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.

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.

Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics.

You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less.

You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight"

Turns about they only needed 11 interns.

Those 11 be Boaz & Jachin of building the Cloudflare's future.

More than enough to vibecode it down.

Those 11 damn lucky interns!

Worst way to grow the company by 11 people

Quoting 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

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.

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.

So they basically fired all the interns? Can anyone who works or knows someone who works for Cloudflare can confirm?

Didn't know about Yogi Bera's quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22

Why should a company continually grow in headcount?

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)

Are they taking the piss by hiring and firing the same number as their public DNS IP ?

Opus 4.6 was released between those dates

> 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.

The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.

About as awkward as "Q1 revenue up 34% YoY". https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...

Imagine if they hired those 1111 to do the most massive nine-month-long live coding interview and only 11 pass the bar.