27 pointsby oradwan2 hours ago9 comments
  • SaucyWrong39 minutes ago
    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.

  • fnyan hour ago
    > 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.

  • pesusan hour ago
    > 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?

    • evenhashan hour ago
      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?

      • BoggleOhYeah2 minutes ago
        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.

      • lesuorac6 minutes ago
        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!

    • stultan hour ago
      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.

    • giancarlostoro29 minutes ago
      Yeah, reads a little inconsistent.
    • thejazzmanan hour ago
      Unfortunately it has been revealed that a large enough population is and corporate America has adjusted. Welcome to hell.
    • cyanydeezan hour ago
      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.

  • peterbecich5 minutes ago
    The distinct categories of building, selling and measuring seem fallacious
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  • lazyantan hour ago
    > The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. wtf is "AI-native" ? couldn't he say "familiar with AI tooling?"
  • jauntywundrkind2 hours ago
    I'd really love to read this article; this feels like it's totally under-explored, not discussed.

    Paywalled.

  • 2 hours ago
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