Comment by gk1
4 hours ago
> 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?
vibes maybe?
If effective AI enhanced SWEs can ship features in a week, the guys who ship 1 feature a quarter stand out more?
Impossible to measure in absolute terms but I think it's clear productivity increases relatively when LLMs are used. At least that's my strong experience.
It's weird to fire people instead of giving them training.
Losing what edge?
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.
> This is NOT performance related.
It's important to say a large layoff isn't performance related, because it helps those who got laid off find new work. Even if it was all performance related, you want someone else to hire your former employees.
And, in a large layoff, it's likely to be at least partially true. Large layoffs work better when they're done quickly, when there's signs of layoffs but no information, many people will head for the exits themselves... which helps your headcount numbers, but ideally you want to keep people who are good at figuring stuff out and taking appropriate action and instead they've left. So... lay off people who are 'known performance issues', but also lay off some whole teams that have a mix of performance, and then do some random assignment and catch a mix of performance, because getting direct managers involved to pick who goes means having too many people know about the lay offs.
> This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
Yeah, this one isn't credible. If it was about something other than costs, like pivoting to a new market, you would offer first choice of jobs for the new market. Even if it's look at our productivity, 20% of our employees have nothing to do, it takes a lot of spin to say not paying them to twiddle their thumbs is something other than cost cutting.
That to me is a pretty clear reason to question the accuracy of those two claims. Insiders are saying that even people who were performing well in very profitable groups are being cut, which is hard to square with the stated motivations.
Agreed. One of the two things must be false. But that's what they are saying (not saying I buy it).