Comment by headinthesky
15 hours ago
This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.
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.
" Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire."
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.
My man, all these fuckers use the same parasitic management consultancies. That's why all this shit looks the same.
Time to watch Office Space again?
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Cloudflare has never made a profit.
Is your stance that shareholders should perpetually subsidize it out of the goodness of their hearts?
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Absolutely. My hope is selfish - the market is awful
I promise you there are a ton of companies desperate to hire talent right now. It's hard on both sides of the market. Lots of noise, but there is demand for this supply. Unfortunately, that means personal connections are more valuable than they used to be, just to get the ball rolling.
Do the world a favor and take your institutional knowledge out the door to enjoy greener pastures.
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> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?
Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.
I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?
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EMs are never in the loop for layoffs for companies of this size, because the whole company would just get forewarning of the layoffs
This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.
I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder
No one had any idea. My director got the same email
My boss had no idea layoffs were even coming, so who knows how they picked.
[dead]
Companies have so much data on employees/products/customers etc these days the EM's opinion is just noise.
Please point people you know to https://antithesis.com/company/careers/ which is hiring EMs and deep tech people
> I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do
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
I guess a company can coast on reputation for a while, before things come crashing down at least at parts of the company.
In my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.
> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.
I know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling.
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...
Is it possible that the line of thinking really is that "agentic AI" will up for the capability shortfall?
It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?
So Sorry, And I literally just moved all my stuff to cloudflare 2 weeks ago… if it means anything it was a great product.