internship class | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare CEO pledges to double 2020 internship class

techcrunch.com

196 pointscaution65 comments

Are their internships open to ... non traditional students?

Folks changing careers and such?

I changed careers a few years ago and I would have been happy to get my feet wet in a new career with an internship or etc. But most are highly centered around the existing 4 year university system, so if you're not in that system that opportunity is closed.

A few were open to folks with other experience, but most were still traditional student focused.

I feel like with the way technology, jobs, and everything changes so quickly that internships too maybe should be more open to different paths.

if one can get past HR, most people probably don't care, though it might be seen as strange

imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.

For those of us changing careers... many of us are (well this was a few years ago so not me at the moment) too ;)

For most industries just getting any 'experience' is half the battle.

They don’t know they’re being insulted, and they lack the tools to address the issue.

But more importantly, you don’t get sass for being a bad boss from a bunch of kids who have never had a real boss before.

I wonder how often this "being insulted" thing is really a thing.

I worked with a lot of interns in my time. Almost everyone seemed to greatly overestimate their productivity / use. The internships we offered were NOT net moneymakers / all that useful. They were more PR, random chance of finding someone good enough to hire.

Maybe I wasn't seeing how many internships work but straight out of or in college into an internship is a real roll of the dice productivity wise in my experience.

No doubt at the top schools / top candidates are different, but most, I'm skeptical of.

I mean for any big tech company, its not that cheap. I made $42.50 an hour plus a housing stipend when I was an intern, and I don't think that I did very much. A lot of the reason that companies do that is that paying an intern about $20k for the summer and converting them to a full time employee after graduation is cheaper than what they would spend to hire someone through the interview process and stuff like that.

To put things into perspective, a 3 months internship in France (which are usually imposed as part of master degree) is paid approximately 1650€ (1800 USD), for the whole internship. Yes, that doesn’t even pay a rent.

I don't know what perspective that really brings. I'm sure that there are internships that pay less, but Cloudflare is a big company that is in the Bay Area, so thats pretty much what they're gonna pay.

Certainly not in most paris tech compagnies : mine pays 1000/month and its a startup. In Big tech its at least 1500.

I worked with a lot of interns, and in my experience the ONLY value was finding folks randomly who were good enough to hire. The actual productivity / work for the interns on average was very low.

The rate was so low though that I'm not sure if it really was a net positive, but I think the company liked the PR and such too.

We sometimes get completed usable work out of interns, but it’s much more a recruiting vehicle (for us) and a training/pay it back for the candidates. The recruiting can pay off for a decade when you land a star out of college and retain them.

I mean yeah, that's not really a secret. The head of the intern program that I was at straight up told all the interns that it was worth it to the company if even 20% of the interns who were hired returned as full time employees.

> imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.

I don't find this very convincing. we get a lot of bright, motivated interns at my company, but even so, there's a limit to what they get actually get done in three months working in an unfamiliar codebase. the deliverable itself usually isn't worth what you have to pay interns in a competitive market. we do find a large portion of our entry-level hires through the internship program, which I believe is the real value to the company.

Yeah my experience with interns is the same.

Outside of the exceptionally rare ultra high performers (I can think of maybe 2 I met like that). Interns really can't get a great deal done, even if just because they just arrived. There's a lot of onboarding for anyone joining, and productivity always takes a hit there.

I’m not sure bout cloudflare but over the last 2 years more tech companies are expanding their internship programs into “early career” programs that accept the non traditional candidates.

At my company at least, you have to be a "diverse candidate" to realistically qualify for that opportunity however.

At my company you do not. Anecdotally (again, for my company) I hear that being from a not-top-N-university helps your chances, so maybe that extends to no university? I'm really not sure.

Cloudflare specifically used to bring in paid interns from programs that targeted women that left the workforce due to having children. Plenty of interns were offered FTE once the internship ended. So I know they are happy to evaluate different types of interns, not just college students.

We still do, via https://www.pathforward.org/

Very nice!

I think you're imagining that this would be a good way to get a foot in the door, but many internship programs are more competitive than full time programs.

Partly this is because they usually have limited spots.

Another large component is the makeup of the applicant pools. Internship applicants include lots of strong applicants that won't be in the full-time applicant pool because they'll get hired out of internships.

Anecdotally, our coding screen gives intern applicants a median score 13% higher than full-time applicants.

Intern applicants tend to also be much more likely to have prepared for coding interview questions.

I also had harder internship questions, and a harder time passing, when interviewing at places like Yelp than I did full-time at most FAANG-tier companies (disclaimer: I did not interview at Netflix).

I love cloudflare, I'd love to work there, but I just wish they would actually pay market rates. Everyone I know that has considered them backs out because the offers they receive are the biggest lowballs they've seen in their life.

Pledging to hire 50 interns? News must be slow over at TechCrunch.

It's semi significant because some companies are curtailing their internship programs right now.

There are many colleges that haven't yet changed their internship and/or foreign study requirements. So, this sort of thing is helpful.

Are theses internships paid?

Yes. All Cloudflare internships are paid, including the new ones we just created. More details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020...

Right from the CEO's mouth :-)

This will be great for students, thanks Matt.

Hi Matt,

This is unrelated, but can you please get rid of hCaptcha? It is an awful experience and it feels like there is a conflict of interest with including it vs captcha. You are now incentivized to push more users towards fraudulent vs non-fraudulent to make more money. I'm not saying that's what is happening, but it is a slippery slope.

I already dislike Captcha, but hCaptcha is somehow much worse.

I wasn't aware they moved to hCaptcha. On one hand, I understand it to some degree, since it's a way to offset the losses caused by malicious actors who are using captcha farms, and they can dedicate those additional resources to better detection and blocking. But as you say, it gives them an awful incentive, and just feels slimy in general.

It also potentially provides an incentive to profit from the growing interest in privacy and anonymization among the general public. The more who people who start using Tor or certain VPNs to mask their activity (as opposed to those using them for malicious purposes - the number of such people may not be growing nearly as quickly), the more they profit.

They should definitely go back to reCAPTCHA.

No chance we go back to ReCAPTCHA. We’d been concerned with the privacy implications of using a Google service for years. Then Google changed their policy to switch ReCAPTCHA from being free to a paid service. They have every right to do that, but it would have imposed >$10M in costs just to support our free customer base, which was untenable. That was the kick in the butt we needed to finally get off Google’s service. We moved to hCAPTCHA as at least a stopgap. Ultimately, our goal is to eliminate any overt CAPTCHA entirely. However, I will say I’ve been very impressed with hCAPTCHA’s responsiveness and willingness to rapidly innovate based on feedback from users — something that, even at our scale, we had a hard time getting from Google.

Thanks for the quick response! I'm definitely interested in eliminating CAPTCHA entirely. I was really hopeful for the Javascript check y'all were doing, but it looks like there were too many ways around that.

In case it isn’t clear from our website, hCaptcha offers both bot prevention and traffic monetization options. Cloudflare does not use our service for traffic monetization, so neither company has an incentive to make it difficult for humans to pass the captcha.

Websites that use hCaptcha for monetization can adjust difficulty settings and the types of data labeling jobs their users will see. The value hCaptcha derives from human data labeling is provided broadly as a service to other companies, not just to provide training data for our own autonomous vehicle division. Since we are growing capacity like crazy and have a broad footprint of sites primarily interested in bot prevention and not traffic monetization, hCaptcha can offer the lowest cost data labeling to everyone. hCaptcha is also privacy-focused and doesn’t track you around the internet to show you advertisements. We support the privacy-pass extension and have an accessibility option which sends you to a cookie via email (because we can’t just cookie you when you log into our email service).

Hi! Are the internships open to only students in the US? Might not be the most appropriate place to ask, but couldn't find an answer on the job application page.

We’re open to applicants from anywhere. The only limitations may be if there are country-level restrictions on where we can pay people (e.g., employment law requirements we haven’t met because we’re not setup as an employer in the country). We have offices in the US, UK, Portugal, Germany, Singapore, and China so it possible from those countries. And we’ll do what we can within reason to make it work from elsewhere.

> Internships are jobs, and we believe people should be paid for the jobs they do, so every internship at Cloudflare is paid. That doesn't change with these new internship positions we're creating: they will all be paid.

This is the right thing to do. Good on Cloudflare.

Has anyone seen unpaid internships in tech recently? I didn't think it was common practice anymore outside of very new companies.

Took a few un-paid as a middle- and early high-schooler, mostly to prove I was worth money and not a total fruit loop, which was probably reasonable at that age. Got paid after that.

Highschool coops are required to be unpaid to count as a credit in my province, so it is probably similar in some other places which would lead to that practice

School credit wasn't an issue; these were for my development and experience. I was homeschooled so I guess I could have put them down, but never thought to. It stinks that schools do it that way; I'm curious, to which province & nation are you referring?

At least in Ontario, Canada I wasn't allowed to take a paid internship for high school credit.

Unpaid internships are illegal in most states and the last time I checked it was the most commonly violated labor law.

However, there are exceptions for government and nonprofit internships.

What’s the culture like at cloudflare?

I hear the culture is good, but the pay is way under market.

That's smart. They are going to get a ton of great applications.

As markets get roiled Cloudflare has proven to be one of the best investments you can make. Buy a thousand shares today and you’ll be glad you did 5 or 6 years from now.

Hang on, any reason why Cloudfare's recent market outperformance will continue?

good product, growing market, good stewardship, growing revenue, high margin...

High margin means that it's ripe for competition.

Cloudflare's margins are not easy to replicate. They have deployed a physical, global network that you cannot spin up with limited resources.

If you're not already in a position to challenge Cloudflare today, it'd take years for you to build a similarly sized network. And even if you were able to get a similar physical distribution, can you get the same low peering prices?

Then, once you have that, it's a very complex stack inherently. So getting feature parity with CF is no easy task by itself.

I'd say Fastly or Amazon could put more effort into challenging Cloudflare and see some success. But Fastly already goes head to head with Cloudflare today. So, idk who would be able to disrupt them within a couple years unless they are already on that trajectory.

It's interesting to me that Akamai hasn't changed their model somewhat away from the "Call Sales for More Info" plan.

They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them. But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.

Well, Cloudflare's free tier costs money, but it was a good way to get people using the service, and now it's part of the ethos and culture people expect from Cloudflare.

By the time Akamai was being challenged by Cloudflare, they already had such a marketshare it probably wasn't worth racing to the bottom. Until Cloudflare is actually taking Akamai customers, I don't think they'll change.

I didn't suggest a free plan. And certainly Akamai has lost some business to Cloudflare.

I didn't suggest you did. I am simply saying that Cloudflare started with a Free plan which helped build the company. So Cloudflare took on the smaller customers by design, as evident from the Free tier of accounts.

So, by the time Cloudflare started really going after meaningful enterprises, it was a race to the bottom for Akamai if they wanted to kill off CF.

Yes Cloudflare has taken some Akamai customers, but when I was working there, it was pretty well established that we didn't directly go after existing Akamai customers. It was a losing battle for Cloudflare. Akamai had a far superior streaming service and there was no way Cloudflare could adequately compete against them in the space where Akamai retained most of their customers.

I'm not as up-to-date on the CDN wars, but I am pretty sure thats still the case. Cloudflare launched a streaming platform, but it still couldn't compete directly against Akamai. Cloudflare has decided that it wants to do everything decently in an agnostic way because it allows them to pick up a wider range of businesses vs being force to go head to head with Akamai or Fastly. Both of those providers offer similar cache response times, and in some cases are much faster than Cloudflare. So, Cloudflare tries really hard to not lock itself into fighting with CDNs directly. We viewed Amazon as a more direct competitor vs Akamai.

While a nice gesture, this would mean a lot more if Cloudflare was doing poorly right now. They're doing great, so this costs them very little and seems mostly like a PR stunt.

Huh? If they were doing poorly they wouldn't be able to afford to do this. It's exactly the companies that are doing well that we want to step up and do things like this.

That's the entire point you and other commenters are missing here. It's very easy to be generous when you're doing well, it's a lot harder to be generous when you're not. The latter is far more noble as a result. Easy comparison: if a millionaire stands up and yells at everyone about how they just donated $100 to a charity while someone else with barely any savings quietly donates the same amount, which one is more deserving of praise? Cloudflare is the millionaire in this example, thousands of small businesses making actual sacrifices to keep employees from getting fired are the other person. This is a feel-good PR stunt.

Honestly, 'deserving of praise' makes no sense to me. There are only behaviours you want to reinforce and behaviours you want to discourage. I think I want to reinforce offering internships (giving the $100 in your example) so I wouldn't differentiate between the two cases and I'd praise them both.

This company is stepping up when they are able to. Good. I want more of that.

Yeah, they should really apologize for not harming themselves before trying to help others. Helping out interns when your business isn't tanking is such a selfish and unforgivable PR stunt.

Even if it's a PR stunt, what's so bad about this specific case? It costs Cloudflare little (this for one depends on how the mentoring is set up), yes, but it also provides a possibility for students to work on interesting problems during a difficult time, and they also get paid (the CEO just confirmed this in a comment on this post; additionally, see https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020...)

All in all I think this is a good thing in these times, PR stunt or not.

Disclaimer: I don't work at Cloudflare

I never said it's not a good thing. It's a great thing. It's also a PR stunt that costs them basically nothing. Downvote me all you want, I'll still call out this kind of thing every time I see it.

What are you accomplishing and/or who are you helping by "calling out" the fact that these things help them from a PR perspective?

I have no idea why there is always a negative take on every HN post these days. Internships are the cheapest way to find talent. Many companies lay a path to obtain a full-time position after internships and its a win-win for both.

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