Cloudflare CEO on how he chooses which employees to replace with AI

I expect LLM slop to be the thing that finally convinces software engineers to create a licensing board.

The measurements will continue until morale improves!

The really, really funny part about this is that he's laying off his regulatory required employees (internal audit). Having worked on building AI systems for this group, the idea that it can be replaced with AI is pretty ludicrous.

Like, firstly this is a requirement from a bunch of regulators, and the whole point of IA is to ensure that your systems are actually doing what they're supposed to. AI definitely helps (massively), but the hallucination rate and over-confidence stop this from being a full replacement.

That being said, I do agree that there are two many measurers in lots of big companies, it's just that I wouldn't have included internal audit in my list of people to go.

Should be an interesting couple of years, if lots of other tech CEOs follow this example.

The CEOs does it that way, why shouldnt the little people or the LLMs do the same.

Unfortunately it has been revealed that a large enough population is and corporate America has adjusted. Welcome to hell.

it sounds more like the fallacy of trickle down economics. Anyone who still believes that the wealth of the company will tricke down to their pocket book, even if they have stock options, is smelling their own farts.

These companies are spinning of metric tons of external costs that no bunker in hawaii will protect them from consequences.

You have to quote this part to really appreciate how self-contradictory this article is.

> We received almost a million applicants for 1,111 paid internships this summer.

~1000 applicants per internship! Not a job, an internship. How could that be interpreted as anything other than bleak?

It's a declaration that corporate America intends to impose all the costs of AI on individuals. Cloudflare could have retrained people, found new roles for them, etc. Instead it is throwing them to the wolves.

It used to be unacceptable for companies to lay people off purely to improve their margins. It's a sign of how dark the times have become that now CEOs don't even question the acceptability of layoffs that aren't driven by financial distress. The idea that they owe any loyalty to their employees has disappeared entirely. And boy you couldn't have invented a more fitting name for an entitled prick of a CEO reveling in this neo-aristocracy: Prince.

I hope everyone who still works at Cloudflare takes note and starts looking for an exit, because it's clear their boss is just waiting for the first possible chance to cut them and they cannot rely on any glint of humanity from him. Longer term, I think these types of layoffs will prove counterproductive for exactly that reason. It is poisonous to company culture, and all but sure to drive away talent.

Also I have had to deal with multiple breaking bugs from Cloudlfare and their absolutely atrocious customer service over the past few months, so I pulled all my personal and professional sites. They are shitting out vibe coded crap and not providing even minimal customer service anymore, even for an account spending six figures with them annually. Which might not be a huge number by CF standards, but surely should be enough to offer at least some human customer service to handle breaking bugs. Instead, all I got was a chatbot that regurgitated their FAQ and then gave me an email address that was no longer in use and a phone number that was disconnected. It was bafflingly unprofessional. So clearly whatever changes they have made are not working, and Prince is just too thick to recognize he is set to tank the company.

Yeah, reads a little inconsistent.

Reminds me of the Twitter comment:

Can't raise minimum wage, because that will kill jobs.

Can't raise taxes on the bourgeoisie class because it will kill jobs.

Can't ditch oil because it will kill jobs.

But when these companies replace 50% of their workforce with AI, it's "sorry, that's just the way it goes."

What a crazy trick. When you don't like the measurements, you can just fire people and get the robots to measure the way you asked them to instead.

We care about outages? Asking as a GitHub and Anthropic user

  > You will be mentored and performance measured by AI, not humans

look on the positive side: it will be easier to game the system /s

Apparently he only laid off "measurers" who wouldn't be able to build and sell their own product.

"AI-native" refers to understanding what new areas of value are unlocked by the existence of modern AI systems, and which old problems no longer matter because you can just have Claude trivially deal with them. Not everyone who's familiar with AI tooling necessarily has those instincts.

I think it’s akin to a child growing up with technology, and therefore being able to operate with it at an intuitive level.

These interns have never not used AI (in the industry), so they haven’t had the “handicap” of traditional development experience that slows down their AI usage.

A senior will see a problem they’ve done a thousand times and do it again the same way, a junior with AI will try to make it fit into any new hole they find.