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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 m
by tempest_ 5mo ago
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"
- verisimi 5mo agoYes, left is right, up is down.
- ectospheno 5mo agoOr it is just regular ageism.
- theteapot 5mo agoMmmm, fresh people.
- mukmuk 5mo agoIsn’t this illegal?
- Analemma_ 5mo agoOnly if you're dumb enough to leave a paper trail showing that's what you did.
- mmooss 5mo agoIt seems it would be easy to show a pattern.
- rdtsc 5mo agoYou would need some class action lawsuit I’d think? Need a good number of laid off people to join it and you need solid statistics that would convince a jury more than the corporate lawyers would with whatever HR covered their assess on paper have.
- knollimar 5mo agoIs it not fine to just cut for pay rate? That should be easy
- mmooss 5mo agoIs it legal to cut pay rates based on age? I doubt it. 'We didn't fire them, we cut their six-figure salary to minimum wage'.
- knollimar 5mo agoNo I'm saying you lay off your senior people. Not because they're old and you don't want to pay retirement but to save on payroll since they make more money than juniors. After all, they're all just Claudr users now.
- davebren 5mo agoI know there's an unspoken rule to not speak directly about whatever shady thing your organization and leadership is doing but for this situation it would be surprising if there isn't some correspondence that would come up in discovery detailing the strategy. It's too much of a coincidence and too big of a decision to hire 20% of your workforce as interns and then a couple months later fire 20% of your employees.
- xingped 5mo agoJust your average Thursday in American capitalism!
- winrid 5mo agoShould companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?
- voxelghost 5mo agoIn Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)
- brabel 5mo agoYes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance review. People quickly understand they need to move on and they can do it with dignity.
- krs_ 5mo agoOr if you really want to get rid of someone you can buy them out with a severance deal that is better than standard and hope they take it.
- Saline9515 5mo agoThat also means that a) it's harder for younger people to get a stable job b) the bare minimum of work not to get fired decreases over time, which is bad for productivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theory_of_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theor...
- kakadu 5mo agoMaking it illegal would be communism
- ornornor 5mo agoYes because anything that is good for individuals is communism.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- _carbyau_ 5mo agoPeople are feeling more alone than ever. But whatever you do, don't do anything communal!
- lovich 5mo agoAnything I don’t like is communism
- platevoltage 5mo agoWould it be Communism to require a license stating you know what that word means in order to use it?
- throwaway2037 5mo agoIn the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work): > The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pantulis 5mo ago> Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination. The only way for this to happen is by leaked private conversations, I think.
- sunrunner 5mo agoSo you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden. I sense a paradox.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoYes, from a legal perspective this will always be true: in-group vs out-group. Age discrimination is a special category because everyone will be in the out-group (when young) the age into the in-group. In this case, it is probably legal to fire someone for being too young. It sounds weird, but that is not a protected class of employees.
- toast0 5mo agoThere's no paradox. The law is you can't descriminate against a protected class. Lots of things are protected classes, like race and religion. Old age is, but young age isn't. Clothing choices in general aren't, but if it's a religous choice, it likely is protected. Etc. It's kind of weird that you can fire young people because they're young, but not old people because they're old. But it's not a paradox, it's just how the system is codified.
- tempest_ 5mo agoTechnically yes, IBM just got sued successfully for it. That said they just settled the case for what happened in 2016. So you might be right and even win but that wont help you for a decade (assuming you win at all)
- fsckboy 5mo agothere's no way 1100 interns are all going to be offered full time jobs
- misswaterfairy 5mo ago> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'... It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoHow do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.
- u1hcw9nx 5mo agoHalf of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company. Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.
- _carbyau_ 5mo ago> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate. They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life. Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.
- moralestapia 5mo ago>Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics. That's the point.
- raverbashing 5mo agoI don't think a 17 yrs old company has that many long tenured people!
- madduci 5mo agoBeing old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?
- fodkodrasz 5mo agoAI will mentor them /s
- davebren 5mo agoIt's more that the young people are more likely to go along with the hype because they aren't experienced enough to know the limitations of LLMs (their baseline skill level is too low to compare), they get to feel like they are more capable than they actually are, or they are not in a financial position to push back.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo agoYou're almost defining part of, or the beginning of, the process of enshittification.
- jojobas 5mo agoSurely they wouldn't keep all of the new hires.
- baq 5mo agoLaying off people with experience which only 1% of their younger colleagues will learn because LLMs made it redundant enough is misguided today. If I were a CEO I’d hold on to my 15-20 yoe engineers for my dear life; can lay them off in 2028.
- coldtea 5mo ago>You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight" If the "future" being built is one that those same interns would be dropped as "dead weight" as soon as they settle into families and refuse to be exploited with overwork, then it's a bad future, even if it's one with more CDN features. Although, instead, it will be a more enshittified one anyway: they're cheapening your company and the product and lose organizational and operational knowledge in the process. But the truth would likely be closer to that those fired would be a mix of mostly extra people hired plus some older employees. But instead of "we hired extra X less than a year ago, we shed X now", it's rebranded as "we reduce our workforce thanks to AI" to get possitive press and appeal to the less bright small-time investors.
- kristianc 5mo agoThe future might have more outages then.
- retinaros 5mo agoyes sure. its pure accounting and buying into the scam that genai+junior will reduce costs. meanwhile they tokenmaxing vibecoding uis for 50% of their wages cost. I will short every company making those moves.
- wesleywt 5mo agoI always wonder what happens to institutional knowledge in American companies.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoYou're expecting the country that's all-in on anti-vaxxing, climate catastrophe denial, and the disassembly of democracy to understand what institutional knowledge is?
- apercu 5mo agoThem capital class is all in on those things and owns all the media. But the majority of us are not.
- NotMichaelBay 5mo agoPicture a space station where there's an error when trying to seal the door and they proceed anyway and it explodes from the pressure differential as all the air escapes out to space.
- lobf 5mo agoThis is literally a scene from Interstellar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lcGnMhvsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lcGnMhvsA
- bijowo1676 5mo agowhat institutional knowledge exactly? all they know is politics and intrigues. zero useful knowledge there anything thats useful is documented. If its not documented, there will be incident/outage and it will be documented later as a lesson
- autaut 5mo agoI worked in a company that did that. They couldn't rehire the senior after the junior burned with a bug 700k in 20 min by touching a part of the codebase no one had context for anymore.
- killerstorm 5mo agoThere's an interesting assumption here that all people working at Cloudflare are great developers, and none deserve to be fired for poor code or laziness.
- moron4hire 5mo agoYou know what's way more expensive than an old senior developer? The 10 interns you try to replace them with.
- gosub100 5mo agoI'm also interested in the proportion of H1B vs US citizens in this layoff vs the last 1100 people they hired (minus overlap)
- davebren 5mo agoYoung people today have grown up in a low trust society and have a totally different mindset. They have no qualms with figuring out how to extract as much as possible from their employer while providing as little value as they can. They will fake their competence as long as possible using LLMs and then go do it again somewhere else. Can't blame them it's the culture we have now especially in tech, and it's incentivized top-down.