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This is awkward. Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/c
by AloysB 4mo ago
This is awkward.
Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future"
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/ 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/ 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
- ryandrake 4mo agoI 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.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoThe skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
- ihsw 4mo agoIt 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.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoThe reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 2ndorderthought 4mo ago*a recession did infact come*
- stringfood 4mo agoI'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
- coliveira 4mo agoThe government is very decided on not letting one happen, or hiding any minor recession. They will throw money at the problem as long as they can.
- fauchletenerum 4mo agoHave to protect boomers retirement accounts at the cost of future generations
- coliveira 4mo agoThey don't care about boomers, it is the wealth of billionaires that they care about.
- anon7725 4mo ago> there has never been one since then There was one in 2020, granted it was the shortest on record.
- tasoeur 4mo agoHonestly 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.
- morpheos137 4mo agoinfrastructure changes slowly. once its built its not clear what you are paying 1111 people for.
- user34283 4mo agoIf 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.
- chasd00 4mo agoI’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.
- matwood 4mo agoI'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.
- imiric 4mo agoShipping is just a milestone. We all know that "AI" can produce code much faster than any human. Productivity should be measured over time and take into account the cost of maintenance, reliability, amount of issues, etc.
- johnbarron 4mo agoAre they taking the piss by hiring and firing the same number as their public DNS IP ?
- WatchDog 4mo agoTheir main DNS is 1.1.1.1 but their secondary is 1.0.0.1 not 1.1.0.0, so close but not quite.
- zamadatix 4mo agoThe "as many as 1,111" number was: > The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional. But like the sibling comment says, "over 1,100" does not reference any of their resolver IPs anyways. In all likelihood, they hired fewer than the maximum of 1,111 interns and they are probably chopping slightly more than that here (max vs min).
- unglaublich 4mo agoAlso it's funnier to make jokes about hiring people, than it is about firing them.
- johnbarron 4mo agoWanna bet they are firing in groups sizes, that match exactly CIDR subnets?
- zamadatix 4mo agoThat 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".
- awwaiid 4mo agoThose 11 damn lucky interns!
- milkglass 4mo agoThe 1%!
- dnnddidiej 4mo ago100x-ing with claude. Code not outcomes, but still! Serious note you dont really hire interns. They are a contractor (and hopefully apprentice who is looked after) really.
- willis936 4mo agoThe 0.990099...%
- jauntywundrkind 4mo agoAbout as awkward as "Q1 revenue up 34% YoY". https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflare-to-cut-one-fifth-of-workers-in-move-to-ai-first-model https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
- rdtsc 4mo agoWonder 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.
- anal_reactor 4mo agoI 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.
- epolanski 4mo agoThat's how the world works, we just automated and hidden most of the disgusting stuff.
- anal_reactor 4mo agoNo. She raises a valid point "if the company overhired, then just tell me".
- kortilla 4mo agoHR 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”.
- tempest_ 4mo agoBoth 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"
- madduci 4mo agoBeing old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?
- fodkodrasz 4mo agoAI will mentor them /s
- davebren 4mo agoIt'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.
- ectospheno 4mo agoOr it is just regular ageism.
- theteapot 4mo agoMmmm, fresh people.
- leaves83829 4mo agoi 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.
- faangguyindia 4mo ago>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez. If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone. Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop competition from growing by nipping the threat in the bud. Future can pay for all of this if you succeed.
- organ1cwast3 4mo ago[flagged]
- deathanatos 4mo ago> Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone. I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them. Every time. Without fail.
- Freedom2 4mo agoWell 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.
- brabel 4mo ago
- al_borland 4mo ago> 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.
- DHRicoF 4mo agoImagine if they hired those 1111 to do the most massive nine-month-long live coding interview and only 11 pass the bar.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo agoDidn't know about Yogi Bera's quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
- uncircle 4mo agoSome of these are unintentionally as witty as Mark Twain’s
- scott01 4mo agoI’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.
- fzeindl 4mo agoThe term for this is „buffer hiring“.
- nostrademons 4mo agoIt'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.
- camillomiller 4mo agoWorkers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo agoIn management terms a human and a printer are the same. Both resources that need to be managed. I hate it.
- StilesCrisis 4mo agoAbsolutely not--the printer is capex, so it's preferable to the humans who are opex.
- jameshart 4mo ago
- chakintosh 4mo agoOpus 4.6 was released between those dates
- echelon 4mo agoThis and the crazy macro economic environment.
- frigg 4mo agoSo they basically fired all the interns? Can anyone who works or knows someone who works for Cloudflare can confirm?
- dust-jacket 4mo agoI doubt it. Interns are cheap. They've replaced paid staff with interns!
- simonjgreen 4mo agoWhy should a company continually grow in headcount?
- jckahn 4mo agoWorst way to grow the company by 11 people
- redhale 4mo agoThis (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.
- gk1 4mo ago> AI tools make great team members even better This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true. But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around. (That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)
- aaa_aaa 4mo agoLosing what edge?
- jurgenburgen 4mo agoBefore AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code. What has changed?
- matharmin 4mo agoNow you can ask "Is it easier to ask an AI agent to do X than asking my employee?" Good metrics is difficult, but sometimes a simple comparison like that is enough.
- 4mo ago
- mihaaly 4mo agoI 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)
- codethief 4mo agoQuoting from the links you shared: > Cloudflare aims to hire as many as 1,111 interns over the course of 2026. […] That’s why this significantly increased class of interns will have a special focus: to ramp up the creative and widespread application of AI with a fresh approach. vs. > The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere. lol
- wartywhoa23 4mo agoThose 11 be Boaz & Jachin of building the Cloudflare's future. More than enough to vibecode it down.
- LukaszWiktor 4mo agoTurns about they only needed 11 interns.
- konart 4mo ago11 interns did okay.
- djeastm 4mo agoThe 1% always does ok
- tlogan 4mo agoWhy do we need to complicate here? cloudFlare is not making any profit. They are losing money. The board probably wants profit now (they predict less growth) so the management needs to cut the costs. This AI story is a just an excuse. If there is not AI they will say “high gas prices”. Or “inflation”. Or whatever … It is true that the companies like Meta, Oracle and Microsoft are laying off due to AI but because they need money to build compute power. There are some companies who maybe do lay offs due to AI replacing employees. But this might not be the one.
- ryandvm 4mo agoI'll just point out that this is exactly the point in the corporate character arc where every company before turns evil. I never liked the idea of every web site in the world using CloudFlare, but I like it even less now that they're struggling.
- the_af 4mo ago> so the management needs to cut the costs I love it that they explicitly say in their blog post "this is not a cost cutting exercise". Of course, every "regrettably..." letter from company execs is understood to be an entirely performative ritual.
- tlogan 4mo agoOne smart old guy once told me that the only language you need to speak in the financial world is spreadsheets. No words needed.
- nyc_data_geek1 4mo agoTake 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.
- 4mo ago
- cmiles8 4mo ago…but AI! Seems no CEO simply wants to say the company is under performing, we hired too many people, and now we’re resetting. But it’s clear that’s what happened on nearly all these layoffs. None of these announcements provide any convincing evidence that AI is anything more than a convenient distraction from the real reasons for the layoffs.
- ptdorf 4mo agoFirst 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?
- falsemyrmidon 4mo ago[dead]
- ai-x 4mo ago[flagged]
- ironmagma 4mo agoYour snow plower and landscaper don't get judged for having 5+ different customers in 5 years. They don't show up in ATSes as job hoppers.
- ai-x 4mo agoI haven't met any truly skilled person constantly being fired. Sure they may get unlucky once or twice, but talent shines through
- ironmagma 4mo agoDidn’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.
- ai-x 4mo agoThe 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
- ironmagma 4mo ago
- bttf 4mo agoThis led me down a rabbit hole - didn't know Yogi Berra was responsible for so many witticisms.
- romaniv 4mo agoThis 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? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/num... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/num... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/number-...
- 5upplied_demand 4mo ago> 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.
- Aurornis 4mo ago> 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.
- alain94040 4mo agoThis 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.
- pojzon 4mo agoThat one guy must be really good at the job. Congratz.
- itissid 4mo agoAlso 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.