Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.
I know Waymo is trying to hire like a thousand engineers this year.
There are others.
Good luck to those of you looking for a job. My company is hiring a few people, but if someone leaves today there is only a 20% change we hire someone outside to replace them so I can't really offer leads worth looking at.
https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hinoki/bb798ffb-2427-460e-84ff-fe29...
Is your stance that shareholders should perpetually subsidize it out of the goodness of their hearts?
In an ideal world, a layoff of this scale would also require a shakeup of the management that let it get this bad in the first place.
What's more, the higher up the chain, the less onerous the layoff for the individual getting laid off.
It just sounds like you're upset and want to hurt whoever you feel is responsible for making you upset. That's not a productive stance to have on important topics.
I'm not asking for the people who hurt me to be hurt. I am asking that the responsibility of the actions that management layers took be considered in layoffs.
For instance - If overhiring happened, how is this not at least a little bit on the individual that approved of a hiring spree? Why is it that they should be able to yield a baton that hurts the workers they hired, without having to actual bare the brunt of the decisions?
If a business is still unprofitable, a business that touches so much of the internet like Cloudflare, then that is also a strategic failure and should be punished as such.
I feel like your tone in this response was also so condescending.
Do you think shareholders do not consider their employees performance when deciding to hire/keep them?
Do you think CEOs don't do that when it comes to their executive team?
Do you think the executive team doesn't consider that?
It all comes flowing down.
I can assure you as a shareholder i am 100% focused on getting a return, and I will fire (or vote to fire) any executives that i believe are doing a bad job, or who accept that their underlings do a bad job.
Hiring people, and then firing them some time later is not intrinsically the same as doing a bad job, nor does it mean there was "overhiring".
Also. "hurts workers"? What?
Workers receive the payments that were agree to, for the period that was agreed to. No more, no less.
You are no more entitled to a job than the supermarket is entitled to my patronage, and me choosing to no longer purchase from you, whether it be groceries or labor, is not me hurting you.
It's a mindset that enables neoliberalism to flourish while vast majorities suffer immensely to benefit the few.
It's a system that's worth questioning as the material lives of 100s of millions of Americans are getting objectively worse every year while we are always being told there is no money for healthcare or childcare but there is always trillions laying around for imperialistic activities like data center expansions and war.
There's a limited pool of execs to run companies. Its a pretty homogenous group of people, similar skill sets, some have varying philosophies on how to run companies, but the majority of them will likely make the same decision if given identical sets of circumstances.
I get triggered when people start calling out "elites" and other boogeymen - what does it mean to have companies run by non-elites? What even is an "elite"? Are they elite simply because they are employed as an exec? Is it possible to have a non-elite executive?
Using "elites" in this context makes it feel like an emotional complaint about the world rather than anything rooted in logic.
In many traditional industries, companies are built and run by the most senior members of whichever discipline. Tech is different because most of its skilled members intentionally cede soft power because of personal (imo short-sighted) predilections and the exorbitant amount of money flowing in has caused a mad dash from other disciplines.
The "elites" are people trained either institutionally or personally (from their relationships with others) to understand power dynamics and utilize them for personal gain.
Navel gazing is a great away to achieve nothing. Being lorded over by someone who couldn't even figure out how to build and host a simple webapp is ludicrous. Should the CEO of my hospital not understand that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? Should the partners at big M&A law firms have no idea how to read a contract? No, because that's fucking ludicrous -- yet it persists in tech because its technicians have zero training, education, or even sense for elite ways of thinking.
I thought Silicon Valley was all about meritocracy? Why should corporate shills that does not know how to profit from entity that controls 25% of internet traffic be allowed to keep their jobs but the actual people providing real value, the workers, aren't?
That is a system that doesn't benefit humanity. It selfishly benefits the few.
What are you talking about??
This is public information. Their financial statements show clearly that they made a loss every single year since the data is available.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/inc...
Leadership is terrible and they're out of ideas. AI is going to be the future but it can't even review code properly
Their "no profit" is entire accounting trickery
How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?
"You have 20 guys that can code, so you can get rid of two of them".
No one had any idea. My director got the same email
That’s how it was at my previous company also. If you asked any engineer there they’d say “I’m incredibly busy, and I need more headcount to get through the things on my plate”. Then they laid off 40% of the company because AI had made everything so efficient shrug
As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.
They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...
It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?
Matthew Price calls it "an electric screwdriver". Does that sound like someone who has ever gotten deep on anything?
Of course they're going to downplay their own stupidity and use LLMs as a means to suppress terrible news.