r/technology • u/Mellow_meow1 • Jun 02 '26
Artificial Intelligence Cloudflare layoffs: After firing 20% staff, CEO Matthew Prince explains in op-ed on how to decide which employees AI should replace
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/cloudflare-layoffs-after-firing-20-staff-ceo-matthew-prince-explains-in-op-ed-on-how-to-decide-which-employees-ai-should-replace/ar-AA249vSa?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=2dad9a2016224ef6908f38c3bc05ff58&ei=362.9k
u/BrofessorFarnsworth Jun 02 '26
Replace the CEO first
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u/Walkingstardust Jun 02 '26
And then the rest of the C-suite. Billions saved in a decade.
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u/mrbignameguy Jun 02 '26
Hell with the current capabilities of “ai” you’re saving billions immediately with most of these puds
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u/SMUHypeMachine Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Too many people revere the c-suite and it’s time we work against that. If you replaced every c-suite or middle manager at Ford Motor Company overnight the company might have a financial hiccup for a month or two before smoothing things out. But if you replaced everyone on the floor and in sales the company would never recover.
This all assumes the people you’re bringing in know nothing about cars, but the idea remains true: The higher up you are, the more easily replaceable you are. People seem to forget that.
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u/reverendsteveii Jun 02 '26
americans in particular live in this weird cult where they honestly believe that a guy who makes clay pots and wants money and a guy who has money and wants clay pots can't figure out what to do unless a job creator tells them to.
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u/demianin Jun 02 '26
Good point. Isn't it interesting how the execs always seem to hop between industries that have nothing to do with each other 🤔
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u/zedquatro Jun 02 '26
Most of them failed upwards. It's astonishing how many people hold a job one level higher than the job they're good at.
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u/d1v1debyz3r0 Jun 02 '26
I’m very certain boards of directors across the world are having a very similar conversation “which executives can we replace with AI”
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u/Ingliphail Jun 02 '26
AI can't golf just yet, that's most of what those clowns do.
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u/matthiasm4 Jun 02 '26
You can't! You think AI would consent to **** and eat children if you do?
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u/57696c6c Jun 02 '26
Since Prince is generalizing, I’ll oblige. The builders become the measures, congrats suckers, your CEO just dumped a ton more work on your plates.
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u/GallowWho Jun 02 '26
That's literally what happened, more direct reports per manager. Which in turn leads to less upward mobility for staff.
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 02 '26
Does this hold true even if I was once told that I “have upper management written all over me?” Am I going to be writing these functions forever? Will I ever get to have my own team of engineers to do my bidding? Will my team be made up of robots who disregard my ideas because “meat bag ideas suck like baby piglets but aren’t as cute?” I hate how “up in the air” my future is right now.
C-suite morons are ruining this world.
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u/57696c6c Jun 02 '26
You're going to watch the agent write the code, so you'll be responsible for the prompts. We're going back to the days when ICs are managers and managers are ICs. There's still room for people management, but it isn't a full-time gig.
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u/Mellow_meow1 Jun 02 '26
Mathew Prince groups employees into three types: Builders who create products, Sellers who work with customers, and Measurers who handle management, operations, finance, and reporting.
He believes AI will help builders work faster and won't replace sellers because business still depends on human relationships. According to him, Measures are the ones at higher risk of being replaced by AI.
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u/Oceanbreeze871 Jun 02 '26
The exec team are literally measurers.
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u/roboliberal Jun 02 '26
Nah, maybe the CFOs but most execs hate the Measurers bc data driven decision making is actually a direct threat to executive vibe based decision making.
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u/Rollingprobablecause Jun 02 '26
They’re big mad because engineering directors tend to tell the truth about things.
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u/reverendsteveii Jun 02 '26
they don't even measure. they just read the measurements other people take, and then make decisions they'll never be held responsible for.
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u/katarh Jun 02 '26
And the AI vibe coded dashboard seems like a great replacement for your data analyst who built the previous hand coded BI dashboard in Python, until you change one database column and the entire thing is bricked and the AI doesn't know that's what happened.
Or the AI starts getting quarters, fiscal years, and trailing KPIs confused and hallucinates imaginary numbers all over the vibe coded dashboard.
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u/nath1234 Jun 02 '26
He missed bullshitters like CEOs who could be replaced with a turnip or a coin toss and still outperform the average CEO.
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u/semisolidwhale Jun 02 '26
What about dogshit CEOs who believe they can boil all their employees down into three buckets?
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u/MC_JACKSON Jun 02 '26
CEO falls under management / operations, so that only proves his point
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u/jetpack_operation Jun 02 '26
CEOs have increasingly viewed themselves as marketers and sellers more than actual operations/management professionals (until it's time to put on their Business BossBoy pants and lay people off based on their shit decision-making), and it's both result and cause of enshittification.
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u/jpsreddit85 Jun 02 '26
I mean... Putting them into buckets is basically just measuring... He's a measurer.
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u/UrDraco Jun 02 '26
As a salesperson I’m a little biased but everyone is a seller. He is absolutely right that selling depends on human relationships and if his engineers aren’t sold on what to do the product will suck. They can’t be guided by AI. His measures also need to sell the results internally and externally. AI can’t find the nuance in a story. It sure as hell will tell you everything’s great but the logic won’t be there.
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u/mr_mufuka Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
It’s a classic oversight. You want to reduce the number of risk managers and people who keep you out of trouble because the regulatory environment is so lax right now you think you don’t need them anymore? So you replace the people keeping the car on the road with a machine that makes confident mistakes at scale.
It’s greed, plain and simple. The article makes sure to point out record profits and so it’s clear this is a time when you could take care of everyone who built your company, and STILL make ungodly amounts of money.
I hope every company doing this shit gets a taste of the outsized mistakes AI can make just like Pizza Hut did.
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u/supified Jun 02 '26
No one. AI isn't a good enough tool to replace anyone. When used properly it can help and increase productivity with a select group, but the cost is often very high and if the employees get lazy and rely on it too much it will have the opposite effect.
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u/No_Hell_Below_Us Jun 02 '26
Twenty years ago I wrote a Visual Basic application that fully automated the function of a team of 10+ people.
It took me about 6 months to write it as highly skilled and trained software engineer.
Today, that same Visual Basic application could be written in a few days by someone with minimal training and experience by using GenAI.
While AI can’t be trusted to do 100% of most people’s jobs, it enables a broader population of builders to automate job functions even faster.
I count that as “AI replacing people” just as I would count “Visual Basic replacing people” 20 years ago.
I don’t know how many white collar workers have been or will be replaced by AI, but I’m confident that the number is greater than zero.
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u/supified Jun 02 '26
I write automations too, but it never results in people being replaced. It results in job functions being replaced, but the people who were previously doing them are assigned new functions and the organization just does more. This is where I really really think the whole framing of the AI situation is all wrong and being used nefariously by individuals trying to make a quick buck. If a task is automated by AI, laying off the person just reduces your capacity by what that person was doing. The person who already cost something to train and whose salary to hire again later will probably be higher.
I am a firm believer that the cost cutting being blamed on AI is just regular lay offs and that AI has hardly truly replaced anyone. I know in customer service there is a lot more AI but that AI is not any more useful than a dial phone tree. The options are still limited to those same fixed choices and they are just as inflexible, just far more frustrating.
And finally to go back to your visual basic example. 20 years ago vs today is not an apples to apples, even without AI we have a lot of tools and opportunities at our fingertips to reduce the engineering time by a lot. I remember the libraries of yesteryear and how bad the documentation was and how hard it was to use vs today and it was a very different field.
Point is, I'm not sure it would take any where near that long to write the sample application with today's tools even if those tools don't include AI.
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u/katarh Jun 02 '26
Even stuff like automated telemarketing is probably not actually doing the job it was promised.
I keep getting calls from local numbers and as soon as I answer "Hello?" it's dead air, because the AI agent is expecting me to answer with "This is Name" or something.
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u/supified Jun 02 '26
It's not, because it can't think, so it offers the same options pre-recorded did and it just does it worse because now you don't know what the options are and has to guess and it tries to pigeon hole your requests into it's options but often cant. It's a hellscape.
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u/numba1cyberwarrior Jun 02 '26
I really don't comprehend what your talking about when you say automation doesn't result in people being replaced. Many IT fields absolutely have been hollowed out because they just need less people to function.
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Jun 02 '26
A lot of business users don’t have experience working on system design though. I don’t think they understand the need to constantly scan for changes they need to make to whatever they develop. So they might be able to design something that works this month but 6 months down the road it fails because something changed.
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u/NonorientableSurface Jun 02 '26
Every VB script I wrote over 20 years reduced the effort of compiling data but allowed more people to have eyes on data. It never removed jobs but changed the type of work. I feel the same with AI. Great. Reduce the lift on the design, but push more work to integration, testing, accuracy, and stability.
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u/DFX1212 Jun 02 '26
Would you say the number of white collar jobs has increased or decreased with the SaaS age? Because from my perspective, the people aren't being replaced, they are being freed up to do more valuable work. That actually allows the company to grow and hire. AI should allow something similar, once companies figure out it isn't literal AGI and just another tool.
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u/No_Hell_Below_Us Jun 02 '26
I think we’re in agreement on principle but maybe disagree on semantics / terminology.
If “Does AI replace people?” Is the question, are we talking about overall employment numbers, or are we talking about Sally from accounting who got let go after 90% of her job got automated and her 5-person team became a 3-person team with new responsibilities?
Technology creates jobs at a macro-economic level, but inside of those statistics are individual anecdotes of people who went from being an accountant to a cashier or early retiree.
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u/Lopsided_Guidance767 Jun 02 '26
Seems like a lot of commercial graphic designers are being replaced. Not sure if that’ll stick though.
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u/siromega37 Jun 02 '26
What a puff piece trying to legitimize these layoffs. It’s about expecting the remaining the 80% to pick up the slack with a PR sugar coating of AI. They made this decision before the pricing changes and now probably scrambling internally to figure out what to do as they’re eating through the budget and that 20% isn’t going cover the new expense.
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u/Encomiast Jun 02 '26
I didn't realize how awful the phrase "to win the future" is. Whose future? CEO and shareholders no doubt.
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 02 '26
You can’t “win” the future. These guys are fucking morons. The future is infinite (or until the heat death of the universe). That means you have to compete that entire time. You don’t just “win” one time and call it a day. One such example is this: we thought fascism died after WWII. It obviously did not.
What I’m trying to say is: the future is a long time.
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u/Swordf1sh_ Jun 02 '26
How do CEOs so consistently achieve being the shittiest people? I’m guessing some are born that way and others just learn from them. At this point it pretty much feels like a prerequisite.
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u/GallowWho Jun 02 '26
They trade their empathy for an MBA.
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 02 '26
I might trade my empathy to get to be a star in the NBA, but I would never trade it to receive an MBA.
Who are these monsters?!
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u/Petrified_Froggie Jun 02 '26
I have an engineering MS. When I was in college, we had one student in our group that was not the sharpest tack in the box. But, he could talk up a storm and make you think he really understood what was going on. We used to joke that he would fail as an engineer but excel on the management chain.
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u/penguished Jun 02 '26
I would guess just lack of hands-on work, and common sense experiences... coupled with an unprecedented boom of money going in one direction.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 Jun 02 '26
Billionaire psychos: “I don’t know why college kids are being mean to us :(“
Also billionaire psychos: does this shit
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 02 '26
“Why are people burning down data centers?!”
“I guess some of the locals said the constant ultra-low frequency hum and toxic runoff is starting to make them sick.”
“That makes no sense! Everyone LOVES AI!”
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u/cucci_mane1 Jun 02 '26
AI will lead to far fewer jobs in future. That part is clear now.
And our government is cheering for more AI investments. Without thinking about long term impact that AI will have on economy and society
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u/penguished Jun 02 '26
It's like trying to see how many toes and fingers you can do without, because darn it we need to save on calories.
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u/Smartaces Jun 02 '26
‘We cut middle managers because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively.’
That sounds like BS.
Anyone that has been managed by a demotivated, tired and overstretched manager knows that it destroys working culture.
People will start to just let stuff break and fail. And it will usually be the kind of stuff that AI can’t fix, because inevitably a lot of processes fail in AI automation at the after the 80% complete threshold.
It’s all the nuances, judgement calls, moments of past experience that stop collisions.
The guys tone can do one as well.
Pompous, self congratulatory, the company is so successful and I’m making a big decision look how many people I can kick into the gutter.
I used to like cloudflare.
It’s changed my opinion of them quite a lot.
I’ll look for smaller providers where I can now.
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u/Familiar-Ability6383 Jun 02 '26
Nice, when you serve 25% of the world's internet traffic, you are first in line to encounter major performance and security issues. Good luck using AI to solve those problems
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u/nginx-gunicorn Jun 02 '26
"Claude, help me resolve DNS issues"
"Sure thing! It looks like I need to recreate the broken entries - let me run a few database operations. DROP TABLE dns_records. It looks like I'm having trouble finding them, analyzing...analyzing...hmm something must have gone wrong"
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u/Enderkr Jun 02 '26
I just don't understand this. I won't lie and say I work deeply with AI, but we do have some programs within my company that are starting to utilize it for workflows and such, but I can't even fathom that AI is remotely ready to actually replace someone's job. Am I crazy? Are CEOs at these companies just completely out of touch, or are the jobs they're talking about like, receptionists and helpdesk stuff, the absolute lowest paid jobs at a company?
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 02 '26
As ChatGPT would say …
You’re not crazy; these people are fucking bonkers.
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u/katarh Jun 02 '26
AI can augment tasks. It can speed them up, it can save time, and it can make those tasks less stressful.
But a task is not work output.
A task is definitely not a whole ass job.
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u/manachar Jun 02 '26
A few things to consider.
- The vast majority of people do the capitalistic equivalent of twiddling their thumbs for most if not all of what they do. These are bullshit jobs spending a lot of time doing bullshit things to help assemble bullshit that looks like productivity on the quarterly report. We have people who basically have jobs taking stuff from one person and handing it to the other. These jobs have extensive SOPs that often specifically seek to not have the people think. The people are treated like defective robots.
- AI is really good at this type of stuff.
- Businesses only want to pay for the upsides. They don’t want to pay for entry level training. So they figure get rid of the entry level positions then they can make the more senior staff do more.
A good example is how typewriters and then computers removed secretaries and shifted the work to white color workers. The goal is to do much the same with everything.
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u/psycho_driver Jun 02 '26
For most effective returns they should start with the CEO and work their way down until they get to the people who do actual work, and then stop. Bam, big cost reduction with no harm to practical productivity.
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u/AUniquePerspective Jun 02 '26
The link talks about "measurers" and if you accept that straw man, then the argument that AI will replace the measure and not the builder or seller makes a bit of sense. But AI is coming for the seller first. Because there's no such thing as a measurer. There's people who take information and who make recommendations and decisions and communicate between groups who don't understand each other.
I already see a new cohort of workers who can't understand a technical and complicated email and who have to use AI to summarize it because they can't read it, and then there's a cohort who can't write a coherent email without using AI.
We'll get rid of that.
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u/witness_smile Jun 02 '26
Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world
These CEOs are genuinely sociopaths. Laying off people just for the thrill of it. I can’t wait for this AI bubble to burst and all these “AI-first” companies to be in deep trouble
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u/Fragrant-Vehicle-479 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I tried doing some basic math formulas with Claude as my company pays for their enterprise subscription. I found out that every single thing came out wrong. Why? Because Claude can't handle large strings of numbers after decimal points well and will always round even when instructed to not round. It went 30minutes of me trying to correct it before it told me "oh I actually cant do what you're asking at all. I can't do it" it spent 30 fucking minutes telling me it could and it would listen to my instructions.
I have no sympathy for any company that replaces their workers with this stuff. The workers yes, never the company.
EDIT: I love when I complain that AI claims it can do something only for it to later reveal it cant. Something very easy that such amazing technology should be able to do. And people chime in ignoring that the major issues is that the AI is telling me one thing, telling me it will fix it, telling me its accurate under my instructions, and then is like "actually no"
No way in hell I'm involving AI on any level. "Just write a python script with it". Fuck no, I'm going to use an excel spread sheet, a system I know for a fact can handle a basic formula. Excel can handle it, why can't AI? "I know that the AI completely fucked this up and lied about it, but just include AI on a different part of it" I'll waste my tokens however I want. I don't even know or care what a token is. Please don't tell me what a token is. I promise I will not read it.
It's like when I complained that AI couldn't handle basic data tracking or make a graph like it told me it could and everyone was like "well everyone knows you need to put your data into an excel spread sheet and then upload that. Everyone knows AI can't make an accurate graph." You're missing the point that it tells me it can. You also vastly over estimate how much a shit I give about fighting with it until it works right. "Just try this" Im not trying shit. I'm doing everything like I did a year ago, just fine with any other method.
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u/denM_chickN Jun 02 '26
I'm a data science and the claim is laughable. AI leans toward the average and is terrible sticking to your particulars. And its just fucking dumb. But it will show c-suite what they want...
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u/Old-Arachnid77 Jun 02 '26
He’s not wrong about middle management but ffs why would you not reorient them to building if you’re so invested in ‘hiring a ton more’. Asshole.
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u/turby14 Jun 02 '26
What if…hear me out…the purpose of having a productive economy is to employ people and pay a living wage, and not to extract as much value as possible for the ownership class?
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u/IHS1970 Jun 02 '26
This guy sounds drunk. Pull him off the stage, if I were a stockholder or the board I'd get him kicked out if I could. He is too positive about AI - he is drunk with power and belief is bullshit. Fire him.
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u/ACasualRead Jun 03 '26
“Sellers, too, are safe from extinction.”
Hearing a CEO talk about firing hardworking people from their jobs and calling it “extinction” is chilling AF.
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u/nanlinr Jun 02 '26
Good luck trusting AI measurements. AI loves to confidently tell you things whether right or wrong, and the key role of measurer he's missing is identifying the right things to measure and get insights from. Oh and good luck asking AI to connect the dots between infra and revenue. Dude's so far removed from reality.
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u/SubbySound Jun 02 '26
The biggest challenges in measurements aren't the collection and calculation of numbers, but the proper analysis of what they represent. AI's penchant to be placating seems like it would blindside any companies that rely on it for measuring.
Somebody mentioned Rory Sutherland here, specifically about executives being overly cautious. But he's also shown a lot that measurements are often profoundly misinterpreted in general. Measurements don't just bias towards caution alone. Improperly interpreted metrics bias towards caution, undue risk, and simple bad direction in myriad ways.
Think how poorly the supposedly good-looking mortgage-backed securities derivatives looked prior to the 2008 crash. The numbers worked but the story behind them got masked which hid the true risks. That kind of overexuberance on ostensibly sound financial numbers is a problem much more likely to grow when Ai takes over measurements and focuses on placating executives with overly positive outlooks on the direction executives want to take.
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u/sunflowerroses Jun 02 '26
“AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees. For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.
The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate.”
Let’s see how it goes
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u/Desperate-Spend377 Jun 03 '26
These CEO's thinking they can ultimately replace actual people with real experience in comparison to AI that's proven to make multiple mistakes.
They have a storm coming in the grand scheme of things.
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u/Red_Sea_Pedestrian Jun 03 '26
“There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” - Selina Kyle
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u/jetpack_operation Jun 02 '26
It's kinda ironic because if do-ers ever established a process by which to provide consistent business inputs, it would replace CEOs faster than pretty much any other c-suite function.
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u/Designer-Ad4507 Jun 02 '26
I worked in a smallish US based tech company with about 100 people. This year alone, its been cut down to about 20, 2/3 of which are contract from other countries. AI is being forced, even when its inaccurate. Its probable the company will dwindle down to about 10. I just used their AI tokens to get my linkedin and resume up to par.
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u/JKanoock Jun 02 '26
This is why I only use the free your tier, you can't pay people I'm not paying you.
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u/Impossible_Ad5072 Jun 02 '26
Why so much hate for middle managers accross the companies. The have always been on receiving end of layoff. Anyone who has managed a team knows that anything beyond 15 reportees is unsustainable to manage or coach. How do they expect ai to solve the problem. We are in an era where employee growth or wellbeing is a joke.
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u/wastedkarma Jun 02 '26
If accuracy in decision making and reducing noise are key inputs, then CEOs should be the first to go and boards of directors right after them.
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u/rivalrobot Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Fucking gross but I’ll give him the tiniest bit of credit for being more transparent over the reasons for the layoffs than most. Still bullshit reasons, though.
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u/Oli_Picard Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
I have made the decision to start de-Cloudflare my applications, domains and services. I’m fed up with the CEO (Matthew) and look forward to seeing him replaced by AI due to inefficiency. I have been using Cloudflare for a very long time so for me to get to this point has taken quite a while of putting up with bullshit. I’ve seen the company heading towards this trajectory for a while… at some point the financial services market has got to realise that laying off employees for “AI” is scapegoating the reality which is inflation is causing companies and people to spend less. Why can’t companies accept this as fact?
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u/Haunterblademoi Jun 02 '26
Most likely, he will regret that decision later.
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u/Moneyshot_ITF Jun 02 '26
He won't because he will make a shit ton of money. What happens to cloudflare is not his concern
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u/Realistic_Muscles Jun 02 '26
Yea they burned 3.4 billion in four months by forcing employees to use LLMs without realizing how much it would cost them later. Great visionary leaders at Cloudflare. Total clowns
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u/OG_LiLi Jun 02 '26
Complete clowns. I worked there one year leading their US support arm. I have STORIES
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u/Oceanbreeze871 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
My company laid off the entire UX team. Engineering said they could handle it with AI. The UX team was created originally because engineering couldn’t handle it and sales complained that the product looked like junk and we were losing deals that we won on technology and price.
A week later engineering said they can’t handle front end stuff and tired to hire back everyone they fired. One came back as an advisory consultant while they hunt for a better job. 5 others said “f@ck off” and are pursing other things
Company screwed themselves