To understand the issue, I went back to a book published in 1954, 20 years before I was born: Peter Drucker’s “The Practice of Management.” Drucker explores the different roles inside every business, which I would categorize as builders, sellers and measurers.
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Measurers are also critical to a business, but different from the other two. The best are hard to find. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, don’t seek the recognition of a front-of-house role, and ideally have a perspective independent from the rest of the organization. Drucker argues that measuring business is important, but customers are earned through building and selling. The best businesses would maximize investment in those two functions.
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.
It’s surprising how typical, how mundane, the logic errors CEOs make are. This guy read a book that he admits was released (presumably he means as a signal of its timelessness) 20 years before he was born. It collapses everyone into three groups. He assumes this heuristic is both correct and accurate to modern times, simply because the words have meanings that attach to modern concepts.
But builders in 1954 were making widgets and physical objects. Sellers were often in a store talking to customers who wanted to buy that object. Measurers were bean-counters, barely out of slide-rule days.
All of these types of roles have updated and transformed to the point of being totally different, and now - like with Cloudflare - the main product is information (code and knowledge, packaged as Cloudflare’s site products). Builders, sellers and measurers all just interact with that information in different ways. Each one has different efficiencies and value.
And here at least, assuming that AI is going to capture “measurers” more than others is not a smart CEO’s inspired leadership. It is a symptom of a brain that can’t adapt to the modern era.
Indeed, why would he not assume that the “builders” will be replaced more easily, as most other big tech CEOs think? Isn’t Claude Code the one success story in a sea of AI losses in the billions? Presumably his product can’t infinitely scale, so why would he keep hiring into infinity? (Those assumptions supporting firing “builders” are wrong, of course, but are as valid as his wrong assumption.)
Why would he not assume the “sellers” can be replaced - their entire job is chatting and collating information tailored to prompts as an intermediary, which is the entire purpose of LLMs? (Again, I don’t think they can be replaced, but again, it’s equally wrong in the ways he is wrong.)
The problem, as always, is that CEOs never understand exactly what is happening on the ground. They need these heuristics to give themselves confidence that they understand the whole picture. The problem is at some point, they lose their humility, their connection to the people who are doing the work, enough to care. If Prince cared enough to think harder about what these “measurers” real value is, and what AI’s real competency is, 20% of the workforce might still have a job.
But mom, all the cool CEOs are doing it!
If an engineer on my team can now be 10 times as productive, I’m going to hire as many as I can find.
Just be 10 times as productive and you’ll get hired, lmao
The funny thing is, being a developer, I was talking to someone the other day about how in my opinion, middle managers were way easier to replace with AI than developers (less domain knowledge, less creative work, etc.). And basically, at least according to the article, that’s the people that Cloudflare fired.
Not that anyone should be replaced by AI, but it’s ironic that many of the people who are shoving AI down our throats are the easiest to replace in an organization.
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.
And since we are doing so great let’s fire 20% of our workforce because obviously they were not a factor in our success. Besides what could possibly go wrong firing 1/5 of our company. Is not like there is lots of tribal knowledge that AI won’t be able to figure out.
So he’s saying [paraphrased] “It wasn’t broken, but I decided to ‘fix’ it anyway”
I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.
It’s a shame that they’ll never actually “win the future” considering they will never make enough profit to be satisfied. “Winning” isn’t something that can be achieved if enough profit is never enough and more is always required.
I need to thank Cloudflare. Thanks to its last changes I found Pangolin (+ CrowdSec) and couldn’t be happier.
As an outsider watching moronic CEOs discarding people like trash, it seems pretty clear who should be fired first and only.
I need to migrate to tuwunel or pangolin… Or was it towonel? Either way screw cloudflare.
Please do. The massive dominance of cloudflare really concerns me. It’s way too much consolidated control over the internet.
who’s gonna tell him he’s a measurer?
Surprisingly not completely out of touch, companies suffering from middle management long predates AI.
Of course he falls into the same error as most corporate people assuming that people are born with skills rather than trained for them. Why not retrain that 20% into builders and sellers.
Yes but how else do you exert power and create a culture of fear? Treating employees as individuals to be valued rather than a limit of their current job title is of course, unreasonable.
