Comment by AloysB

> AI tools make great team members even better

This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.

But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.

(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)

This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?

A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.

Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.

People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.

Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.

Company internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.

It's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year".

If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.

Using human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101

It feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation.

LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....

300% accurate

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less.

Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'...

It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.

Being old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?

Or it is just regular ageism.

Laying off people with experience which only 1% of their younger colleagues will learn because LLMs made it redundant enough is misguided today. If I were a CEO I’d hold on to my 15-20 yoe engineers for my dear life; can lay them off in 2028.

I worked in a company that did that. They couldn't rehire the senior after the junior burned with a bug 700k in 20 min by touching a part of the codebase no one had context for anymore.

You know what's way more expensive than an old senior developer? The 10 interns you try to replace them with.

Mmmm, fresh people.

Isn’t this illegal?

there's no way 1100 interns are all going to be offered full time jobs

>You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight"

If the "future" being built is one that those same interns would be dropped as "dead weight" as soon as they settle into families and refuse to be exploited with overwork, then it's a bad future, even if it's one with more CDN features.

Although, instead, it will be a more enshittified one anyway: they're cheapening your company and the product and lose organizational and operational knowledge in the process.

But the truth would likely be closer to that those fired would be a mix of mostly extra people hired plus some older employees. But instead of "we hired extra X less than a year ago, we shed X now", it's rebranded as "we reduce our workforce thanks to AI" to get possitive press and appeal to the less bright small-time investors.

There's an interesting assumption here that all people working at Cloudflare are great developers, and none deserve to be fired for poor code or laziness.

The future might have more outages then.

I always wonder what happens to institutional knowledge in American companies.

>Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics.

That's the point.

Yes, left is right, up is down.

yes sure. its pure accounting and buying into the scam that genai+junior will reduce costs. meanwhile they tokenmaxing vibecoding uis for 50% of their wages cost. I will short every company making those moves.

Surely they wouldn't keep all of the new hires.

I don't think a 17 yrs old company has that many long tenured people!

You're almost defining part of, or the beginning of, the process of enshittification.

The 1%!

I found that video and I couldn't finish watching it. TBH it's really incomprehensible to me why we've created a culture where being so heartless is praised upon.

HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).

I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.

That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.

Interns getting “truck loads” of work done has not been my experience. Potted plant is a better metaphor.

Liquidity in the currency market.

Need to propagate a lot of dollars fast, 24/7 as a moat on it remaining a reserve currency.

99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.

But that money printer was running hot and heavy. Needed to funnel it somewhere. Why not that favorite political cudgel of the elites; pointless busy work jobs! Let's invest in a bunch of shops nearby for them to lunch at too!

>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop competition from growing by nipping the threat in the bud.

Future can pay for all of this if you succeed.

Some of these are unintentionally as witty as Mark Twain’s

I doubt it. Interns are cheap. They've replaced paid staff with interns!

The "as many as 1,111" number was:

> The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional.

But like the sibling comment says, "over 1,100" does not reference any of their resolver IPs anyways. In all likelihood, they hired fewer than the maximum of 1,111 interns and they are probably chopping slightly more than that here (max vs min).

Their main DNS is 1.1.1.1 but their secondary is 1.0.0.1 not 1.1.0.0, so close but not quite.

This and the crazy macro economic environment.

The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.

Honestly not a bad theory. There’s definitely a huge disparity between actual productivity gained by using agentic coding done somewhat properly… and a non-stop wave of vibe coded work causing outages and churn. Pre-Covid hiring coupled with the high enterprise pricing for AI plans, it would make sense.

If you listen to people on HN you could think AI is not increasing productivity or is even having a net negative effect.

I think the reality is different.

In this thread I saw the resume of an engineer affected by this Cloudflare layoff. In the resume he claimed that adopting opencode in his workflow, he shipped an integration in half the time it took peers without AI assistance for similar projects.

infrastructure changes slowly. once its built its not clear what you are paying 1111 people for.

It is May 2026, there is no difference between AI and non-AI bills.

Most (if not all) major enterprises in the US have gone through at least one round of org-wide subscription renewals (eg: Atlassian product packs, Microsoft product packs, etc) where 1) price increases were mandatory, 2) AI features could not be opted out of, and 3) AI feature usage was strongly encouraged from C-suite to client-facing biz staff to telephone agent support staff.

I repeat, we are passed the point where AI bills and non-AI bills can be differentiated. We are all paying for these features driven by tokens whether we like it or not, whether the cost-benefit analysis makes sense, and whether they are even being used.

And we are all passing the costs onto everyone lower on the totem pole, from insurance groups to bank groups to national grocery chains to consultant conglomerates to minimum wage front-line staff to below-minimum-wage gig workers.

And this is why there are layoffs, every price increase from the top down causes further price increases to cascade down.