The AI layoffs end in 12 months and I know why

on the recent cloudflare earnings ceo matthew prince also known as the guy that took this picture and posted it on x and did not delete it uh announced two things in the same breath one is that the company had its best quarter in its 16 year history 639 million dollars in revenue two he announced that he was laying off 1100 people which is just shy of the number matthew tried to go for but his his staff stopped him he's like he wanted that 1.1.1.1 again he wanted to lay off 11 more people but they're like come on matthew and so he's like yeah you know he went on this call and he's like congratulations team we had our best quarter in the history of the company and also we're firing one in five of you so thank you thank you all for your hard work here is your severance and an analyst asked him on the call the obvious question he's like matthew if you just had your best quarter ever why are you firing this many people and he said just because you're fit it doesn't mean you can't get fitter this dude is talking like a personal trainer now dude he's like read a david goggins book and now he's you know talking about the art of discipline sorry humans my guy describing their layoff like it's a workout split yeah we're doing chest triceps and 1100 layoffs today i'm gonna be so sore tomorrow and he kept going he didn't stop there uh thank you matthew for the transparency uh he said that his employees have become 100 times more productive bro 100 times dude you take any given cloudflare employee and you 100x that son of a you 100x that son of a son of a gun and uh i'm trying not to swear here did i already swear i'm not actually sure trying to imagine what 100x jesus christ but that wasn't even the worst part he said it's like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver this guy compared his employees to a screwdriver bro and like you know the laid off employees are listening the families are listening dude and and cloudflare engineer's wife is listening to her husband being called a screwdriver i mean this is devastating man this dude is comparing your husband to a black and decker bro and he's like no no you're not fired you're more of a flathead and we're looking for a phillips but he said one thing that is really really important and is the main thesis of this video whenever we have these layoffs there's always this little tell this little signal that we get as observers as to what the market is looking for and here's what matthew said he said the productivity gains from the people directly creating code have been incredible and a lot of the support roles behind them are not going to be the roles that drive companies going forward.

now the word support roles it's easy to read that or to hear that and just and think he's talking about customer service or something that's not what he means dude what he means by support roles is that you know for 30 years companies have had to hire reserves you had the starters you had the five starters and you had everyone else on the bench and the point of the players on the bench was so that if one of your star players is injured or tires out in the middle of the game you swap them out if your star player quit or went on vacation or something this was a really scary thing for a lot of companies especially smaller companies where one person held a shit ton of institutional knowledge so you'd have to hire like redundancy like backups who get onboarded and don't really do much other than just hold the knowledge it was basically insurance but what companies have now sort of noticed is that you don't need a bench anymore in a sense you don't need these backups because claude is the backup you know if you're looking for a mediocre dev look no further than claude dude like you know imagine your star player quits before you'd be screwed now you just open up a claude instance and you ask questions you can get by right it's not going to be perfect and so that's what matthew meant by support roles.

now if the story ended here we would be screwed you would be screwed we'd all sort of be screwed here but there's one man who saves us all here his name is well his last name is is jevons the s is part of his name so he is a victorian dude he died in 1882 in 1865 he noticed that when the steam engine got more efficient the demand for coal went up not down everyone sort of quotes jevons paradox and they say look guys i know it's it's unintuitive right now and i know we can't imagine it but demand for software will go up we're going to be making 50 times more 10x more software 50x more software and i'm like hearing that and i'm like dude what do you mean by 50x more software like you want to take the current state of software and 50x that in volume like are you out of your mind dude like i have enough software i want better software i want less software dude 50x more like 50x more apps on my home screen 50x more notifications 50x more bugs i don't want any of that i think that's a naive interpretation and i want to offer you a different interpretation of jevons paradox the question is if jevons turns out to be right about ai why right what aren't we intuiting right now what are we missing and the answer is the long tail of software.

every company has like an infinite list of software they want to build whether externally or internally but in a lot of cases internal software just doesn't get built all together you have teams that want a dashboard that want an automation that want a slack bot that wants a ad hoc tool there's so much that wants to be built but can never ever be budgeted you can never get an internal tool to fit into some quarters okrs or something it never matches the priority of your actual core product and so there's just a shit ton of pent-up demand internally in companies for software that that has never been met and i think that demand gets met now there's no denying that ai is very good at building ad hoc tools that you don't really care about their quality necessary like internal dashboards historically have been an absolute horror show like the worst quality the most outdated nobody wants to work on it ai is going to be a godsend for internal tools and most companies haven't realized this they haven't realized yet or figured out yet how to take advantage of the so-called efficiency gains.

but i think generally what a lot of companies do is that when they are having a hard time steering the ship you lessen the load of the ship when companies want to make a pivot it's much easier to do that with a smaller team there's two things you could do here one is you wait you practice patience if you're somebody in a job you're somebody looking for a job this is a rhetorical what i'm saying is rhetorical i don't actually expect you to wait but i want to make this case just because when i say the next thing you don't get upset now if you don't want to wait here's what you have to do you have to differentiate you know everyone on their resume is like i hope you're putting on your resume that you are an ai wizard that you can orchestrate 10 agents like boris every podcast he goes on he talks about how he did 300 pull requests just today on the way on the uber to the podcast interview he from his phone he fired off 300 pull requests that's what people want man i hope you're saying something like that.

speaking of cloudflare one of the engineers who got laid off uh he posted a comment to hacker news on the on the thread and he says you know yikes looks like i was one of the persons affected here's a link to my website where i have my resume and in this website he or she or they said i'm more than happy to use ai but also i could do things by hand and i think you know the idea was that an employer reading that would think oh wow this person is really impressive like wow they could do both that's what i want i want someone that could do ai and can someone do it by hand i i think that's wrong i don't think that's what you want to be saying but i think what you want to be saying instead is while i can code by hand i have in the last 12 months 10 100x my throughput by using exclusively ai i have a proprietary agent orchestration system that lets me ship more pull requests than the man the legend boris himself whether it's true or not well you know get the job first and then fill in the gaps you know you can you can easily make it true it's not that hard to manage 10 agents bro you just you tell you open up one cloud instance and you're like spin up 10 agents there you go it's all pretty easy it there's no skill to it there's no skill to ai agent orchestration bro but the ceos don't know that so you can take advantage of that.

the one thing everyone sucks at is making an impression standing out getting their name on top of the pile this has been the playbook for 20 years personally for me almost everyone i hired had a personal website that's very important to me like you have to have something that you're proud of that you put your name on that you maintain that represents you like i look at a website and just by its design i get a a really good sense of of everything that you stand for that i don't get from your resume and so if you don't have a personal website today there's really no excuse it'll take you like 10 minutes dude do some thought leadership there you know show that you have interests of some sort but it used to be that it was almost like 70 skill and maybe 30 all this shit that devs don't like to do and i think now the balance has shifted it's 70 attention marketing positioning yourself and 30 skill this video isn't about tips about how to focus on the 70 it's rather just to inform you that that's the balance now it has shifted and if you're still sort of focused on the skill side of things you might not have gotten the memo but again you don't have to do anything if you don't want to do anything bro wait for jevin's paradox to kick in and they'll be begging you to come back.

we just don't know when that will be presumably the capitalism cycle moves pretty quick once they max out with their current labor pool they are going to be like okay we need more people we need more people that's every company you've ever worked at everyone's always saying we need more people we need more people temporarily now people are saying let's try less people but eventually jevin's paradox says we need more people and i hope to cover more of the concrete tips on actually how to take advantage of this change in dynamics in a future video thanks for.