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.