Their stock has gone down nearly 20% in early trading today. When layoffs happen, usually it is the opposite, so I imagine Matthew Prince must be annoyed!
I am disappointed by this decision from Cloudflare. I've always felt that massive layoffs are something that companies who are greedy and don't care about their employees do (like Amazon and Meta). Up until now, my impression of Cloudflare has been that they care about their societal impact to an extent and still share old values from how tech companies used to be. Maybe they're starting the downward make-money-at-all-costs spiral that has gripped the rest of tech.
I feel the same way. When my apartment got new locks, we could only unlock the doors with our phone. I refused to download the app, so I had to wait outside until someone could let me in. On a similar note I refused to keep a web browser on my phone because I would use it to constantly check the news or other sites. Every once in a while I had to scan a QR code, but I just quickly downloaded a browser then deleted it. Unfortunately with the new iPhone update you are required to have a browser on your phone. Now I must rely on self-control alone!
A book from an environmentalist author that explores similar themes is "Finding the Mother Tree" by Suzanne Simard. I think about the interconnectedness of plants frequently when I walk in the woods now.
But in my experience I have also experienced the opposite. I have seen people casually reuse variables by reassigning them to a new type or developing a single function that returns different types. With dynamically typed languages it sometimes feels like you can take messy shortcuts because they let you.