Comment by AloysB
2 months ago
This is awkward.
Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]
Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]
I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra
I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.
This has a name, and also a poster boy.
Amazon's well known "hire-to-fire" [1]
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
Amazon followed that model heavily until they basically ran out of top talent wanting to work for them.
That bit really hard when AI hit and all the top engineers wouldn’t even consider working at Amazon.
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This is so ethically and morally odious I struggle to find the words to describe it.
I’ve managed people out. I’m sure I’ll have to do it again. I’ve even let people go during probation but, on the rare occasions that’s happened, I’ve seen it as a failure of the hiring process.
People have families, they have mortgages, bills to pay, and a powerful need to eat (Mal, Serenity?). The last thing I want is for someone to give up a stable job that allows them to do that to come and work for me only so I can fire them and leave them up the creek a few weeks or months down the line.
Our employees are after all people, human beings.
As I result I skew picky during the hiring process: if there’s any doubt there’s no doubt kind of thing.
Just awful behaviour here from Amazon.
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I took one of those seasonal hire to fire Amazon roles, having thrived in Apple engineering for many years, and not needing to work really at all.
It was laughable that the manager thought he could brainwash me (who used to report one level away from Steve Jobs) into learning how to write code, etc. He was from country X and would protect another wildly inappropriate employee also from country X despite her being a geography graduate in an SWE role, I'd have to teach her, then she'd report to him she taught me what i know.
Unbelievably corrupt org, but amusing i had to admit. it wouldn't be amusing if i had been dependent on working there.
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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.
old sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.
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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.
This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
A. We have to work somewhere, and in 2026 honestly it’s actually the employer’s market which is kinda new to me, as someone who always just passively waited until an interesting job offer fell in my lap.
B. They all pretty much work the same. Everywhere is “like a family” and “cares about sustainability” and all, until either your VC money starts to run low and you sell to PE or liquidate, or, for your big techs, layoff season comes around and you need to show that you’re willing to cut costs with the best of them, so you pick a random 4-5 digit number to lay off for the investors.
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> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
- “Yes we do”
It’s a bit naive to think they’d just own up to it.
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> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
There’s some kind of reverse-survivorship bias here. I’d never apply at Meta because their management does the “hire a bunch of excess people in the good times, so when Zuck‘s next inevitable efficiency-drive happens, the team is able to layoff lots of people while still staying operational” approach.
So I’d never make it into the Meta interview to ask that question in the first instance, and neither would anyone else who thinks of Meta in that way.
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How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.
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> 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?
Well, this is not something you can safely ask in most interviews. Also, while there's some sort of HN/hackerdom fiction that the job seeker holds some power during the interview, for most job seekers the interview is strongly imbalanced towards the interviewer. So asking clever questions during the interview is risky if you're desperate for a job.
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> Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices.
When you have a mortgage to pay and a family and a COBRA package running out (in the best case), your willingness to "penalize" a company that is actually willing to pay you decent money gets progressively lower as time passes. Not everybody has FU money and can refuse all offers until an ideal employer shows up on the horizon.
At least personally, I optimize for "any job that I can get in this horrible job market". When job seekers are despirate I don't think you can realistically say that their taking the job implies consent. They've effectively been given the offer "take this job or become homeless".
> 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.
This strategy basically puts you in the top 5% earners though.
I cannot imagine a company or managee that engages in these practices being honest about them
> People game companies and companies will game people in return.
You have cause and effect entirely reversed.
There have literally been movies and tv shows made about employees showing missplaced loyalty to their companies and what the companies do in spite of that loyalty, and now that the pendulum has swung to around a bit, you have the temerity to suggest it's the employees who started this trend and the poor employers are just forced to play the game? Fuck right off.
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> This is completely acceptable.
I dunno, treating people with cattle kind of feels like the less good option here. These people who get hired have their own life, with plans and outlooks and what not, and basically hiring someone just to have someone to fire later, feels really shitty and flat out ignoring that they're human too.
>This is completely acceptable.
No, it's psychopathic. Please, let's not pretend multi-billion dollar companies and your average worker are on anywhere near even footing. Companies always make a big song and dance about being great places to work. Nobody tells candidates 'you'll be expected to work 60h weeks to keep up with the workload here'. Candidates don't ask pointed questions about this because they'd be immediately disqualified. I know, I've been there.
The only company I know of that's open about their practices is netflix, and they comp appropriately for the risk. All other companies? It's basically word of mouth.
> This is completely acceptable.
Is it?
Or we need labor unions
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It's the other way around. Why do employees try to game the companies in the first place? Because most, or at least a very large portion, don't give a shit about their employees.
It's not just cloudflare. Amazon had been doing this shit forever (probably decades at this point), to cite an egregious example. As a mere mortal employee, its not like you have a lot of choices.
> 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?
To put it another way: she shouldn't have been dressed like that, it's her fault for being raped.
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.
If both sides know it, working as a "churney" can be pretty chill. Like being put on the roof from the getgo.
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You may knock this system but it's what made General Electric the company it is today!
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Maybe 1/10 of the new hires replace 1/90 of the existing old timers. You need some creative destruction.
Workers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
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I know a medium sized defense contractor that ultimately had to sell itself a few years because they did this.
They would come recruiting in bulk at our school only to fire the majority within a year to satisfy their stack ranking nonsense.
10 years later, the engineers they were protecting retired and they couldnt find anyone willing to work for them, even people still in school knew the reputation.
People are so desperate for work nowadays I don't think a negative reputation would deter applicants
Using human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101
Or it was a combined strategy - hire interns who will hopefully be able to replace some higher paid employees at lower cost once they learn the ropes. Then reduce headcount further replacing with AI.
Surely nothing will go wrong with this strategy !
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....
They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...
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The term for this is „buffer hiring“.
Company internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.
Totally.
In companies that routinely layoff people for lulz, executives collect business units for layoff fodder to protect their key players.
It’s the proving ground for the sociopaths who rise up.
See: "The B-Ark".
300% accurate
This (from the September 2025 post) now evokes the Curb theme:
> Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. This is resulting in increased sidelining of new college graduates. But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.
> While we are excited about what AI tools can help do, we have a different philosophy about their role. AI tools make great team members even better, and allow firms to set more ambitious goals. They are not replacements for new hires — but ways to multiply how new hires can contribute to a team.
> 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.)
Before AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code.
What has changed?
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I know you're arguing a more general point, but it's worth pointing out in their layoff announcement, CloudFlare is claiming:
- This is NOT performance related.
- This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
They say both things explicitly. What they don't say very clearly is what the layoffs ARE about.
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Losing what edge?
It's weird to fire people instead of giving them training.
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Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics.
You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less.
You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight"
> 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.
> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience,
If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.
They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.
Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.
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Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company.
Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.
Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers?
This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.
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How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.
Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired.
Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.
> seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience
Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.
Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.
Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.
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Being old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?
It's more that the young people are more likely to go along with the hype because they aren't experienced enough to know the limitations of LLMs (their baseline skill level is too low to compare), they get to feel like they are more capable than they actually are, or they are not in a financial position to push back.
AI will mentor them /s
Or it is just regular ageism.
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.
Young people today have grown up in a low trust society and have a totally different mindset. They have no qualms with figuring out how to extract as much as possible from their employer while providing as little value as they can. They will fake their competence as long as possible using LLMs and then go do it again somewhere else.
Can't blame them it's the culture we have now especially in tech, and it's incentivized top-down.
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.
Mmmm, fresh people.
Can we juice them?
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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.
there's no way 1100 interns are all going to be offered full time jobs
Isn’t this illegal?
In the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work):
To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.
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Only if you're dumb enough to leave a paper trail showing that's what you did.
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Technically yes, IBM just got sued successfully for it.
That said they just settled the case for what happened in 2016. So you might be right and even win but that wont help you for a decade (assuming you win at all)
Just your average Thursday in American capitalism!
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Making it illegal would be communism
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>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.
Cloudflare is a public company.
The incentives do not allow it to look more than a year (and in a lot of cases a quarter) down the road.
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>Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics.
That's the point.
You know what's way more expensive than an old senior developer? The 10 interns you try to replace them with.
The future might have more outages then.
Yes, left is right, up is down.
I always wonder what happens to institutional knowledge in American companies.
Picture a space station where there's an error when trying to seal the door and they proceed anyway and it explodes from the pressure differential as all the air escapes out to space.
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what institutional knowledge exactly? all they know is politics and intrigues. zero useful knowledge there
anything thats useful is documented. If its not documented, there will be incident/outage and it will be documented later as a lesson
You're expecting the country that's all-in on anti-vaxxing, climate catastrophe denial, and the disassembly of democracy to understand what institutional knowledge is?
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I don't think a 17 yrs old company has that many long tenured people!
Surely they wouldn't keep all of the new hires.
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.
You're almost defining part of, or the beginning of, the process of enshittification.
I'm also interested in the proportion of H1B vs US citizens in this layoff vs the last 1100 people they hired (minus overlap)
This seems to be the new normal in Big Tech. They regularly announce massive layoffs, but if you look at their size over time it stays stable or grows. Cloudflare size grew every year. Microsoft size was stable for the past 4 years despite all the layoffs. Google had lost some (4%) employees in 2023, but has grown back to 2022 size last year. Meta shrunk by 22% in 2023, but has been growing in size since then and is probably back to 2022 size right now.
These companies overhire and then downsize. This is covered up by the moronic narrative about AI.
Side note. You know who is steadily shrinking, though? Intel. Wild, eh?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/num...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/num...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/number-...
> Google had lost some (4%) employees in 2023, but has grown back to 2022 size last year. Meta shrunk by 22% in 2023, but has been growing in size since then and is probably back to 2022 size right now.
Google's revenue in 2022 was $282 billion, in 2025 it was $402 billion (43% growth).
Meta's revenue in 2022 was $117 billion, in 2025 it was $201 billion (72% growth).
Surging profits paired with flat employment continues the concentration of wealth.
> You know who is steadily shrinking, though? Intel. Wild, eh?
Intel's revenue is falling ($63 billion in 2022 vs $52 billion in 2025), makes sense that they would trim headcount.
> This seems to be the new normal in Big Tech. They regularly announce massive layoffs, but if you look at their size over time it stays stable or grows.
Periodic layoffs always happen at all big companies.
I think it’s only surprising to people now because it’s being tied to the AI worries at the same time where we’re exiting an unusual period where layoffs all but stopped for a few years after COVID.
The layoff sizes are also larger because there was so much overhiring in those years after COVID. Some rebound effects in play.
Interestingly, at least on my browser, the bottom of the Y axis is not consistently zero from chart-to-chart, which distorts the message being conveyed by these charts.
Why do we need to complicate here? cloudFlare is not making any profit. They are losing money.
The board probably wants profit now (they predict less growth) so the management needs to cut the costs.
This AI story is a just an excuse. If there is not AI they will say “high gas prices”. Or “inflation”. Or whatever …
It is true that the companies like Meta, Oracle and Microsoft are laying off due to AI but because they need money to build compute power.
There are some companies who maybe do lay offs due to AI replacing employees. But this might not be the one.
I'll just point out that this is exactly the point in the corporate character arc where every company before turns evil.
I never liked the idea of every web site in the world using CloudFlare, but I like it even less now that they're struggling.
> so the management needs to cut the costs
I love it that they explicitly say in their blog post "this is not a cost cutting exercise".
Of course, every "regrettably..." letter from company execs is understood to be an entirely performative ritual.
One smart old guy once told me that the only language you need to speak in the financial world is spreadsheets. No words needed.
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> They are losing money.
They have $4b in cash and Q1 FCF $84m, and 70% gross margin. They can become profitable anytime they want.
And apparently “anytime they want” is going to be this year.
What's the reasoning that software companies don't have to count R&D into gross margins?
> They can become profitable anytime they want.
By cutting 1100 workers!
Those 11 damn lucky interns!
The 1%!
100x-ing with claude. Code not outcomes, but still!
Serious note you dont really hire interns. They are a contractor (and hopefully apprentice who is looked after) really.
The 0.990099...%
Are they taking the piss by hiring and firing the same number as their public DNS IP ?
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).
Also it's funnier to make jokes about hiring people, than it is about firing them.
Wanna bet they are firing in groups sizes, that match exactly CIDR subnets?
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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.
First politics. Now businesses. This sounds like a wildly poorly written parody by teenagers.
"reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally."
Are they 1) halting all the 1111 interns, 2) keeping the 1111 interns, now armed with AI, to replace mid-level/senior institutional knowledge or 3) a mix?
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About as awkward as "Q1 revenue up 34% YoY". https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
i saw this ALL the time at past employers. Employers higher all kinds of interns who eagerly get truck loads of work done and build great connections. and 2 years later the company is getting sold off, out of business, or mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.
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!
> 99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.
This sounds like specious reasoning, similar to the tired old interview question "how would you design Twitter".
Twitter is just a table in a RDBMS, isn't it right? Any fool implements that in an afternoon.
Except it isn't, and the actual complexity of real world software often lies in festures you are completely oblivious.
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All of these companies feed their workers in their posh corporate cafeterias while the restaurants around their offices remain mostly empty
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>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.
> 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.
I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them.
Every time. Without fail.
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…but AI!
Seems no CEO simply wants to say the company is under performing, we hired too many people, and now we’re resetting. But it’s clear that’s what happened on nearly all these layoffs.
None of these announcements provide any convincing evidence that AI is anything more than a convenient distraction from the real reasons for the layoffs.
Worst way to grow the company by 11 people
Wonder if they'll do it like they did for Brittany Pietsch. She recorded her firing video some years ago. I think it's on tiktok but there are youtube videos discussing it as well.
Anyway, new employee at Cloudflare, just finished onboarding. Suddenly a short meeting is scheduled with two people she had never met before. She is told she is let go for "performance" reasons. She kind of tears into them with "what performance issues, I only got great reviews" just to hear the HR people squirm and backpedal, well because, they know they are lying. But of course, they're trained enough to never admit it and say "they'll get back to her on that". Needless to say, it has the same effect as a suspect being arrested arguing with the cops. But it did make Cloudflare "famous" on tiktok for a bit.
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.
That's how the world works, we just automated and hidden most of the disgusting stuff.
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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”.
How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.
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I wish tech companies would start building great products again, rather than trying to build the future. I've kind of had enough of Tech's vision of what the future should be.
I think this sends a clear message. And the message is this: "Don't work here! You will be f*d! Soon!"
(it also sends clear message to the clients: you will have to suffer through the cheapest to run AI agent in case of troubles, because yes, we care the most about Wall Street guy's income, not anyone else's, we save money on everything else anytime, even when we don't have to)
Also how EMs in amazon construct hunger games. Just hire a person every now and then so they can let go of another to prove you made your team better on some non-sensical performance evaluation axes..Cue the hunger games.
Didn't know about Yogi Bera's quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
Some of these are unintentionally as witty as Mark Twain’s
11 interns did okay.
The 1% always does ok
This paragraph from September 2025 didn't age well:
Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. [...] But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.
The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.
*a recession did infact come*
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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.
I’m sitting in an airport after spending a week with a client. They’ve killed off one of their enterprise saas subscriptions with an internal ai assisted effort and are looking to kill more. Granted, they are extremely competent but software isn’t their business. There may be something to the saaspocolypse.
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Shipping is just a milestone. We all know that "AI" can produce code much faster than any human.
Productivity should be measured over time and take into account the cost of maintenance, reliability, amount of issues, etc.
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.
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.
So they basically fired all the interns? Can anyone who works or knows someone who works for Cloudflare can confirm?
I doubt it. Interns are cheap. They've replaced paid staff with interns!
Opus 4.6 was released between those dates
This and the crazy macro economic environment.
Those 11 be Boaz & Jachin of building the Cloudflare's future.
More than enough to vibecode it down.
Why should a company continually grow in headcount?
> The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional.
Hiring and firing based on things like this should be a huge red flag.
I’m surprised they didn’t lay off 1001.
I realize those were interns, so maybe the expectation is they’re temporary from the start, but picking these numbers for marketing instead of need is silly.
Turns about they only needed 11 interns.
That one guy must be really good at the job. Congratz.
Quoting from the links you shared:
> Cloudflare aims to hire as many as 1,111 interns over the course of 2026. […] That’s why this significantly increased class of interns will have a special focus: to ramp up the creative and widespread application of AI with a fresh approach.
vs.
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
lol
This led me down a rabbit hole - didn't know Yogi Berra was responsible for so many witticisms.
Imagine if they hired those 1111 to do the most massive nine-month-long live coding interview and only 11 pass the bar.
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Your snow plower and landscaper don't get judged for having 5+ different customers in 5 years. They don't show up in ATSes as job hoppers.
I haven't met any truly skilled person constantly being fired. Sure they may get unlucky once or twice, but talent shines through
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It's almost like there's a difference between a contractor and an employee. You'd think someone in the smartest cohort would know the difference. You wouldn't hire a full time groundskeeper just to plow your snow for 4 months and fire them when the weather changes.