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.
I know 4 people who’ve worked for them, two on the same team, one who’s moved around various offices over a long period of time, and one who used to work for me but left to go there (and with the offer they were made I absolutely don’t blame them - we’d been hit hard by COVID and were in the midst of a salary freeze).
The first three of those people seem to have got on well there and mostly enjoyed it. The fourth had a miserable 8 months. Their manager was based in a different office with a 5+ hour time difference and was a complete nightmare, and they left of their own accord to another job on about the same money but without all the extra hours, stress, and terrible management.
I’m guessing Amazon is like other big companies: the quality of your experience will depend to a very large extent on your manager.
I've worked with some Amazon fanboys who'd rave about being "bar raisers" and other assorted nonsense, trying to impress Amazon-derived "leadership principles" upon much smaller organizations. It left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Well FAANG is now MANGO and yes Amazon dropped out of the top tier of tech companies on the market per these acronyms. Theres a few others other there gaining popularity which also now exclude Amazon as a top tier tech company.
Amazon is successful on the boring utility stuff (logistics, building data centers) but is broadly seen as unable to execute on higher value add things, which keeps it out of the top tier. The AI misses really highlighted that.
Isn’t AWS a massive value add operation on top of what is otherwise just rental servers?
It isn’t sexy, but they are selling their proprietary technology to just about everyone. That and their market cap puts them in league with the rest of the big boys.
This is so ethically and morally odious I struggle to find the words to describe it.
I’ve managed people out. I’m sure I’ll have to do it again. I’ve even let people go during probation but, on the rare occasions that’s happened, I’ve seen it as a failure of the hiring process.
People have families, they have mortgages, bills to pay, and a powerful need to eat (Mal, Serenity?). The last thing I want is for someone to give up a stable job that allows them to do that to come and work for me only so I can fire them and leave them up the creek a few weeks or months down the line.
Our employees are after all people, human beings.
As I result I skew picky during the hiring process: if there’s any doubt there’s no doubt kind of thing.
On the opposite direction (but compatible overall view): if I think a candidate is marginal/on the bubble of passing, I’m much more likely to move forward with them if they’re unemployed.
Someone unemployed might be a little rusty (and thus get estimated slightly worse in the interview) but, more importantly, if they come in and flame out, they’re not worse off for the experience or at least not as much as if they gave up a stable job.
> People have families, they have mortgages, bills to pay, and a powerful need to eat (Mal, Serenity?). The last thing I want is for someone to give up a stable job that allows them to do that to come and work for me only so I can fire them and leave them up the creek a few weeks or months down the line.
Literally none of that is the employer’s responsibility. It’s just a business transaction. Having sufficient savings is the responsibility of every adult, never their employer. It is not the employer’s job to manage the employee’s cash flow.
Everyone, but ESPECIALLY those making six figures in tech, should have a six months of expenses savings account in cash SPECIFICALLY for this exact scenario. There are a million ways you might be without work for 2-4 months. It’s not an employer’s fault (or responsibility) that their employee is financially irresponsible.
A LOT of people don't make enough money to put away 6 months of savings. You can be the most financially responsible person in existence, but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money.
Yeah, employers should not hire people that can’t afford to put away 6 months of livings expenses, because that puts the employer in a questionable ethical position.
Or maybe a living wage with savings should be the legal minimum wage? Oh wait, nope, can’t have that lol.
Just wait for a few months, that 40 isn’t going to stretch nearly as far. We are entering a period of food scarcity, and if things continue on the road they are on, a high likelihood of global conventional conflicts. The powers that be seem to have converged on the need for depopulation and consolidation of power.
Its a business transaction with a MASSIVE power differential and as Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility.
An employer has a responsibility to treat an employee with respect, not exploit them, and give them a fair part in the rewards when the company succeeds.
Then COVID happened and employers didn't have 2-4 months of savings built up, and ended up shuttering due to lack of money immediately.
Also, since post COVID, we've had hyper inflation and a locked up housing market. $150 townhomes that a $50 family salary could afford are now going for $300. And rent has gone up to match.
I don't think the numbers not matching is because of anyone's personal financial responsibility. It's more from the Fed's and Congress's horrible actions over the past 2 decades and their financial irresponsibility.
Granted, grumbling about the powers that be doesn't solve the problem, which is why I fear civil turmoil will be here very soon.
Only if they are being honest. Offer this as a 12 month temp contract with possibility of continuation. Offering a role as permanent but with unvoiced intent to let go, that's dishonest. Being honest is always a responsibility.
In my country employers have a duty of care towards their employees: "hire to fire" very clearly violates that duty of care.
Even ignoring that - let's say that duty of care didn't exist - are you telling me that you, as a human being, will not simply choose to do the right thing unless you are legislatively forced to do so? Pretty scummy when you think about it like that, isn't it? Your talk of "business transactions" is fine in the abstract but I bet you won't be so chipper about it when it happens to you.
Moreover, nobody materialises in this world with 6 months of expenses for themselves and their families magically in their bank account. Most people have to work and save for that, and that's if they're fortunate enough to have a job that pays them well enough to save after expenses. Many people don't.
Perhaps you should climb down off that high horse of yours, travel a little, learn what the world is really like, and understand the very real struggles that many people face.
I think that such a duty of care does not exist ethically or morally, and that legislating it into existence is foolish.
Both parties can walk away from a deal they don’t like. It’s just a business transaction. There are other employers; the balance of power is not as one-sided as everyone pretends it is.
This is good advice. Moving the responsibility onto the employer is a BLAME game, and when people haven't prepared, it's easier if they attack the messenger instead of being critical of their own bad decisions for whom to work.
Clearly some are triggered by the idea that employers should be held accountable for those that don't plan so well. The fact is, the employers are only accountable to the stakeholders and their continued corporate existence.
Yes I suppose this is the bare minimum, but isn’t that just a nasty way to go about things? What about responsibility and decency, do we just not do that anymore?
I took one of those seasonal hire to fire Amazon roles, having thrived in Apple engineering for many years, and not needing to work really at all.
It was laughable that the manager thought he could brainwash me (who used to report one level away from Steve Jobs) into learning how to write code, etc. He was from country X and would protect another wildly inappropriate employee also from country X despite her being a geography graduate in an SWE role, I'd have to teach her, then she'd report to him she taught me what i know.
Unbelievably corrupt org, but amusing i had to admit. it wouldn't be amusing if i had been dependent on working there.
Just want to point out that relational nepotism is human nature.
It basically needs to be brainwashed out of people in childhood to avoid having it happen, regardless of where they are from.
There is nothing wrong with relational nepotism in a vacuum, and also nothing wrong with brainwashing it away. Whether or not to brainwash it away is a cultural choice with tradeoffs in both directions.
That being said, IMO having a host culture brainwash it away in its own people while simultaneously welcoming outsiders from cultures without such brainwashing is very, very, very foolish. We either need to let everyone do it, or forcibly make everyone stop doing it. The current situation is ridiculous.
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.
Genuine kubernetes scaling strategy: add a do-nothing container that runs with a lower priority than your real workloads, that requests half a machine’s worth of mcpu.
When you deploy a new container, and all your nodes are fully allocated, that low priority container will get evicted, and your container will immediately get scheduled in its place. Then k8s will try to find somewhere to put that half-machine container. If it finds somewhere it fits, it’ll schedule it. If not, it’ll trigger your cluster auto scale to add a new node where that task can run, making sure the next container you want to deploy has some readily available capacity to drop on to.
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!).
old defence against unreasonably demanding manager: add deliberate pockets of slow processing as insurance so that when things get too hot about performance, you unclog a few of those to acquiesce management.
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.
This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
A. We have to work somewhere, and in 2026 honestly it’s actually the employer’s market which is kinda new to me, as someone who always just passively waited until an interesting job offer fell in my lap.
B. They all pretty much work the same. Everywhere is “like a family” and “cares about sustainability” and all, until either your VC money starts to run low and you sell to PE or liquidate, or, for your big techs, layoff season comes around and you need to show that you’re willing to cut costs with the best of them, so you pick a random 4-5 digit number to lay off for the investors.
>This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Pigs are literally reared for slaughter and have no autonomy. Employees can and do choose these companies completely of their own volition.
I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering. LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings (1). I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one otherwise its a humanitarian crisis. In fact, I'd say it's beyond unreasonable to suggest that.
Still, I do feel bad for younger folks trying to break into the industry - but "work for cloudflare or go hungry" is beyond a stretch.
Edit: Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture.
> LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings
Yeah sure. I've seen literally dozens of job openings in certain companies that match my resume pretty much perfectly. None of them ever bothered to respond when I applied beyond "nah, better luck next time" (even that is not guaranteed, some just ignore you). I have no idea what those millions of job openings are, really, but the fact is, when you're out of a job, you don't feel like you have millions of employers lined up to invite you. Especially after you spend a couple of months submitting resumes and getting no interviews.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
This is pretty generous, usually a couple of months is all you get, sometimes people don't get even that. With that kind of approach, working for Cloudflare becomes even more decent option, comparatively.
I hope people don’t gaslight you into thinking it’s something wrong with you. That was exactly my experience this year - and that’s completely new compared to 4 years ago. It’s the market that’s changed.
No, I have been in the field long enough and done enough things that I know I maybe not the best ever, but I am pretty good. I appreciate the kind words though. And I am lucky to have a good job too, now. But that's what happens in the field, and it's not only me - I have heard the same you are saying from multiple people over the last years. It's just how it works now. Maybe there is some super-elite level where you can just sit on your Herman-Miller throne and the unicorns come and bow to you and beg you to take a job with them. I know I am, while being pretty good, not at that level. And many, many other people aren't either, while still being pretty good. All those people don't always have a luxury of refusing a well-paying job just because they get a slightly wrong vibe about what could happen with the company years from now.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture
We were talking about the people interviewing and picking jobs in general, not specifically ones that had been laid off from CF.
> I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering.
Maybe not right now (though I imagine that varies a lot even now). But I've been there. I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month. Admittedly, that was after the dotcom bubble; but it left me with a mindset of not assuming everyone has a choice to work at the company they want to. Sometimes you need a job, and being picky about which one you choose isn't always an option.
Huge gulf between "sometimes you need a job" and "employees are pigs to the slaughter".
"I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month" is pretty intense. I'm sorry you went through that, but if you get ~7 months of paid time to job search and still wind up 100k in debt, there are definitely other problems. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize getting laid off from an extremely highly paid job as a humanitarian crisis.
Should tech companies hire more slowly and carefully? Yes, definitely. Does that actually help employees? I'm not sure, in this case they're getting paid more than they would have had they not been hired at all. Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes.
Though it’s ridiculous to entertain the thought that one would pivot their career at the drop of a hat. Even just bumping into a tech stack will chain one to it as recruiters stare at yoe in a specific one and completely ignore anything adjacent, imagine doing anything more radical.
One can do it, but it’s a life changing, irreversible and likely damaging event nobody sane would take lightly. Absolute nonsense.
"I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one"
I understand your point, but this is the least bad world we're in. If you mandated no-firing or mandated year-long compensation for laid-off workers, you would be crushing the small business economy and destroying more jobs than you were trying to save.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
That's great that they're doing that, but it's absolutely not guaranteed, either in this particular case (prior to this announcement, i.e. when these people were hired) or in general.
But all of this ignores the more general point, which is that--for reasons which may or may not be their fault--some people are not in a good situation financially and for them being laid off is a big deal with very real risks. Just because that's not you doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
Most job openings are fake. Ghost jobs are a real and growing problem as dishonest businesses use it to signal growth without the actual intent to hire.
What criteria would you use? Companies that don't do mass layoffs excludes all big-tech. What makes you think that "seriously inquiring about such practices in interviews or at the application stage" will get an honest answer?
Maybe the answer is that choosing 'big tech' implicitly prioritizes salary over stability. Many people (even on HN) work at places other than FAANG (or whatever counts as big tech these days).
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.
You could also just ask directly. I think it's a totally fair question. I don't think you'd be penalized for asking about a company's layoff history. Especially if you say something like "I'm looking for my next home, somewhere I can be for the next 5 plus years".
I might not ask in the first 10 minutes of the first interview, but once you're a few rounds of interview deep, you can pretty safely ask questions like this.
>- “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.
> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
There’s some kind of reverse-survivorship bias here. I’d never apply at Meta because their management does the “hire a bunch of excess people in the good times, so when Zuck‘s next inevitable efficiency-drive happens, the team is able to layoff lots of people while still staying operational” approach.
So I’d never make it into the Meta interview to ask that question in the first instance, and neither would anyone else who thinks of Meta in that way.
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."
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.
I missed a word in there, which was "has it always worked out", but on the other hand I've also dated a lot of people I didn't marry, and even in my original phrasing I think it would be very odd to not ask or try to suss out this information! If nothing else you'll learn later if people are truthful or not, or worth working with again in the future.
I think we're saying the same thing? Just asking about team size won't reveal the answer. So a different set of probing questions might have to be asked.
I thought it was hilarious when they did their layoff a couple years ago just because everyone else was. It was portrayed by their announcement as though it was a business need that they tighten their belts, as though Apple, the company that makes twelve figures of profit every fiscal year were in some kind of tight cash flow situation. Really made it obvious that they saw the atmosphere as “good layoff weather.”
> 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.
While you can't really ask "will I be layed off next year," it's pretty common to ask some version of "why is the role open," usually split among a few questions (that you'd tailor based on the role):
- "Which of my skills do you think are most valuable for this role?"
- "How would you measure success in this role?"
- "Can you tell me a little more about the product lines we'll be developing / supporting?"
- "How is the current team planning to grow?"
These are the kinds of questions that let you feel out what the manager envisions for the role. If the answers seem vague, that tells you something about the role / manager / org. If it's not clear how you impact the product and they can't clarify, that also tells you something.
I hear you, but the answers to these questions in my experience are always of the kind "we're looking to hire capable people with skills X, Y, Z for projects A & B".
These don't give you any idea about the health of the company or how precarious your new job will be.
agree - every time you ask a "clever" question you're increasing the risk it will be mis-interpreted, and also giving the interviewers a chance to pass. You may think you're being intelligent, honest or candid but it can easily come across as cocky, confrontational and (for lack of a better term) "off". I've passed on candidates for all of these reasons.
> Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices.
When you have a mortgage to pay and a family and a COBRA package running out (in the best case), your willingness to "penalize" a company that is actually willing to pay you decent money gets progressively lower as time passes. Not everybody has FU money and can refuse all offers until an ideal employer shows up on the horizon.
At least personally, I optimize for "any job that I can get in this horrible job market". When job seekers are despirate I don't think you can realistically say that their taking the job implies consent. They've effectively been given the offer "take this job or become homeless".
> 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.
This strategy basically puts you in the top 5% earners though.
> 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.
I see it all the time companies keeping people out of loyalty despite employee being grossly incompetent. But it would be hard of hear about it because what kind of news that'd be.
Hiring is event, firing is event. Not hiring or firing are not the event to cover.
I dunno, treating people with cattle kind of feels like the less good option here. These people who get hired have their own life, with plans and outlooks and what not, and basically hiring someone just to have someone to fire later, feels really shitty and flat out ignoring that they're human too.
No, it's psychopathic. Please, let's not pretend multi-billion dollar companies and your average worker are on anywhere near even footing. Companies always make a big song and dance about being great places to work. Nobody tells candidates 'you'll be expected to work 60h weeks to keep up with the workload here'. Candidates don't ask pointed questions about this because they'd be immediately disqualified. I know, I've been there.
The only company I know of that's open about their practices is netflix, and they comp appropriately for the risk. All other companies? It's basically word of mouth.
It's the other way around. Why do employees try to game the companies in the first place? Because most, or at least a very large portion, don't give a shit about their employees.
It's not just cloudflare. Amazon had been doing this shit forever (probably decades at this point), to cite an egregious example. As a mere mortal employee, its not like you have a lot of choices.
> 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.
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.
Yes, but your performance review is way more dramatic. Being a PIP-boy for life is not funny, but when they know and you know, it gets something of a comedic element.
The easiest way to become a F500 company is to start as an F5 company, then financialize your whole business, stop innovating, fire anyone effective, and give the executives huge bonuses.
This is effective. Therefore, normalization of this plays into the workers' hands, gives them information, and gives economic advantage to honest agents.
I mean, you could compare it to any non-capitalist society, where such treatment of workers is declared unacceptable. But what does this translate into in reality? Such strategies are still effective and provide an advantage to those actors who adhere to them. But since firing workers for their relative effectiveness contradicts the proclaimed ideology, such workers are simply accused of random crimes against the country and executed.
Usually, companies value opex more than capex - opex is much more flexible. That's one of the reasons why printers, coffee machines, companies cars and other things are typically leased.
Not really that simple. Opex gets better tax treatment (you can deduct it in full every year) but people aren't always Opex depending on what they're doing (research tends to be Capex)
Also tax treatment isn't the only consideration for financial engineering: It's easier for a company with a huge capital spend to argue that they're investing in the future and CapEx doesn't hurt EBITDA. On the other hand, some companies get worried about reporting a high "capital ratio" (ratio of capital assets to income).
In reality you can't say categorically that companies prefer Opex to Capex.
Concretely speaking, the FAANG companies are all wildly slashing opex (us) for capex (data centers, TPUs) even as the capex costs skyrocket due to demand outstripping supply.
Programmers are usually capex to be honest, with current tax treatment. When companies switched from data center to cloud they ended up shifting a lot of their compute from capex (buying servers) to opex (paying a hyperscaler for compute by the hour).
Of course if you're in one of the five tech companies building datacenters rather than renting (MSFT, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle) then things are different.
I know a medium sized defense contractor that ultimately had to sell itself a few years because they did this.
They would come recruiting in bulk at our school only to fire the majority within a year to satisfy their stack ranking nonsense.
10 years later, the engineers they were protecting retired and they couldnt find anyone willing to work for them, even people still in school knew the reputation.
Or it was a combined strategy - hire interns who will hopefully be able to replace some higher paid employees at lower cost once they learn the ropes. Then reduce headcount further replacing with AI.
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...
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.
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.
Stuff just gets done, I guess? Projects move faster, people onboard faster with less intervention, etc. The speedup seems noticeable enough that it doesn’t need precise measuring.
If the speed up is noticeable enough then coming up with a metric should be easy?
I haven’t noticed a speed up in my own org though the feeling of engineers rushing to implementation has become more pronounced. Team members no longer understand what others are doing and siloing has become intense even within my team.
Quality matters as well as speed though: reworking comes at a cost, so you really need to be tracking more than one metric. A lot of problems are caused by optimising for one metric above all else.
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 important to say a large layoff isn't performance related, because it helps those who got laid off find new work. Even if it was all performance related, you want someone else to hire your former employees.
And, in a large layoff, it's likely to be at least partially true. Large layoffs work better when they're done quickly, when there's signs of layoffs but no information, many people will head for the exits themselves... which helps your headcount numbers, but ideally you want to keep people who are good at figuring stuff out and taking appropriate action and instead they've left. So... lay off people who are 'known performance issues', but also lay off some whole teams that have a mix of performance, and then do some random assignment and catch a mix of performance, because getting direct managers involved to pick who goes means having too many people know about the lay offs.
> This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
Yeah, this one isn't credible. If it was about something other than costs, like pivoting to a new market, you would offer first choice of jobs for the new market. Even if it's look at our productivity, 20% of our employees have nothing to do, it takes a lot of spin to say not paying them to twiddle their thumbs is something other than cost cutting.
Didn't a few large tech companies fail even that low bar of decency? I seem to recall news of layoffs in the not too distant past where the employer openly let it be known those chosen were chosen for performance reasons, e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...
That to me is a pretty clear reason to question the accuracy of those two claims. Insiders are saying that even people who were performing well in very profitable groups are being cut, which is hard to square with the stated motivations.
Training can be socialized by asking people to take govt loans on further education and then letting the people default on them. Why should company spend their profits on it? /s
> 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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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,
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.
The vast majority of people working for small companies do not earn much. A few doctor firms, and high end legal/engineering firms maybe, but most employees of smaller businesses lose out on total comp to big businesses, and government.
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.
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.
The point of today's megascale corporations is to make it impossible for challengers to arise at all. They aren't always successful, but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
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.
>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.
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.
> seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience
Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
It's more that the young people are more likely to go along with the hype because they aren't experienced enough to know the limitations of LLMs (their baseline skill level is too low to compare), they get to feel like they are more capable than they actually are, or they are not in a financial position to push back.
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.
Young people today have grown up in a low trust society and have a totally different mindset. They have no qualms with figuring out how to extract as much as possible from their employer while providing as little value as they can. They will fake their competence as long as possible using LLMs and then go do it again somewhere else.
Can't blame them it's the culture we have now especially in tech, and it's incentivized top-down.
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.
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.
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.
The law is you can't descriminate against a protected class. Lots of things are protected classes, like race and religion. Old age is, but young age isn't. Clothing choices in general aren't, but if it's a religous choice, it likely is protected.
Etc.
It's kind of weird that you can fire young people because they're young, but not old people because they're old. But it's not a paradox, it's just how the system is codified.
Yes, from a legal perspective this will always be true: in-group vs out-group. Age discrimination is a special category because everyone will be in the out-group (when young) the age into the in-group. In this case, it is probably legal to fire someone for being too young. It sounds weird, but that is not a protected class of employees.
I know there's an unspoken rule to not speak directly about whatever shady thing your organization and leadership is doing but for this situation it would be surprising if there isn't some correspondence that would come up in discovery detailing the strategy. It's too much of a coincidence and too big of a decision to hire 20% of your workforce as interns and then a couple months later fire 20% of your employees.
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.
No I'm saying you lay off your senior people. Not because they're old and you don't want to pay retirement but to save on payroll since they make more money than juniors.
Technically yes, IBM just got sued successfully for it.
That said they just settled the case for what happened in 2016. So you might be right and even win but that wont help you for a decade (assuming you win at all)
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.
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.
I have worked a fair share of that kind of jobs in the past. The colleagues on my level who cared about more than being paid and not getting fired where the absolute majority. People want to belong. They want to work. The ones who are the exception of the rule can be seeded out pretty quickly. You do not work for an organisation for 10+ years, wake up one day and switch to pure opportunism.
As for incompetent management, that problem can not be solved by churning workers. It can only be solved by better career paths and selection processes for management roles. The most intelligent people in an organisation are often more interested in getting things done than getting more power.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
This seems to be the new normal in Big Tech. They regularly announce massive layoffs, but if you look at their size over time it stays stable or grows. Cloudflare size grew every year. Microsoft size was stable for the past 4 years despite all the layoffs. Google had lost some (4%) employees in 2023, but has grown back to 2022 size last year. Meta shrunk by 22% in 2023, but has been growing in size since then and is probably back to 2022 size right now.
These companies overhire and then downsize. This is covered up by the moronic narrative about AI.
Side note. You know who is steadily shrinking, though? Intel. Wild, eh?
> Google had lost some (4%) employees in 2023, but has grown back to 2022 size last year. Meta shrunk by 22% in 2023, but has been growing in size since then and is probably back to 2022 size right now.
Google's revenue in 2022 was $282 billion, in 2025 it was $402 billion (43% growth).
Meta's revenue in 2022 was $117 billion, in 2025 it was $201 billion (72% growth).
Surging profits paired with flat employment continues the concentration of wealth.
> You know who is steadily shrinking, though? Intel. Wild, eh?
Intel's revenue is falling ($63 billion in 2022 vs $52 billion in 2025), makes sense that they would trim headcount.
> This seems to be the new normal in Big Tech. They regularly announce massive layoffs, but if you look at their size over time it stays stable or grows.
Periodic layoffs always happen at all big companies.
I think it’s only surprising to people now because it’s being tied to the AI worries at the same time where we’re exiting an unusual period where layoffs all but stopped for a few years after COVID.
The layoff sizes are also larger because there was so much overhiring in those years after COVID. Some rebound effects in play.
Interestingly, at least on my browser, the bottom of the Y axis is not consistently zero from chart-to-chart, which distorts the message being conveyed by these charts.
Take it a step further. Words, in the financial world are largely used for obfuscation, marketing, concealing of the truth by financially motivated actors. Thus, financial literacy is looking at the numbers, market conditions and geopolitical situation, while consciously discarding whatever bullshit corporate speak is being disseminated by captured media.
> 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).
That doesn't make much sense as a distinction, though it's a fun brain teaser to see why.
CIDR subnets can be as small as /32 (an individual IP). Even in the case we take the strictest IPv4 formatting requirements (no assumed 0s and no extra leading 0s), that'd be any layoff of 1000-259999 employees. Exceptions start to appear after that, e.g. 260.0.0.0 would be invalid and there is no other valid way to group the last three 0s per the strict rules.
Say we modify the question to just /24 subnets (i.e. similar the classic class C sized subnet) while keeping the rest of the question and rules the same. Through similar logic, any press releases which round to the nearest 10 give essentially the same range, now 995-259994. Since press releases like this tend to use rounded numbers ("over 1,100" seen here), essentially any large layoff could be read as a /24.
One thing I would bet on is "If you try hard enough, you'll eventually manage to find patterns where there aren't any".
First politics. Now businesses. This sounds like a wildly poorly written parody by teenagers.
"reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally."
Are they 1) halting all the 1111 interns, 2) keeping the 1111 interns, now armed with AI, to replace mid-level/senior institutional knowledge or 3) a mix?
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.
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!
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
The point is that HR declining to engage with her questions does not prove that they were lying. Even if they have 100% ironclad proof that they're in the right, what possible value is there in having an argument about it? Will she feel any better, and will they look any better to social media, if they deliver a 5 minute lecture on everything the company feels is wrong with her and her work?
(What is true, and what the Cloudflare CEO did acknowledge at the time, is that the manager who she felt was giving her only positive feedback should have been the one delivering the news.)
Maybe for context: In systems with worker protections, lying about this can be a crime. For example in Germany, if you want to fire someone for bad performance, you have to tell him before about the problem and give him the opportunity to improve, more than once. Even if a country like the USA, one that has nothing but disdain for the working class, does not have any such protections, the moral sentiment of non-brainwashed humans will not accept such amoral behaviour. So yes, ofc she might feel better if given an understandable reason, and yes, they might have looked better on social media, and more importantly: They might have felt better after behaving like humans.
In Germany, this woman would have been only halfway done with her 6 month probation period and the company would not be required to do these things. Again, you’re assuming without evidence that they were lying; an obvious alternative explanation is that her performance was genuinely not satisfactory, and she didn’t understand or wouldn’t listen to the feedback she got to that effect.
I wish tech companies would start building great products again, rather than trying to build the future. I've kind of had enough of Tech's vision of what the future should be.
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)
Also how EMs in amazon construct hunger games. Just hire a person every now and then so they can let go of another to prove you made your team better on some non-sensical performance evaluation axes..Cue the hunger games.
This paragraph from September 2025 didn't age well:
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. [...] But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.
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 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.
It kind of depends what we mean. If you're conservatively in the market, invested in the aggregate economy, diversified, and what not, yes, but if you're taking bets on a smaller number of companies you can just lose your money full on. Not every single company recovers from a recession.
That's why if you are a business, the risk of a recession is a real threat. Someone will recapture your market once the recession is over, but will you?
That also means people will lose their jobs, price of goods will rise, the pressure to need to dip into one's savings will increase, forcing many people into cashing out at the worse possible time. If you are someone with that risk, as an individual, a recession is a real threat as well, and you might want to reduce your market exposure beforehand.
I've lived through both 2000 and 2008. They do happen. And typically not when everybody says there will be a recession, but when almost everybody finally agrees there won't be one.
Not that us plebs can do anything about it anyway... :(
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Didn’t you just say your landscaper gets fired every year? That would mean they’re not “truly skilled.” So why hire them in the first place if they’re not skilled?
Originally you were assigning zero significance to the act of being fired, now you’re backtracking saying it implies something about value.
The landscaper analogy is to explain how any firm can hire or fire at the same time (which many can't seem to grasp).
A landscaper that doesn't have repeat clients is what you are comparing to, which is the signal for unskilled labor.
(If we are just using the landscape ecosystem).
For the Knowledge Worker ecosystem, the seasonality is not summer/winter but say Recession/Growth or Technology Waves. There is definitely at least 3 years gap between Recession/Growth of Technology Waves. So, someone getting fired every 8 months is a red flag just like the Landscaper not getting re-hired the next season.
All these are valid signals but most HNers are blinded by anti-corporation propaganda and can't see the objective reality
It's almost like there's a difference between a contractor and an employee. You'd think someone in the smartest cohort would know the difference. You wouldn't hire a full time groundskeeper just to plow your snow for 4 months and fire them when the weather changes.
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