This is awkward.
Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]
Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]
I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra
I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.
Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.
old sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.
Or on Amazon elastic filesystems... create giant files just to ensure you're in the right performance class for the files you do need (that was the official way of doing it for a while!).
This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.
Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.
People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.
> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
- “Yes we do”
It’s a bit naive to think they’d just own up to it.
Do they need to own up to it directly? Interviews are always about both sides of the table putting their best self forwards. If it's a big enough company to implement stack ranking and the resulting games played then GlassDoor, LinkedIn, Reddit, even HN all serve this purpose quite effectively.
You can also just ask indirect questions: "how often do you hire new team members?", wait a bit and then, "how is the company measuring growth?" and then at a later opportunity "what's the tenure of those on the team I'd be working with?". If nobody with 1 -2 years is on the team but they admitted to hiring frequently and that growth is meager or stagnant (or they can't answer the question), you have your answer.
>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
You think the naive part is the response and not that question?
My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.
Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.
As if the L4 SDE phone screener has any idea how to answer that from their scripts
> This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
Well, this is not something you can safely ask in most interviews. Also, while there's some sort of HN/hackerdom fiction that the job seeker holds some power during the interview, for most job seekers the interview is strongly imbalanced towards the interviewer. So asking clever questions during the interview is risky if you're desperate for a job.
How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.
> How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting?
You now know which companies do this.
Every company laying off now has to wear a Scarlett Letter: "we're a layoffs company".
Good luck working in tech for a company that's never done a layoff.
Just Apple (and even there only "mostly") among big tech?
"Why is this role open"?
Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like:
"How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.
Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.
This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.
A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."
> How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
“It didn’t change” and it would not be telling much. They are just hiring and firing X amount of people every year.
False dichotomy, the same team members could have been there for 24 months
You know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right?
That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional
This is a bizarre take, I've always asked questions like this when interviewing, and if a manager doesn't have a good answer I ask for follow up conversations with the team before taking a job.
Has it worked out? No, but usually they were all being lied to by upper management. Can't do much about that.
Naive to think such a question would get anything other than a plausibly ambiguous lie.
> People game companies and companies will game people in return.
You have cause and effect entirely reversed.
There have literally been movies and tv shows made about employees showing missplaced loyalty to their companies and what the companies do in spite of that loyalty, and now that the pendulum has swung to around a bit, you have the temerity to suggest it's the employees who started this trend and the poor employers are just forced to play the game? Fuck right off.
> This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
To put it another way: she shouldn't have been dressed like that, it's her fault for being raped.
Company internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.
It's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year".
If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.
If both sides know it, working as a "churney" can be pretty chill. Like being put on the roof from the getgo.
Lol. Isn't this like being a contractor?
Maybe 1/10 of the new hires replace 1/90 of the existing old timers. You need some creative destruction.
Workers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
In management terms a human and a printer are the same. Both resources that need to be managed. I hate it.
Absolutely not--the printer is capex, so it's preferable to the humans who are opex.
We don't send 10% of our printers to the landfill every year just to motivate the other printers.
I take it you haven’t seen the printer demolition scene from Office Space?
/s
Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
Using human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101
It feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation.
LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....
They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...
300% accurate
Why do we need to complicate here? cloudFlare is not making any profit. They are losing money.
The board probably wants profit now (they predict less growth) so the management needs to cut the costs.
This AI story is a just an excuse. If there is not AI they will say “high gas prices”. Or “inflation”. Or whatever …
It is true that the companies like Meta, Oracle and Microsoft are laying off due to AI but because they need money to build compute power.
There are some companies who maybe do lay offs due to AI replacing employees. But this might not be the one.
I'll just point out that this is exactly the point in the corporate character arc where every company before turns evil.
I never liked the idea of every web site in the world using CloudFlare, but I like it even less now that they're struggling.
> so the management needs to cut the costs
I love it that they explicitly say in their blog post "this is not a cost cutting exercise".
Of course, every "regrettably..." letter from company execs is understood to be an entirely performative ritual.
This (from the September 2025 post) now evokes the Curb theme:
> Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. This is resulting in increased sidelining of new college graduates. But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.
> While we are excited about what AI tools can help do, we have a different philosophy about their role. AI tools make great team members even better, and allow firms to set more ambitious goals. They are not replacements for new hires — but ways to multiply how new hires can contribute to a team.
> 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?
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.
I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so.
A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.
Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.
To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.
In most companies and industries it’s closer to 100k to start.
To start a $100M software company you need 5 engineers and 5 laptops.
To start a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
Software is a tragedy of the commons situation where anyone smart enough to engineer is smart enough to learn pointers and objects instead of shear stresses and voltage fluxs.
Nevermind that software pays much more with a much lower barrier to entry.
> I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.
I think your premise is significantly correct; things like launch HN (and even YC startups) are heavily software biased. I suspect you'll find about a hundred product hunt products for every physical kickstarter/indiegogo.
It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.
You might be surprised how easy it is for some people to make 200K and end up in debt...
That's basically the meme, right: You rail against corporations and yet you work for one. Curious.
Anyway in general, corporations are sticky. They save resources through scale and collaboration. Famously this is a problem for free market true believers because if you believe that the market is the most efficient mean of organizing people then you would expect firms to operate internally as free markets (or disappear). There is a whole body of work about it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
In practice you can't just become your own boss and compete against firms.
Most people in fact do not work for corporations. But small companies rarely get into the news do they?
I don't have the link to the US census bureau in front of me, but I think as of 2018 more than 50% of employees worked for firms with >500 employees.
And, of course, there's nothing preventing a small/medium business from incorporating, either. "Corporation means big, small business is a different thing" is common shorthand but not actually how it goes.
Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...
Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.
Sorry I should have specified, engineer here means software engineer/software developer.
You missed the question entirely.
Marketing, networking, and sales are the job. Or a large part of it. If you don't have connections, knowing how to make connections is part of it.
Accept that there are other skills besides engineering, and they can be just as challenging to learn, and just as opaque from the outside of you don't understand it.
I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.
Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.
Managing things often requires a different skillset, some want to avoid solving meatspace problems, some are not destined to be good at it.
Capital.
what?
Relevant post with some military examples as well:
https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing...
(Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?
They sent a module around the moon. They didn’t send a rocket to the moon. They still haven’t landed and their timeline keeps slipping.
Well, rails get made as well, I think the point was that a lot of things require reinventing knowledge that was previously known.
Or phrase it as reusing exiting tech because "it is cheaper" ending in having to reinvent it because all the people who designed it and made it have gone.
IT isn't even clear that is bad - SpaceX is famous for designing rockets from scratch that are better than the old technology everyone else has been using.
That happened in the reverse way. The government fired and underpaid a lot of people at Nasa ... and Musk hired incredibly experienced people, who became experienced on the taxpayers' dime, to build a rocket, for huge payrises.
The biggest but not only example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller (yes, lots of subcontractors involved, however, Nasa paid, with a bonus percentage provided by the US military)
Note that Mueller gives the payment situation at TRW, and the fact that he "wasn't appreciated" as a direct reason to go to SpaceX.
What did you think happened? Does anyone actually believe Musk did the technical design for that engine, just because he claims so? Or I should say he constantly claims it, staying slightly away from direct claims to avoid getting caught in lies (well ... getting caught AGAIN).
SpaceX has nothing to do with any part of the Artemis II crewed lunar fly-by. They were considered and rejected. It was entirely legacy aerospace contractors. SpaceX is under contract for parts of future missions including the lunar lander.
This is the internet. You can’t expect HN or Reddit to be positive, especially around America. It was the same way before Trump was around.
These people and bots have no idea what they are talking about. They’re parrots.
>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.
Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.
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.
Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever.
Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.
Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.
Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.
It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.
Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
I was disagreeing with "they shouldn't be".
I think we should care that our engineers have put the effort to understand the code they are responsible to produce. I don't care specifically about how they get that knowledge (I am using AI to learn myself, for example). But I disagree with the implicit assumption on the statement, which is, in my view, "humans don't need to understand the code any more" (because some fresh out of university might think they understand, but they really don't).
The problem with AI isn't that it's mediocre, I can work with mediocre. The problem with AI is that it produces absolutely stellar world-class code with two hidden 0days in it.
I can't work with that sort of surprise. I'm tuned to consistency, and I can work with consistently bad, but not with "95% absolutely amazing, 5% abysmal".
And I say this as someone who develops exclusively with LLMs now.
> it produces absolutely stellar world-class code
I am using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and I have to correct it every day. It produces working code but it makes mistakes. The code is more verbose than it should be, misunderstands/ignores edge cases, etc. Daily.
And I am not a stellar world-class programmer. I am pretty average. I just read what it produces.
> I just read what it produces.
I don't think that's average right now.
With junior programmers I typically just look for high level patterns that are commonly wrong. Sure if they are touching our cross thread communications code I need to spend a lot of time on that because it is so complex nobody gets it right - but we only have a tiny amount of that and most people look at it and run the opposite way (even me - I wrote it but I still do my best not to touch it when I can avoid it - that is hard hard hard)
I'm not talking about some hypotethical scenario - but what I observe. When I started out, us interns were tasked with "nothing". Now the skill floor is so much higher, and I'm seeing freshers accomplish tasks that were previously thought of strong mid-level or early senior ones.
Well that is not my experience. My first task as an intern, decades ago, was performing a useful task for the company that hired me. I did a mediocre job at it and it took me way longer than it would take one of the experienced engineers there, who would have done it better. That was expected because I was an intern.
With the tools available now, I would have been able to produce things of higher quality and faster, I don't deny that. But putting that code in production without an experienced developer reviewing it thoroughly would have been reckless. And they would have been the owners of that code, not me.
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.
You would need some class action lawsuit I’d think? Need a good number of laid off people to join it and you need solid statistics that would convince a jury more than the corporate lawyers would with whatever HR covered their assess on paper have.
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?
In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)
Yes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance review. People quickly understand they need to move on and they can do it with dignity.
That also means that a) it's harder for younger people to get a stable job b) the bare minimum of work not to get fired decreases over time, which is bad for productivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theor...
If a significant share of your employees optimise in the sense of doing the least of work possible, without getting fired, you have a huge problem anyways. Usually, given the right conditions, people have intrinsic interest in doing a good job. Even if their motivation is more of the extrinsic type, there is more to it than getting paid.
Yes, it only works in a high trust society where there’s plenty of jobs and people actually care about doing a good job (any company will have incentives, people can’t just sit around and do nothing, lots of social pressure too if you’re a slacker). But hey, that’s been mostly true (until recently, I hear immigrant unemployment is really high, while “local” unemployment is close to zero, but the official statistics sit in the middle at around 7% I think, much higher for the youth).
Or if you really want to get rid of someone you can buy them out with a severance deal that is better than standard and hope they take it.
In my experience those people get juicy positions doing nothing useful as they their competence long atrophied due to zero pressure to keep their knowledge up to date. Of course now companies hire "consultants" to work around to issue, so those get fired on a week's notice when money is tight. The warm bodies remain in their chairs until retirement. Inefficiency remains a huge problem in Swedish economy, but no one dares to touch these archaic rules (BTW no minimal wage in a European country, WTF?) due to political reasons, so the immigrants get the blame instead for everything.
Its a choice - work hard with minimal securities, get better salary. Heck, one can do that in many EU places when working as self-employed on contract (if legal), and be paid by just billed days, no vacations or sick days. Its actually pretty good career path in the beginning of one's career in software development, get more money and ie invest in a property. Then get more secure permanent position, coast more and enjoy and appreciate more those stability benefits.
But high economic performance this isn't. Adaptability of market to ever-changing world that certainly isn't neither. Europe is getting hammered by this and things will get much, much worse in upcoming years. We will have to revisit our comfy lazy attitude towards work, or end up being a stagnant place with 3rd world salaries and corresponding QoL.
Switzerland is doing things much better, its sort of in between both extremes and economy is reflecting this very well. But EU leaders egos will sooner accept poverty than that somebody figured out things better than them.
The Netherlands recognized the problems with the last-in-first-out system and requires that after a reorganization, the statistical distribution remains the same. How well that works is hard to say because the level of unemployment in The Netherlands has been quite low for many yours.
What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.
> What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.
The poverty rate in Switzerland has increased (source:https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/economic-soc...) but is defined as:
The poverty line is derived from the guidelines of the Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS). In 2024, it was on average CHF 2388 per month for a single person and CHF 4159 for two adults with two children.
I live in Zurich (by far the most expensive city) and while 2388 (or 4159) would be tight (depending on housing) it would still afford you a fairly comfortable life with access to top quality healthcare and public transport. Life quality wise one could argue that poverty in CH is a better option than a middle income in a lot of European countries.
Outside of Zurich rentals are not even that bad. You can easily get a nice apartment for 1500.- or even less. If one is struggling financially, rents are lower e.g. in Aarau district, starting from around 1000 and you can commute from there. Spending 1000 when the median salary is around 7000 is really not that bad. Low inflation in Switzerland meant other European locations are now at the swiss level or sometimes even above.
Yeah Switzerland has rather few poor people and very strong middle class. And poor ain't some US version of homeless/trailer park living, just lower income, less fancy clothes, shopping in cheaper supermarkets, less/no vacations abroad.
lol does all of European tech companies combined even make more than what the EU brings in from taxing US companies yet?
Why don't you research this and report back your findings. Learning is a cool experience, compared to prejudice.
Just for others, it seems this was already an article so it came up quickly, but for fines, not taxes.
"In 2024, the total income tax paid by all publicly listed European internet companies combined was approximately €3.2 billion. This total, which includes firms like SAP, Adyen, Spotify, and Zalando, was notably lower than the €3.8 billion in fines the EU collected from US tech giants in the same year"
China is hiring engineering talent. US is firing. Nobody forces anybody to do anything. Just pointing out the current state of affairs in the long life cycle of empire. As Ray Dalio says US is very late stage declining „financial capitalism”. While China is early stage aspiring „production capitalism”. It is not like late stage declining USSR needed as many engineers as it did when it wasnt collapsing. USA is a collapsing empire. China is growing.
Making it illegal would be communism
Yes because anything that is good for individuals is communism.
People are feeling more alone than ever. But whatever you do, don't do anything communal!
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.
…but AI!
Seems no CEO simply wants to say the company is under performing, we hired too many people, and now we’re resetting. But it’s clear that’s what happened on nearly all these layoffs.
None of these announcements provide any convincing evidence that AI is anything more than a convenient distraction from the real reasons for the layoffs.
Those 11 damn lucky interns!
The 1%!
100x-ing with claude. Code not outcomes, but still!
Serious note you dont really hire interns. They are a contractor (and hopefully apprentice who is looked after) really.
The 0.990099...%
Worst way to grow the company by 11 people
i saw this ALL the time at past employers. Employers higher all kinds of interns who eagerly get truck loads of work done and build great connections. and 2 years later the company is getting sold off, out of business, or mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.
Interns getting “truck loads” of work done has not been my experience. Potted plant is a better metaphor.
Liquidity in the currency market.
Need to propagate a lot of dollars fast, 24/7 as a moat on it remaining a reserve currency.
99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.
But that money printer was running hot and heavy. Needed to funnel it somewhere. Why not that favorite political cudgel of the elites; pointless busy work jobs! Let's invest in a bunch of shops nearby for them to lunch at too!
All of these companies feed their workers in their posh corporate cafeterias while the restaurants around their offices remain mostly empty
Big tech, sure, but not all the startups. I can assure you having freelanced and mentored many a SWE at 5-20 person startups the last 6 years they are not all hiring pro chefs.
Have you not been reading the headlines about urban offices empty? Low taxes to create foot traffic for other businesses?
The trickle down of the ZIRP era was about spreading all the dollars they could print as quickly as possible to maintain dominance of the dollar.
SaaS apps are meaningless to future generations. We were never creating pyramids of Egypt like wonders. We were missionaries for contemporary American propaganda.
> 99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.
This sounds like specious reasoning, similar to the tired old interview question "how would you design Twitter".
Twitter is just a table in a RDBMS, isn't it right? Any fool implements that in an afternoon.
Except it isn't, and the actual complexity of real world software often lies in festures you are completely oblivious.
> you are completely oblivious.
Sounds like specious reasoning similar to the tired trope of "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".
Twitter is in the 1% not the "99% of these..." but don't let reading comprehension get in the way.
I was a phonics kid not a 3-cuing student. Reading scores have nose dived since phonics was phased out. So I understand it's not entirely your fault.
>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.
If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.
Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop competition from growing by nipping the threat in the bud.
Future can pay for all of this if you succeed.
> Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.
I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them.
Every time. Without fail.
I am part of Management in my company. We explicitly maintain a list of key people in the company we don’t want to lose. The truth is that just a few people are what makes a company. Lose them and you are in trouble. Some companies don’t seem to understand that, but perhaps after a certain size, it doesn’t matter anymore! The machinery just keeps turning.
Yes. The intent is not to retain them or keep them happy, it's just to prevent them from doing inventive work for anyone else.
I met a guy this happened to. He got a special award within the company, asked for a bit of equity, didn't get it, in fact got blacklisted and booted out.
Luckily for him it worked out very very nicely.
Well how can they have the time or resources to invest in retaining talent? They're busy hiring more interns, where one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.
Yeah that's a the meme tech bros go with trying to look smurt
But it's pretty clear with the money printer switched off the real motivation was the propagation dollars fast and wide.
The rest of the world has rebuilt after Biden and Trump's and their parents generations bombed it to glass.
Those countries modernizing create an existential threat to the dollar as a reserve currency; fuck Americans! says a generation that grew up in a shit hole Americans left behind.
While polite publicly as expected a whole lot of the 8 billion outside the US do not give a shit the US exists and has power over them.
Wonder if they'll do it like they did for Brittany Pietsch. She recorded her firing video some years ago. I think it's on tiktok but there are youtube videos discussing it as well.
Anyway, new employee at Cloudflare, just finished onboarding. Suddenly a short meeting is scheduled with two people she had never met before. She is told she is let go for "performance" reasons. She kind of tears into them with "what performance issues, I only got great reviews" just to hear the HR people squirm and backpedal, well because, they know they are lying. But of course, they're trained enough to never admit it and say "they'll get back to her on that". Needless to say, it has the same effect as a suspect being arrested arguing with the cops. But it did make Cloudflare "famous" on tiktok for a bit.
I found that video and I couldn't finish watching it. TBH it's really incomprehensible to me why we've created a culture where being so heartless is praised upon.
HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).
I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.
That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.
How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.
Most of the US is a right to work environment where a company can let someone go at any time for any reason other than the few protected class reasons. Many companies also have 90 day probationary period where they bypass internal company processes and let someone go, again other than for protected class reasons.
It's obviously hard when people's lives are upended, but no one complains when companies do a lot of hiring because the risk is lower.
Sure, but why lie?
They lie to get out of paying for unemployment I think.
I mean, look at them it’s a poor struggling company barely making ends meet /s
It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.
11 interns did okay.
The 1% always does ok
Didn't know about Yogi Bera's quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
Some of these are unintentionally as witty as Mark Twain’s
So they basically fired all the interns? Can anyone who works or knows someone who works for Cloudflare can confirm?
I doubt it. Interns are cheap. They've replaced paid staff with interns!
Those 11 be Boaz & Jachin of building the Cloudflare's future.
More than enough to vibecode it down.
Are they taking the piss by hiring and firing the same number as their public DNS IP ?
The "as many as 1,111" number was:
> The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional.
But like the sibling comment says, "over 1,100" does not reference any of their resolver IPs anyways. In all likelihood, they hired fewer than the maximum of 1,111 interns and they are probably chopping slightly more than that here (max vs min).
Also it's funnier to make jokes about hiring people, than it is about firing them.
Their main DNS is 1.1.1.1 but their secondary is 1.0.0.1 not 1.1.0.0, so close but not quite.
Why should a company continually grow in headcount?
Quoting from the links you shared:
> Cloudflare aims to hire as many as 1,111 interns over the course of 2026. […] That’s why this significantly increased class of interns will have a special focus: to ramp up the creative and widespread application of AI with a fresh approach.
vs.
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
lol
Turns about they only needed 11 interns.
Opus 4.6 was released between those dates
This and the crazy macro economic environment.
> The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional.
Hiring and firing based on things like this should be a huge red flag.
I’m surprised they didn’t lay off 1001.
I realize those were interns, so maybe the expectation is they’re temporary from the start, but picking these numbers for marketing instead of need is silly.
The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.
*a recession did infact come*
Why is this text not rendered as expected.
If you type 2 asterisks it's rendered as one, it's an escape character mechanism:
This text has one asterisk on each side
*This one has two on each side*
Obvious now
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
I've been told that a recession is coming since 2009, when I started investing - there has never been one since then despite all the dire predictions - therefore, my investments are safe
As the saying goes, "Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions."
> there has never been one since then
There was one in 2020, granted it was the shortest on record.
If you had started investing 1 year earlier though?
As long as you didn’t sell, and in fact bought more on the way down, you did well. Of course, not everyone’s time horizon works the timing (you might need the money and so sell at a low point), but generally, being in the market pays off.
The government is very decided on not letting one happen, or hiding any minor recession. They will throw money at the problem as long as they can.
Have to protect boomers retirement accounts at the cost of future generations
Honestly not a bad theory. There’s definitely a huge disparity between actual productivity gained by using agentic coding done somewhat properly… and a non-stop wave of vibe coded work causing outages and churn. Pre-Covid hiring coupled with the high enterprise pricing for AI plans, it would make sense.
If you listen to people on HN you could think AI is not increasing productivity or is even having a net negative effect.
I think the reality is different.
In this thread I saw the resume of an engineer affected by this Cloudflare layoff. In the resume he claimed that adopting opencode in his workflow, he shipped an integration in half the time it took peers without AI assistance for similar projects.
I’m sitting in an airport after spending a week with a client. They’ve killed off one of their enterprise saas subscriptions with an internal ai assisted effort and are looking to kill more. Granted, they are extremely competent but software isn’t their business. There may be something to the saaspocolypse.
I've seen non-tech people building internal tooling that engineering just never had time to get to. Small/lean companies are leveling up with AI, and they aren't carrying the salary overhead of the big companies. The big companies are going to have to get that much more productive in order to compete and/or they are going to have to cut staff.
Shipping is just a milestone. We all know that "AI" can produce code much faster than any human.
Productivity should be measured over time and take into account the cost of maintenance, reliability, amount of issues, etc.
infrastructure changes slowly. once its built its not clear what you are paying 1111 people for.
It is May 2026, there is no difference between AI and non-AI bills.
Most (if not all) major enterprises in the US have gone through at least one round of org-wide subscription renewals (eg: Atlassian product packs, Microsoft product packs, etc) where 1) price increases were mandatory, 2) AI features could not be opted out of, and 3) AI feature usage was strongly encouraged from C-suite to client-facing biz staff to telephone agent support staff.
I repeat, we are passed the point where AI bills and non-AI bills can be differentiated. We are all paying for these features driven by tokens whether we like it or not, whether the cost-benefit analysis makes sense, and whether they are even being used.
And we are all passing the costs onto everyone lower on the totem pole, from insurance groups to bank groups to national grocery chains to consultant conglomerates to minimum wage front-line staff to below-minimum-wage gig workers.
And this is why there are layoffs, every price increase from the top down causes further price increases to cascade down.
I think this sends a clear message. And the message is this: "Don't work here! You will be f*d! Soon!"
(it also sends clear message to the clients: you will have to suffer through the cheapest to run AI agent in case of troubles, because yes, we care the most about Wall Street guy's income, not anyone else's, we save money on everything else anytime, even when we don't have to)
About as awkward as "Q1 revenue up 34% YoY". https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
Imagine if they hired those 1111 to do the most massive nine-month-long live coding interview and only 11 pass the bar.