7 ms·

Cloudflare CEO pledges to double 2020 internship class

196 points by caution 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago
There are many colleges that haven't yet changed their internship and/or foreign study requirements. So, this sort of thing is helpful.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sschueller 7y ago
Are theses internships paid?
- eastdakota 7y ago
  Yes. All Cloudflare internships are paid, including the new ones we just created. More details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020-summer-intern-class/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020...
  - BlackJack 7y ago
    Right from the CEO's mouth :-) This will be great for students, thanks Matt.
  - lawrencevillain 7y ago
    Hi Matt, This is unrelated, but can you please get rid of hCaptcha? It is an awful experience and it feels like there is a conflict of interest with including it vs captcha. You are now incentivized to push more users towards fraudulent vs non-fraudulent to make more money. I'm not saying that's what is happening, but it is a slippery slope. I already dislike Captcha, but hCaptcha is somehow much worse.
    - eastdakota 7y ago
      No chance we go back to ReCAPTCHA. We’d been concerned with the privacy implications of using a Google service for years. Then Google changed their policy to switch ReCAPTCHA from being free to a paid service. They have every right to do that, but it would have imposed >$10M in costs just to support our free customer base, which was untenable. That was the kick in the butt we needed to finally get off Google’s service. We moved to hCAPTCHA as at least a stopgap. Ultimately, our goal is to eliminate any overt CAPTCHA entirely. However, I will say I’ve been very impressed with hCAPTCHA’s responsiveness and willingness to rapidly innovate based on feedback from users — something that, even at our scale, we had a hard time getting from Google.
      - lawrencevillain 7y ago
        Thanks for the quick response! I'm definitely interested in eliminating CAPTCHA entirely. I was really hopeful for the Javascript check y'all were doing, but it looks like there were too many ways around that.
        amirhirsch 7y ago
        In case it isn’t clear from our website, hCaptcha offers both bot prevention and traffic monetization options. Cloudflare does not use our service for traffic monetization, so neither company has an incentive to make it difficult for humans to pass the captcha. Websites that use hCaptcha for monetization can adjust difficulty settings and the types of data labeling jobs their users will see. The value hCaptcha derives from human data labeling is provided broadly as a service to other companies, not just to provide training data for our own autonomous vehicle division. Since we are growing capacity like crazy and have a broad footprint of sites primarily interested in bot prevention and not traffic monetization, hCaptcha can offer the lowest cost data labeling to everyone. hCaptcha is also privacy-focused and doesn’t track you around the internet to show you advertisements. We support the privacy-pass extension and have an accessibility option which sends you to a cookie via email (because we can’t just cookie you when you log into our email service).
    - meowface 7y ago
  - plibither8 7y ago
    Hi! Are the internships open to only students in the US? Might not be the most appropriate place to ask, but couldn't find an answer on the job application page.
    - eastdakota 7y ago
      We’re open to applicants from anywhere. The only limitations may be if there are country-level restrictions on where we can pay people (e.g., employment law requirements we haven’t met because we’re not setup as an employer in the country). We have offices in the US, UK, Portugal, Germany, Singapore, and China so it possible from those countries. And we’ll do what we can within reason to make it work from elsewhere.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    > Internships are jobs, and we believe people should be paid for the jobs they do, so every internship at Cloudflare is paid. That doesn't change with these new internship positions we're creating: they will all be paid. This is the right thing to do. Good on Cloudflare.
- enchiridion 7y ago
  Has anyone seen unpaid internships in tech recently? I didn't think it was common practice anymore outside of very new companies.
  - mmm_grayons 7y ago
    Took a few un-paid as a middle- and early high-schooler, mostly to prove I was worth money and not a total fruit loop, which was probably reasonable at that age. Got paid after that.
    - ajayyy 7y ago
      Highschool coops are required to be unpaid to count as a credit in my province, so it is probably similar in some other places which would lead to that practice
      - mmm_grayons 7y ago
        School credit wasn't an issue; these were for my development and experience. I was homeschooled so I guess I could have put them down, but never thought to. It stinks that schools do it that way; I'm curious, to which province & nation are you referring?
        johnaoss 7y ago
        At least in Ontario, Canada I wasn't allowed to take a paid internship for high school credit.
  - mushbino 7y ago
    Unpaid internships are illegal in most states and the last time I checked it was the most commonly violated labor law. However, there are exceptions for government and nonprofit internships.
xwdv 7y ago
As markets get roiled Cloudflare has proven to be one of the best investments you can make. Buy a thousand shares today and you’ll be glad you did 5 or 6 years from now.
- highfrequency 7y ago
  Hang on, any reason why Cloudfare's recent market outperformance will continue?
  - StriverGuy 7y ago
    good product, growing market, good stewardship, growing revenue, high margin...
    - thelean12 7y ago
      High margin means that it's ripe for competition.
      - JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
        Cloudflare's margins are not easy to replicate. They have deployed a physical, global network that you cannot spin up with limited resources. If you're not already in a position to challenge Cloudflare today, it'd take years for you to build a similarly sized network. And even if you were able to get a similar physical distribution, can you get the same low peering prices? Then, once you have that, it's a very complex stack inherently. So getting feature parity with CF is no easy task by itself. I'd say Fastly or Amazon could put more effort into challenging Cloudflare and see some success. But Fastly already goes head to head with Cloudflare today. So, idk who would be able to disrupt them within a couple years unless they are already on that trajectory.
        tyingq 7y ago
        It's interesting to me that Akamai hasn't changed their model somewhat away from the "Call Sales for More Info" plan. They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them. But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.
mdorazio 7y ago
While a nice gesture, this would mean a lot more if Cloudflare was doing poorly right now. They're doing great, so this costs them very little and seems mostly like a PR stunt.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Huh? If they were doing poorly they wouldn't be able to afford to do this. It's exactly the companies that are doing well that we want to step up and do things like this.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    That's the entire point you and other commenters are missing here. It's very easy to be generous when you're doing well, it's a lot harder to be generous when you're not. The latter is far more noble as a result. Easy comparison: if a millionaire stands up and yells at everyone about how they just donated $100 to a charity while someone else with barely any savings quietly donates the same amount, which one is more deserving of praise? Cloudflare is the millionaire in this example, thousands of small businesses making actual sacrifices to keep employees from getting fired are the other person. This is a feel-good PR stunt.
    - renewiltord 7y ago
      Honestly, 'deserving of praise' makes no sense to me. There are only behaviours you want to reinforce and behaviours you want to discourage. I think I want to reinforce offering internships (giving the $100 in your example) so I wouldn't differentiate between the two cases and I'd praise them both. This company is stepping up when they are able to. Good. I want more of that.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Yeah, they should really apologize for not harming themselves before trying to help others. Helping out interns when your business isn't tanking is such a selfish and unforgivable PR stunt.
- 7y ago
soared 7y ago
Pledging to hire 50 interns? News must be slow over at TechCrunch.
- abhisuri97 7y ago
  It's semi significant because some companies are curtailing their internship programs right now.
duxup 7y ago
Are their internships open to ... non traditional students? Folks changing careers and such? I changed careers a few years ago and I would have been happy to get my feet wet in a new career with an internship or etc. But most are highly centered around the existing 4 year university system, so if you're not in that system that opportunity is closed. A few were open to folks with other experience, but most were still traditional student focused. I feel like with the way technology, jobs, and everything changes so quickly that internships too maybe should be more open to different paths.
- cat199 7y ago
  if one can get past HR, most people probably don't care, though it might be seen as strange imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.
  - duxup 7y ago
    For those of us changing careers... many of us are (well this was a few years ago so not me at the moment) too ;) For most industries just getting any 'experience' is half the battle.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 7y ago
    They don’t know they’re being insulted, and they lack the tools to address the issue. But more importantly, you don’t get sass for being a bad boss from a bunch of kids who have never had a real boss before.
    - duxup 7y ago
      I wonder how often this "being insulted" thing is really a thing. I worked with a lot of interns in my time. Almost everyone seemed to greatly overestimate their productivity / use. The internships we offered were NOT net moneymakers / all that useful. They were more PR, random chance of finding someone good enough to hire. Maybe I wasn't seeing how many internships work but straight out of or in college into an internship is a real roll of the dice productivity wise in my experience. No doubt at the top schools / top candidates are different, but most, I'm skeptical of.
morty_s 7y ago
What’s the culture like at cloudflare?
- sdjghsg 7y ago
  I hear the culture is good, but the pay is way under market.
kats 7y ago
That's smart. They are going to get a ton of great applications.
sdjghsg 7y ago
I love cloudflare, I'd love to work there, but I just wish they would actually pay market rates. Everyone I know that has considered them backs out because the offers they receive are the biggest lowballs they've seen in their life.

196 points by caution 7y ago

There are many colleges that haven't yet changed their internship and/or foreign study requirements. So, this sort of thing is helpful.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sschueller 7y ago

Are theses internships paid?

eastdakota 7y ago
Yes. All Cloudflare internships are paid, including the new ones we just created. More details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020-summer-intern-class/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-of-2020...
- BlackJack 7y ago
  Right from the CEO's mouth :-) This will be great for students, thanks Matt.
- lawrencevillain 7y ago
  Hi Matt, This is unrelated, but can you please get rid of hCaptcha? It is an awful experience and it feels like there is a conflict of interest with including it vs captcha. You are now incentivized to push more users towards fraudulent vs non-fraudulent to make more money. I'm not saying that's what is happening, but it is a slippery slope. I already dislike Captcha, but hCaptcha is somehow much worse.
  - eastdakota 7y ago
    No chance we go back to ReCAPTCHA. We’d been concerned with the privacy implications of using a Google service for years. Then Google changed their policy to switch ReCAPTCHA from being free to a paid service. They have every right to do that, but it would have imposed >$10M in costs just to support our free customer base, which was untenable. That was the kick in the butt we needed to finally get off Google’s service. We moved to hCAPTCHA as at least a stopgap. Ultimately, our goal is to eliminate any overt CAPTCHA entirely. However, I will say I’ve been very impressed with hCAPTCHA’s responsiveness and willingness to rapidly innovate based on feedback from users — something that, even at our scale, we had a hard time getting from Google.
    - lawrencevillain 7y ago
      Thanks for the quick response! I'm definitely interested in eliminating CAPTCHA entirely. I was really hopeful for the Javascript check y'all were doing, but it looks like there were too many ways around that.
      - amirhirsch 7y ago
        In case it isn’t clear from our website, hCaptcha offers both bot prevention and traffic monetization options. Cloudflare does not use our service for traffic monetization, so neither company has an incentive to make it difficult for humans to pass the captcha. Websites that use hCaptcha for monetization can adjust difficulty settings and the types of data labeling jobs their users will see. The value hCaptcha derives from human data labeling is provided broadly as a service to other companies, not just to provide training data for our own autonomous vehicle division. Since we are growing capacity like crazy and have a broad footprint of sites primarily interested in bot prevention and not traffic monetization, hCaptcha can offer the lowest cost data labeling to everyone. hCaptcha is also privacy-focused and doesn’t track you around the internet to show you advertisements. We support the privacy-pass extension and have an accessibility option which sends you to a cookie via email (because we can’t just cookie you when you log into our email service).
  - meowface 7y ago
- plibither8 7y ago
  Hi! Are the internships open to only students in the US? Might not be the most appropriate place to ask, but couldn't find an answer on the job application page.
  - eastdakota 7y ago
    We’re open to applicants from anywhere. The only limitations may be if there are country-level restrictions on where we can pay people (e.g., employment law requirements we haven’t met because we’re not setup as an employer in the country). We have offices in the US, UK, Portugal, Germany, Singapore, and China so it possible from those countries. And we’ll do what we can within reason to make it work from elsewhere.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  > Internships are jobs, and we believe people should be paid for the jobs they do, so every internship at Cloudflare is paid. That doesn't change with these new internship positions we're creating: they will all be paid. This is the right thing to do. Good on Cloudflare.
enchiridion 7y ago
Has anyone seen unpaid internships in tech recently? I didn't think it was common practice anymore outside of very new companies.
- mmm_grayons 7y ago
  Took a few un-paid as a middle- and early high-schooler, mostly to prove I was worth money and not a total fruit loop, which was probably reasonable at that age. Got paid after that.
  - ajayyy 7y ago
    Highschool coops are required to be unpaid to count as a credit in my province, so it is probably similar in some other places which would lead to that practice
    - mmm_grayons 7y ago
      School credit wasn't an issue; these were for my development and experience. I was homeschooled so I guess I could have put them down, but never thought to. It stinks that schools do it that way; I'm curious, to which province & nation are you referring?
      - johnaoss 7y ago
        At least in Ontario, Canada I wasn't allowed to take a paid internship for high school credit.
- mushbino 7y ago
  Unpaid internships are illegal in most states and the last time I checked it was the most commonly violated labor law. However, there are exceptions for government and nonprofit internships.

xwdv 7y ago

As markets get roiled Cloudflare has proven to be one of the best investments you can make. Buy a thousand shares today and you’ll be glad you did 5 or 6 years from now.

highfrequency 7y ago
Hang on, any reason why Cloudfare's recent market outperformance will continue?
- StriverGuy 7y ago
  good product, growing market, good stewardship, growing revenue, high margin...
  - thelean12 7y ago
    High margin means that it's ripe for competition.
    - JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
      Cloudflare's margins are not easy to replicate. They have deployed a physical, global network that you cannot spin up with limited resources. If you're not already in a position to challenge Cloudflare today, it'd take years for you to build a similarly sized network. And even if you were able to get a similar physical distribution, can you get the same low peering prices? Then, once you have that, it's a very complex stack inherently. So getting feature parity with CF is no easy task by itself. I'd say Fastly or Amazon could put more effort into challenging Cloudflare and see some success. But Fastly already goes head to head with Cloudflare today. So, idk who would be able to disrupt them within a couple years unless they are already on that trajectory.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        It's interesting to me that Akamai hasn't changed their model somewhat away from the "Call Sales for More Info" plan. They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them. But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.

mdorazio 7y ago

While a nice gesture, this would mean a lot more if Cloudflare was doing poorly right now. They're doing great, so this costs them very little and seems mostly like a PR stunt.

0xffff2 7y ago
Huh? If they were doing poorly they wouldn't be able to afford to do this. It's exactly the companies that are doing well that we want to step up and do things like this.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  That's the entire point you and other commenters are missing here. It's very easy to be generous when you're doing well, it's a lot harder to be generous when you're not. The latter is far more noble as a result. Easy comparison: if a millionaire stands up and yells at everyone about how they just donated $100 to a charity while someone else with barely any savings quietly donates the same amount, which one is more deserving of praise? Cloudflare is the millionaire in this example, thousands of small businesses making actual sacrifices to keep employees from getting fired are the other person. This is a feel-good PR stunt.
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    Honestly, 'deserving of praise' makes no sense to me. There are only behaviours you want to reinforce and behaviours you want to discourage. I think I want to reinforce offering internships (giving the $100 in your example) so I wouldn't differentiate between the two cases and I'd praise them both. This company is stepping up when they are able to. Good. I want more of that.
mehrdadn 7y ago
Yeah, they should really apologize for not harming themselves before trying to help others. Helping out interns when your business isn't tanking is such a selfish and unforgivable PR stunt.
7y ago

soared 7y ago

Pledging to hire 50 interns? News must be slow over at TechCrunch.

abhisuri97 7y ago
It's semi significant because some companies are curtailing their internship programs right now.

duxup 7y ago

Are their internships open to ... non traditional students? Folks changing careers and such? I changed careers a few years ago and I would have been happy to get my feet wet in a new career with an internship or etc. But most are highly centered around the existing 4 year university system, so if you're not in that system that opportunity is closed. A few were open to folks with other experience, but most were still traditional student focused. I feel like with the way technology, jobs, and everything changes so quickly that internships too maybe should be more open to different paths.

cat199 7y ago
if one can get past HR, most people probably don't care, though it might be seen as strange imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.
- duxup 7y ago
  For those of us changing careers... many of us are (well this was a few years ago so not me at the moment) too ;) For most industries just getting any 'experience' is half the battle.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 7y ago
  They don’t know they’re being insulted, and they lack the tools to address the issue. But more importantly, you don’t get sass for being a bad boss from a bunch of kids who have never had a real boss before.
  - duxup 7y ago
    I wonder how often this "being insulted" thing is really a thing. I worked with a lot of interns in my time. Almost everyone seemed to greatly overestimate their productivity / use. The internships we offered were NOT net moneymakers / all that useful. They were more PR, random chance of finding someone good enough to hire. Maybe I wasn't seeing how many internships work but straight out of or in college into an internship is a real roll of the dice productivity wise in my experience. No doubt at the top schools / top candidates are different, but most, I'm skeptical of.

morty_s 7y ago

What’s the culture like at cloudflare?

sdjghsg 7y ago
I hear the culture is good, but the pay is way under market.

kats 7y ago

That's smart. They are going to get a ton of great applications.

sdjghsg 7y ago

I love cloudflare, I'd love to work there, but I just wish they would actually pay market rates. Everyone I know that has considered them backs out because the offers they receive are the biggest lowballs they've seen in their life.