As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."
If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.
Acting like workers at Cloudflare have any meaningful say in how work is made or the direction of the company is delusional neoliberal fantasy thinking.
The onus of poor business outcomes is laid directly on its leadership. Saying that workers were unproductive when they were coerced to follow leadership's mandates is just straight up class warfare.
Dang it Bobby indeed.
Is anyone reviewing the output of the generated work (PRs, docs etc)?
They don’t need them. Simple as that
If we extend the logic, if we have 0 employees then profitability is maximized right? Then shouldn’t every company have 0 employees?
Obviously hiring increases profitability, otherwise some of the biggest headcount companies wouldn’t have hired so many people
Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.
But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.
say a lot - while saying nothing.
They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained. Folks whose experience snd expertise is valuable. Don't kid yourself.
> They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained.
"They fired some talented folks."
Sure. That is guaranteed with large layoffs. I work in an insanely competitive industry, and there are annual culls each autumn of the bottom 5%. Few are surprised by who gets cut. What is harder to forsee is a business downturn and they need to layoff X% of staff. You see good people let go. That's just life in that kind of system.
"Folks who could be retrained."
Again, in the US, for white-collar office workers, this almost never happens, and surely not for very highly skilled software developers (probably most of the layoffs at Cloudflare). It is not required by law, and it is not a common business practice in the US.
The norm - outside of outliers like Warren Buffett - is "when numbers go up then buy when numbers go down then sell".
The financialization / stonkmarketization of everything is slowly destroying our economies like a cancer.
> For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently
I don't understand how this could be the case for Cloudflare specifically. They made their name with DDoS protection and sandboxed hosting. These are exactly the products whose demand rises in lockstep with agent adoption. How could they possibly be allowing all the growth opportunity to slip past them? In times like this, with rising productivity to boot, you increase headcount, not decrease.
If A1 was real, cloudflare would be 1000% more needed and they would be falling behind with their 600% productivity gainz
On its own its just words which might or might not reflect reality. The phrasing strongly indicates its the latter, however
Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
Huh? How is it not connected? More productivity means fewer people are required. I'm not sure how you are not able to connect these obviously connected statements.
I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?