I suspect these reasons are just more AI-washing of a mass layoffs indicative of pandemic-era business mismanagement, but supposing they aren’t…
Watch Cloudflare closely and hold Matthew Prince accountable to all of these statements. If LLMs enhance their builders while simultaneously making their measurers redundant, investors should expect record business growth, drastically fewer outages, and few if any security and compliance fails.
> AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.
Honestly not the apocalyptic scenario I had on my bingo card.
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.
> Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world.
Huh, I wonder why people hate AI so much?
> AI isn’t the harbinger of bleak youth unemployment—it is quite the opposite.
This makes no sense and directly contradicts everything else said before. How is gloating about how you're laying people off despite making more money than ever supposed to increase employment? Do they honestly believe everyone is gullible enough to believe blatant lies like this?
It's been a decade since I was in college but I used to send applications to every vaguely interesting internship, expecting less than 20% of them to contact me.
My university required an internship for graduation so you had to cast a wide net unless you wanted to wait to graduate.
Given how high-profile is and the number of students in the US, 1000 doesn't seem all that impressive.
idk, when I was applying for college a lot of people in the class applied to like 10 schools. There was always space in the education system for them (although maybe not at all of those colleges).
Kids these days are probably just more efficient and can 100x that!
Teen here, I think that I have also applied on the same ~10 colleges level rather than 1000x but I do feel like I have looked for many colleges and I tried to find some international colleges but I am not quite sure about them too. I even made an HN post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377
Anyways I would love to hear your suggestion.
That being said, I feel like an number of colleges apply to rate might still be lower (people might look at many many colleges though) but still not increased 100x
but I can't say the same about internship numbers and I feel like those numbers might have been very different.
I live in India and the Indian education system works a bit differently than American one which I think that I have hopefully fairly detailed it in the HN post.
Anyways, I would love if you would have some advice for which colleges I should apply to if you might have any as I would love to hear it!
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.
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.
> We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively
You will be mentored and performance measured by AI, not humans.
> And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.
Everyone is tracked by AI
> They’re the next generation who will invent ways to drive our business. With AI we can now better measure their contributions and accurately identify those who will be tomorrow’s leaders.
Everything done by every employee judged automatically by AI 24/7, and you’ll put up with it because you’re desperate, 1000s of people applied per internship role.
This is a horrible dystopian future, we’re supposed to be excited by this?
What was the compostion of folks let go by Cloudflare ? How many working in profitable lines ? How many in loss leaders ? How many engineers ? How many supporting business functions ?
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.
"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.
So HR and middle management, legal is ... measuring?
They want to focus on builders and sellers but will support them like robots. A great recipe for disaster.
Legal is measuring too? I can't wrap my head around the reasoning process here. Unless cloudflare is going to be a teal enterprise (from the reinventing organisations book), I don't see how it makes sense.
I suspect these reasons are just more AI-washing of a mass layoffs indicative of pandemic-era business mismanagement, but supposing they aren’t…
Watch Cloudflare closely and hold Matthew Prince accountable to all of these statements. If LLMs enhance their builders while simultaneously making their measurers redundant, investors should expect record business growth, drastically fewer outages, and few if any security and compliance fails.
I expect LLM slop to be the thing that finally convinces software engineers to create a licensing board.
> AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.
Honestly not the apocalyptic scenario I had on my bingo card.
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 measurements will continue until morale improves!
The LLMs will now measure their own performance and conclude it’s stellar and the company should buy more LLMs tokens
The CEOs does it that way, why shouldnt the little people or the LLMs do the same.
Yeah, measurers. You know, the people who help you verify claims such as "the LLM is measuring your organization accurately."
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.
> Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world.
Huh, I wonder why people hate AI so much?
> AI isn’t the harbinger of bleak youth unemployment—it is quite the opposite.
This makes no sense and directly contradicts everything else said before. How is gloating about how you're laying people off despite making more money than ever supposed to increase employment? Do they honestly believe everyone is gullible enough to believe blatant lies like this?
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 been a decade since I was in college but I used to send applications to every vaguely interesting internship, expecting less than 20% of them to contact me.
My university required an internship for graduation so you had to cast a wide net unless you wanted to wait to graduate.
Given how high-profile is and the number of students in the US, 1000 doesn't seem all that impressive.
Every candidate was probably applying to 100s or 1000s of jobs using AI tools.
idk, when I was applying for college a lot of people in the class applied to like 10 schools. There was always space in the education system for them (although maybe not at all of those colleges).
Kids these days are probably just more efficient and can 100x that!
Teen here, I think that I have also applied on the same ~10 colleges level rather than 1000x but I do feel like I have looked for many colleges and I tried to find some international colleges but I am not quite sure about them too. I even made an HN post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377
Anyways I would love to hear your suggestion.
That being said, I feel like an number of colleges apply to rate might still be lower (people might look at many many colleges though) but still not increased 100x
but I can't say the same about internship numbers and I feel like those numbers might have been very different.
I live in India and the Indian education system works a bit differently than American one which I think that I have hopefully fairly detailed it in the HN post.
Anyways, I would love if you would have some advice for which colleges I should apply to if you might have any as I would love to hear it!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Also tech executives: “we have a talent shortage”
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.
[flagged]
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."
Unfortunately it has been revealed that a large enough population is and corporate America has adjusted. Welcome to hell.
Yeah, reads a little inconsistent.
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.
potentially ruining thousands of lives over some shit you read in a seventy year old book is a very normal thing to do
Hidden in there are a few very dystopian lines:
> We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively
You will be mentored and performance measured by AI, not humans.
> And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.
Everyone is tracked by AI
> They’re the next generation who will invent ways to drive our business. With AI we can now better measure their contributions and accurately identify those who will be tomorrow’s leaders.
Everything done by every employee judged automatically by AI 24/7, and you’ll put up with it because you’re desperate, 1000s of people applied per internship role.
This is a horrible dystopian future, we’re supposed to be excited by this?
Unpaywalled https://nonogra.ph/how-i-choose-which-cloudflare-employees-t...
Loer-Value humans as the Standard Charter CEO calls it https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/standard-chartered-...
Everyone who gets fired should be teaming up to start a competing product.
What was the compostion of folks let go by Cloudflare ? How many working in profitable lines ? How many in loss leaders ? How many engineers ? How many supporting business functions ?
Next year's headlines: Cloudfare fires CEO after year of AI vibe-coding related outages cause hundreds of millions in losses.
We care about outages? Asking as a GitHub and Anthropic user
Luigi copycats in 3…2…
Gross
> The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. wtf is "AI-native" ? couldn't he say "familiar with AI tooling?"
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.
"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.
No, he replaced older workers with new cheaper ones. Can't say that out loud or it might lead to lawsuits.
This is more about how the CEO enjoys having such power to just go ahead and lay off 20% of workspace than how AI is replacing people
Can't shake the feeling that in the US CEOs do vibe firing. Just spin a wheel and see who gets the axe.
Would be far too expensive in my country because of the severance package.
The distinct categories of building, selling and measuring seem fallacious
So HR and middle management, legal is ... measuring?
They want to focus on builders and sellers but will support them like robots. A great recipe for disaster.
Legal is measuring too? I can't wrap my head around the reasoning process here. Unless cloudflare is going to be a teal enterprise (from the reinventing organisations book), I don't see how it makes sense.
Beheading is one thing. Parading around the severed heads is another.
I'd really love to read this article; this feels like it's totally under-explored, not discussed.
Paywalled.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-i-choose-which-cloudflare-em...
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