[Snoozle]

The sentence is not confusing, the sentence doesn't mean anything. There's nothing confusing about it, but there's no information either. "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.

[simianwords]

> "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.

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.

[draftsman]

> More productivity means fewer people are required.

Required for what? If your goal is growth, and AI really is improving productivity of every employees that uses it, then why would you fire anyone?

[simianwords]

There’s an optimal number of employees required at any productivity point. Why don’t Google hire 3 times the number of developers? They have the money right? What’s your logic for not hiring more?

[epicide]

Because firing is not a zero-sum for hiring.

Hiring 1 developer instead of 3 is not the same cost as firing 2 developers.

[simianwords]

why is it not? if google can make more money by hiring 3x the developers, why didn't they do it? just explain that

[epicide]

Hiring and firing people aren't symmetric actions.

They're asymmetric because hiring more people costs more than just the salary. For example, some folks' entire jobs are to recruit and hire people. Once they are hired, you have to onboard them, etc. So the more you hire, the more you have to pay the folks with supporting roles (either directly or by way of them not having infinite time/capacity).

Firing people isn't free, either. It comes at the cost of bad PR and severance, but the latter is voluntary and calculated by the company, and the former is quickly forgotten by anybody that matters to a publicly traded company (investors).

That means not hiring those two people in the first place is usually cheaper than firing them later.

To the original point: Cloudflare isn't hiring fewer people; they are firing people. If they are trying to grow (like every single investor is counting on them to do), then why would they fire people (the cheaper action) now when they would likely need to hire people (the more-expensive action) later in order to meet that increased growth?

The charitable answer would be that the people they are firing were deemed unable to adapt to using AI for all of this supposed increased productivity. But Cloudflare aren't saying that. In fact, they're saying the opposite by stating it's not about individual performance.

[lijok]

Or maybe you don’t understand what it means because you’re not the target audience?

[Snoozle]

Enlighten me then as to the secret meaning behind the words used to communicate in the language we call English. Saying that AI is really transforming the company is fine. Saying that 20% of staff need to be laid off is fine. Those are understood terms. How do they relate? There's no explanation. Did cost need to be reduced? Did those people no longer add value? Was there certain projects that weren't profitable? Nothing is explained because meaning is avoided.