This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.
I promise you there are a ton of companies desperate to hire talent right now. It's hard on both sides of the market. Lots of noise, but there is demand for this supply. Unfortunately, that means personal connections are more valuable than they used to be, just to get the ball rolling.
Are you sure? Can you share some of those companies that are desperate to hire talent right now? I'd like serious teams as I need to find work. I do keep an eye on HN, Wellfound, Workatstartup, X, etc.
My company is hiring (small, but definitely happy to talk to you and all the people who made stuff run on your team at Cloudflare!) https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blaxel
I know Waymo is trying to hire like a thousand engineers this year.
There are always a ton of companies looking for good talent. However there are not nearly as many as a couple year ago: there is more good talent looking for a job than there are jobs. This has happened before, it will happen again (this is easy for me to say - I still have a job, but I've been there before and I know first hand how bad it is when you need the job).
Good luck to those of you looking for a job. My company is hiring a few people, but if someone leaves today there is only a 20% change we hire someone outside to replace them so I can't really offer leads worth looking at.
Like us :) We are not mandating AI tokens but asking people not to ship slop code. Naturally that means more people required; but in the age when everything is slop, imho having good taste becomes a competitive advantage. And that... requires good people.
I've been laid off from every job I've held (and once I was even re-hired a month later!) so I know the feeling. There seem to be others here who are also impacted and I fear the overall trend will only continue, so I wrote up my thoughts on how to future-proof your job search. I do think the GP comment about institutional knowledge could be a key part of it. Hope this helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067459
"I'm an agent person. I'm good at dealing with the agents! Can't you understand that?! What the hell is wrong with you people?! I'm good at dealing with the agents!"
My stance is this: Fine, maybe you need to restructure for profit reasons. If that is the case, then it is also beholden upon the people doing the layoffs to understand their responsibility in that.
In an ideal world, a layoff of this scale would also require a shakeup of the management that let it get this bad in the first place.
What's more, the higher up the chain, the less onerous the layoff for the individual getting laid off.
Why should people who are profitable to employ be laid off as well?
It just sounds like you're upset and want to hurt whoever you feel is responsible for making you upset. That's not a productive stance to have on important topics.
I'm not asking for the people who hurt me to be hurt. I am asking that the responsibility of the actions that management layers took be considered in layoffs.
For instance - If overhiring happened, how is this not at least a little bit on the individual that approved of a hiring spree? Why is it that they should be able to yield a baton that hurts the workers they hired, without having to actual bare the brunt of the decisions?
If a business is still unprofitable, a business that touches so much of the internet like Cloudflare, then that is also a strategic failure and should be punished as such.
I feel like your tone in this response was also so condescending.
>For instance - If overhiring happened, how is this not at least a little bit on the individual that approved of a hiring spree? Why is it that they should be able to yield a baton that hurts the workers they hired, without having to actual bare the brunt of the decisions?
Do you think shareholders do not consider their employees performance when deciding to hire/keep them?
Do you think CEOs don't do that when it comes to their executive team?
Do you think the executive team doesn't consider that?
It all comes flowing down.
I can assure you as a shareholder i am 100% focused on getting a return, and I will fire (or vote to fire) any executives that i believe are doing a bad job, or who accept that their underlings do a bad job.
Hiring people, and then firing them some time later is not intrinsically the same as doing a bad job, nor does it mean there was "overhiring".
Also. "hurts workers"? What?
Workers receive the payments that were agree to, for the period that was agreed to. No more, no less.
You are no more entitled to a job than the supermarket is entitled to my patronage, and me choosing to no longer purchase from you, whether it be groceries or labor, is not me hurting you.
This is how the elites actually feel tho. They think they can do no wrong, it's not their fault that they don't know how to run a business but you should please give them another chance and not change corporate law to stop benefiting them over workers.
It's a mindset that enables neoliberalism to flourish while vast majorities suffer immensely to benefit the few.
It's a system that's worth questioning as the material lives of 100s of millions of Americans are getting objectively worse every year while we are always being told there is no money for healthcare or childcare but there is always trillions laying around for imperialistic activities like data center expansions and war.
Let's throw the elites in jail, so that more elites can come in and do the same thing?
There's a limited pool of execs to run companies. Its a pretty homogenous group of people, similar skill sets, some have varying philosophies on how to run companies, but the majority of them will likely make the same decision if given identical sets of circumstances.
I get triggered when people start calling out "elites" and other boogeymen - what does it mean to have companies run by non-elites? What even is an "elite"? Are they elite simply because they are employed as an exec? Is it possible to have a non-elite executive?
Using "elites" in this context makes it feel like an emotional complaint about the world rather than anything rooted in logic.
None of these elites are operators -- they're liberal arts educated and their primary skills are in using words and lack of to achieve status gains -- nothing more.
In many traditional industries, companies are built and run by the most senior members of whichever discipline. Tech is different because most of its skilled members intentionally cede soft power because of personal (imo short-sighted) predilections and the exorbitant amount of money flowing in has caused a mad dash from other disciplines.
The "elites" are people trained either institutionally or personally (from their relationships with others) to understand power dynamics and utilize them for personal gain.
Navel gazing is a great away to achieve nothing. Being lorded over by someone who couldn't even figure out how to build and host a simple webapp is ludicrous. Should the CEO of my hospital not understand that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? Should the partners at big M&A law firms have no idea how to read a contract? No, because that's fucking ludicrous -- yet it persists in tech because its technicians have zero training, education, or even sense for elite ways of thinking.
No, it's more like we have undemocratically elected people in positions of power that want to act like dictatorships when in reality these people made a mistake that is costing the company billions of dollars and their ineptitude means they should be removed from these positions.
I thought Silicon Valley was all about meritocracy? Why should corporate shills that does not know how to profit from entity that controls 25% of internet traffic be allowed to keep their jobs but the actual people providing real value, the workers, aren't?
That is a system that doesn't benefit humanity. It selfishly benefits the few.
My orgs products. Others, probably not. There is a lot water they could have targeting and gone after. Starting with Dane's idiotic incomplete messes he left around and declaring them done and leaving people to clean his garbage up
Leadership is terrible and they're out of ideas. AI is going to be the future but it can't even review code properly
Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.
Thats usually correct for these “surprise” layoffs. For the ones that are announced in advance there is a bit more coordination (like the meta/amazn ones).
I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?
Employees are treated as a cost which is why you often see the strongest performers inexplicably laid off (since they are likely compensated higher). In situations like this they don’t care about productivity; leadership is given a list and they can move a few people around but for most its game over once they’re on it.
If you know anyone that works at MBB they would be happy to share this with you; if you’re in SF just hit any bar for a weeknight happy hour and you will 100% find someone.
Yeah, honestly this is where LLMs shine since they were trained on so many MBA/HBS materials. Just remember to ask your questions in a way that praises neoliberalism and you'll unlock even more secrets about how they fuck over and alienate workers.
I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder
No one had any idea. My director got the same email
This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.
> I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do
That’s how it was at my previous company also. If you asked any engineer there they’d say “I’m incredibly busy, and I need more headcount to get through the things on my plate”. Then they laid off 40% of the company because AI had made everything so efficient shrug
In my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.
I know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling.
They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...
All of us who work with AI, and HN audience especially, know the gap between what can the agent do now, and "it fulfill the functions of my job" is something that won't be overcome anytime soon. Anyone who really believes that's the case is just showcasing their lack of knowledge
Matthew Price calls it "an electric screwdriver". Does that sound like someone who has ever gotten deep on anything?
Do you really think management would come out and say "Hey we actually fucked up and don't really know what to do. Please don't punish us, here is a ritual sacrifice instead."?
Of course they're going to downplay their own stupidity and use LLMs as a means to suppress terrible news.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.