Cloudflare laid off more than 1,000 employees globally on 7 May, with the company apparently transitioning to artificial intelligence. In a blog post authored by company CEO Matthew Prince, it was detailed how the reliance on AI over the last three months was necessary to ensure quality service was delivered to their customers.
The decision, asdetailed in the post, appeared heartfelt. However, there were some who believed that it was horrendous. One of them was venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, branding the message as something that came out of the 'PR school of retards.'
'You could have not written a worse memo. It's like you reduce humans to a label called the measurers and then you're like I'm laying off all the measurers,' Chamath opined when he spoke on theAll-Inpodcast.
A topic we don’t discuss enough is how poorly executed layoffs impact your company’s culture and your ability to hire top talent in the futurerecruiters and hiring managers jobs get much harderyour best people will kick off a search process because they have plenty of optionshttps://t.co/MvQ9GWhxLu
Chamath's reaction stemmed from the words of Prince himself in aWall Street Journalop-ed that was published recently. In that piece, he defined measurers as the people who were in middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition, according to a report byFortune.
'The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers,' Prince said in that article.
As far as the Canadian-American entrepreneur is concerned, Prince should have been more aware and mindful of how those words would impact laid-off workers. He feels the label is an added burden for employees, robbing them of some dignity when they go out and look for new jobs.
'There's enough of these tech CEOs that are now public. You can hear them, you can understand them. They're really good at one thing and not necessarily good at other things,' Chamath pointed out. 'So I would say, "Shut the f*** up. Get behind the keyboard. Just do your job. And if you need to manage something, just manage it. Don't write these missives. You are terrible at it,"' he added.
Chamath is aware that losing a job and finding new work is difficult, especially in this day and age of AI. Hence, he feels that while there are some who need to face this hard reality, the last thing they need is to leave with a dubious label on their heads.
The Social Capital founder believes that the Cloudflare memo was written more like a marketing tool to justify the decision to axe employees in favour of AI. He believes that executives can do better when layoffs are made and instead resort to means to help workers find new work rather than worry about the credibility of the company.
Source: International Business Times UK
