alt Hacker NewsI dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
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Maybe I've become cynical and jaded, because when I saw the title I immediately thought to myself "oh, Cloudflare's announcing a layoff."
It's interesting how every time there's a layoff, the blog post always has a title like "Preparing for what's next" or "An update on our workforce" or "Getting ready for the agentic era"!
The title should be something like "Cloudflare reducing workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally".
I’ll never forget how when I was at Google, every email with subject line “An update on X” meant X was getting axed. Like, just say so in the subject line…
Two days ago: “Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%” (layoffs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021368
> "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative...
If you'll believe them, it indeed is:
... [the Leadership at Cloudflare] have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era ... reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company.
... [This layoff is] not a cost-cutting exercise ... [but] Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates.
... We don't want to [mass layoff] again for the foreseeable future.
... [Cloudflare] cannot rest on the workflows and organizational structures that worked yesterday. We're confident that [Cloudflare] will be even faster and more innovative [after layoffs] ...This is what the true definition of "AGI" is.
Welcome to the corporate world
Yes. We've since changed the top link to a third-party article. We prefer to do this with corporate press releases* - this is probably the #1 exception to HN's "please post the original source" rule (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If anyone sees a better third-party article, we can change it again.
(Edit: it's not really an exception because the purpose of a corporate press release is usually to obscure the main story, which means it's misleading, so by HN rules we should change it.)
(Edit 2: I feel like I should add that this isn't specific to Cloudflare! It's literally a generic problem.)
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...