Comment by tempest_
9 hours ago
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.
Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
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>If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.
That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can.
In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.
It takes two years to get up to speed on a job. It seems laying off will cost the company time even if they are saving money.
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.
I've never seen evidence that companies value experience. They hire outside CEOs instead of developing and promoting from within. They move managers to new rolls all the time, and thus everyone needs to learn how to manage a new boss. My local school district did the same when the superintendent retired - found a small local school district and hired their superintendent away instead of using what should have been a pool of assistants who already have experience in local problems.
I'm not sure if it matters or not in management. I believe it does in engineering.
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.
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.
I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review.
LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
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Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks.
The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership.
> noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be.
Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
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boomers wish
Being old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?
AI will mentor them /s
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.
Mmmm, fresh people.
Can we juice them?
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.
> Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.
The only way for this to happen is by leaked private conversations, I think.
So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.
I sense a paradox.
Only if you're dumb enough to leave a paper trail showing that's what you did.
It seems it would be easy to show a pattern.
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Just your average Thursday in American capitalism!
Should companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?
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Making it illegal would be communism
Yes because anything that is good for individuals is communism.
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Anything I don’t like is communism
there's no way 1100 interns are all going to be offered full time jobs
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
Them capital class is all in on those things and owns all the media. But the majority of us are not.
>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.