[headinthesky]

This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.

Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.

I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

[j2jj]

" Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire."

They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.

[headinthesky]

Absolutely. My hope is selfish - the market is awful

[bloppe]

I promise you there are a ton of companies desperate to hire talent right now. It's hard on both sides of the market. Lots of noise, but there is demand for this supply. Unfortunately, that means personal connections are more valuable than they used to be, just to get the ball rolling.

[heldrida]

Are you sure? Can you share some of those companies that are desperate to hire talent right now? I'd like serious teams as I need to find work. I do keep an eye on HN, Wellfound, Workatstartup, X, etc.

[bloppe]

My company is hiring (small, but definitely happy to talk to you and all the people who made stuff run on your team at Cloudflare!) https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blaxel

I know Waymo is trying to hire like a thousand engineers this year.

There are others.

[bluGill]

There are always a ton of companies looking for good talent. However there are not nearly as many as a couple year ago: there is more good talent looking for a job than there are jobs. This has happened before, it will happen again (this is easy for me to say - I still have a job, but I've been there before and I know first hand how bad it is when you need the job).

Good luck to those of you looking for a job. My company is hiring a few people, but if someone leaves today there is only a 20% change we hire someone outside to replace them so I can't really offer leads worth looking at.

[johnnyyw]

Like us :) We are not mandating AI tokens but asking people not to ship slop code. Naturally that means more people required; but in the age when everything is slop, imho having good taste becomes a competitive advantage. And that... requires good people.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hinoki/bb798ffb-2427-460e-84ff-fe29...

[kevin_thibedeau]

Do the world a favor and take your institutional knowledge out the door to enjoy greener pastures.

[headinthesky]

The pasture is pretty crowded and full of shit. But thanks, friend. I appreciate it

[keeda]

I've been laid off from every job I've held (and once I was even re-hired a month later!) so I know the feeling. There seem to be others here who are also impacted and I fear the overall trend will only continue, so I wrote up my thoughts on how to future-proof your job search. I do think the GP comment about institutional knowledge could be a key part of it. Hope this helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067459

[krooj]

My man, all these fuckers use the same parasitic management consultancies. That's why all this shit looks the same.

[happymellon]

Time to watch Office Space again?

[sanderjd]

"I'm an agent person. I'm good at dealing with the agents! Can't you understand that?! What the hell is wrong with you people?! I'm good at dealing with the agents!"

[siva7]

That line is so damn good i recommend everyone who doesn't get it to watch Office Space.

[harimau777]

Honestly, Office Space looks like a dream job compared to normal practices. Imagine getting your own cubicle! That would be amazing!

[heldrida]

"Management consultancies" that make sense. I thought that maybe all these higher-up people know each other and share a common "Slack group"

[jdasdf]

Cloudflare has never made a profit.

Is your stance that shareholders should perpetually subsidize it out of the goodness of their hearts?

[podgietaru]

My stance is this: Fine, maybe you need to restructure for profit reasons. If that is the case, then it is also beholden upon the people doing the layoffs to understand their responsibility in that.

In an ideal world, a layoff of this scale would also require a shakeup of the management that let it get this bad in the first place.

What's more, the higher up the chain, the less onerous the layoff for the individual getting laid off.

[jdasdf]

Why should people who are profitable to employ be laid off as well?

It just sounds like you're upset and want to hurt whoever you feel is responsible for making you upset. That's not a productive stance to have on important topics.

[podgietaru]

What an odd view of what I said.

I'm not asking for the people who hurt me to be hurt. I am asking that the responsibility of the actions that management layers took be considered in layoffs.

For instance - If overhiring happened, how is this not at least a little bit on the individual that approved of a hiring spree? Why is it that they should be able to yield a baton that hurts the workers they hired, without having to actual bare the brunt of the decisions?

If a business is still unprofitable, a business that touches so much of the internet like Cloudflare, then that is also a strategic failure and should be punished as such.

I feel like your tone in this response was also so condescending.

[shimman]

No, it's more like we have undemocratically elected people in positions of power that want to act like dictatorships when in reality these people made a mistake that is costing the company billions of dollars and their ineptitude means they should be removed from these positions.

I thought Silicon Valley was all about meritocracy? Why should corporate shills that does not know how to profit from entity that controls 25% of internet traffic be allowed to keep their jobs but the actual people providing real value, the workers, aren't?

That is a system that doesn't benefit humanity. It selfishly benefits the few.

[heldrida]

Cloudflare has never made a profit? The thread commentator said the product he maintained was 95% profit.

[jdasdf]

The comentator either wasn't talking about the company as a whole, or was mistaken.

This is public information. Their financial statements show clearly that they made a loss every single year since the data is available.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/inc...

[headinthesky]

My orgs products. Others, probably not. There is a lot water they could have targeting and gone after. Starting with Dane's idiotic incomplete messes he left around and declaring them done and leaving people to clean his garbage up

Leadership is terrible and they're out of ideas. AI is going to be the future but it can't even review code properly

Their "no profit" is entire accounting trickery

[rcatcher]

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?

[pm90]

Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.

[bpicolo]

EMs are never in the loop for layoffs for companies of this size, because the whole company would just get forewarning of the layoffs

[pm90]

Thats usually correct for these “surprise” layoffs. For the ones that are announced in advance there is a bit more coordination (like the meta/amazn ones).

[bpicolo]

At Amazon managers absolutely are not in the loop for layoffs. I would very much doubt they are at meta.

[morpheuskafka]

I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?

[philipwhiuk]

They probably claim all of it, but likely only job description.

"You have 20 guys that can code, so you can get rid of two of them".

[pm90]

Employees are treated as a cost which is why you often see the strongest performers inexplicably laid off (since they are likely compensated higher). In situations like this they don’t care about productivity; leadership is given a list and they can move a few people around but for most its game over once they’re on it.

[heldrida]

Wow! Is there any good read on that, like even if a "YouTube" show or something? This is quite interesting.

[pm90]

If you know anyone that works at MBB they would be happy to share this with you; if you’re in SF just hit any bar for a weeknight happy hour and you will 100% find someone.

[shimman]

Yeah, honestly this is where LLMs shine since they were trained on so many MBA/HBS materials. Just remember to ask your questions in a way that praises neoliberalism and you'll unlock even more secrets about how they fuck over and alienate workers.

[headinthesky]

I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder

No one had any idea. My director got the same email

[raydev]

This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.

[cfthrow96765]

My boss had no idea layoffs were even coming, so who knows how they picked.

[gib444]

Companies have so much data on employees/products/customers etc these days the EM's opinion is just noise.

[kevincrane]

> I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do

That’s how it was at my previous company also. If you asked any engineer there they’d say “I’m incredibly busy, and I need more headcount to get through the things on my plate”. Then they laid off 40% of the company because AI had made everything so efficient shrug

[zelphirkalt]

I guess a company can coast on reputation for a while, before things come crashing down at least at parts of the company.

[tootie]

In my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.

[terpimost]

Please point people you know to https://antithesis.com/company/careers/ which is hiring EMs and deep tech people

[brandon272]

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.

[headinthesky]

I know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling.

They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...

[aryehof]

Is it possible that the line of thinking really is that "agentic AI" will up for the capability shortfall?

It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?

[headinthesky]

All of us who work with AI, and HN audience especially, know the gap between what can the agent do now, and "it fulfill the functions of my job" is something that won't be overcome anytime soon. Anyone who really believes that's the case is just showcasing their lack of knowledge

Matthew Price calls it "an electric screwdriver". Does that sound like someone who has ever gotten deep on anything?

[shimman]

Do you really think management would come out and say "Hey we actually fucked up and don't really know what to do. Please don't punish us, here is a ritual sacrifice instead."?

Of course they're going to downplay their own stupidity and use LLMs as a means to suppress terrible news.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

So Sorry, And I literally just moved all my stuff to cloudflare 2 weeks ago… if it means anything it was a great product.