
Cloudflare CEO pledges to double 2020 internship class - caution
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/cloudflare-ceo-pledges-to-double-2020-internship-class/
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duxup
Are their internships open to ... non traditional students?

Folks changing careers and such?

I changed careers a few years ago and I would have been happy to get my feet
wet in a new career with an internship or etc. But most are highly centered
around the existing 4 year university system, so if you're not in that system
that opportunity is closed.

A few were open to folks with other experience, but most were still
traditional student focused.

I feel like with the way technology, jobs, and everything changes so quickly
that internships too maybe should be more open to different paths.

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cat199
if one can get past HR, most people probably don't care, though it might be
seen as strange

imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to
work for cheap without being insulted.

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aripickar
I mean for any big tech company, its not that cheap. I made $42.50 an hour
plus a housing stipend when I was an intern, and I don't think that I did very
much. A lot of the reason that companies do that is that paying an intern
about $20k for the summer and converting them to a full time employee after
graduation is cheaper than what they would spend to hire someone through the
interview process and stuff like that.

~~~
duxup
I worked with a lot of interns, and in my experience the ONLY value was
finding folks randomly who were good enough to hire. The actual productivity /
work for the interns on average was very low.

The rate was so low though that I'm not sure if it really was a net positive,
but I think the company liked the PR and such too.

~~~
aripickar
I mean yeah, that's not really a secret. The head of the intern program that I
was at straight up told all the interns that it was worth it to the company if
even 20% of the interns who were hired returned as full time employees.

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sdjghsg
I love cloudflare, I'd love to work there, but I just wish they would actually
pay market rates. Everyone I know that has considered them backs out because
the offers they receive are the biggest lowballs they've seen in their life.

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soared
Pledging to hire 50 interns? News must be slow over at TechCrunch.

~~~
abhisuri97
It's semi significant because some companies are curtailing their internship
programs right now.

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tyingq
There are many colleges that haven't yet changed their internship and/or
foreign study requirements. So, this sort of thing is helpful.

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sschueller
Are theses internships paid?

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eastdakota
Yes. All Cloudflare internships are paid, including the new ones we just
created. More details: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-
of-2020...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-doubling-size-
of-2020-summer-intern-class/)

~~~
lawrencevillain
Hi Matt,

This is unrelated, but can you please get rid of hCaptcha? It is an awful
experience and it feels like there is a conflict of interest with including it
vs captcha. You are now incentivized to push more users towards fraudulent vs
non-fraudulent to make more money. I'm not saying that's what is happening,
but it is a slippery slope.

I already dislike Captcha, but hCaptcha is somehow much worse.

~~~
eastdakota
No chance we go back to ReCAPTCHA. We’d been concerned with the privacy
implications of using a Google service for years. Then Google changed their
policy to switch ReCAPTCHA from being free to a paid service. They have every
right to do that, but it would have imposed >$10M in costs just to support our
free customer base, which was untenable. That was the kick in the butt we
needed to finally get off Google’s service. We moved to hCAPTCHA as at least a
stopgap. Ultimately, our goal is to eliminate any overt CAPTCHA entirely.
However, I will say I’ve been very impressed with hCAPTCHA’s responsiveness
and willingness to rapidly innovate based on feedback from users — something
that, even at our scale, we had a hard time getting from Google.

~~~
lawrencevillain
Thanks for the quick response! I'm definitely interested in eliminating
CAPTCHA entirely. I was really hopeful for the Javascript check y'all were
doing, but it looks like there were too many ways around that.

~~~
amirhirsch
In case it isn’t clear from our website, hCaptcha offers both bot prevention
and traffic monetization options. Cloudflare does not use our service for
traffic monetization, so neither company has an incentive to make it difficult
for humans to pass the captcha.

Websites that use hCaptcha for monetization can adjust difficulty settings and
the types of data labeling jobs their users will see. The value hCaptcha
derives from human data labeling is provided broadly as a service to other
companies, not just to provide training data for our own autonomous vehicle
division. Since we are growing capacity like crazy and have a broad footprint
of sites primarily interested in bot prevention and not traffic monetization,
hCaptcha can offer the lowest cost data labeling to everyone. hCaptcha is also
privacy-focused and doesn’t track you around the internet to show you
advertisements. We support the privacy-pass extension and have an
accessibility option which sends you to a cookie via email (because we can’t
just cookie you when you log into our email service).

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morty_s
What’s the culture like at cloudflare?

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sdjghsg
I hear the culture is good, but the pay is way under market.

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kats
That's smart. They are going to get a ton of great applications.

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xwdv
As markets get roiled Cloudflare has proven to be one of the best investments
you can make. Buy a thousand shares today and you’ll be glad you did 5 or 6
years from now.

~~~
highfrequency
Hang on, any reason why Cloudfare's recent market outperformance will
_continue_?

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StriverGuy
good product, growing market, good stewardship, growing revenue, high
margin...

~~~
thelean12
High margin means that it's ripe for competition.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
Cloudflare's margins are not easy to replicate. They have deployed a physical,
global network that you cannot spin up with limited resources.

If you're not already in a position to challenge Cloudflare today, it'd take
years for you to build a similarly sized network. And even if you were able to
get a similar physical distribution, can you get the same low peering prices?

Then, once you have that, it's a very complex stack inherently. So getting
feature parity with CF is no easy task by itself.

I'd say Fastly or Amazon could put more effort into challenging Cloudflare and
see some success. But Fastly already goes head to head with Cloudflare today.
So, idk who would be able to disrupt them within a couple years unless they
are already on that trajectory.

~~~
tyingq
It's interesting to me that Akamai hasn't changed their model somewhat away
from the "Call Sales for More Info" plan.

They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them.
But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they
would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There
is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
Well, Cloudflare's free tier costs money, but it was a good way to get people
using the service, and now it's part of the ethos and culture people expect
from Cloudflare.

By the time Akamai was being challenged by Cloudflare, they already had such a
marketshare it probably wasn't worth racing to the bottom. Until Cloudflare is
actually taking Akamai customers, I don't think they'll change.

~~~
tyingq
I didn't suggest a free plan. And certainly Akamai has lost some business to
Cloudflare.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
I didn't suggest you did. I am simply saying that Cloudflare started with a
Free plan which helped build the company. So Cloudflare took on the smaller
customers by design, as evident from the Free tier of accounts.

So, by the time Cloudflare started really going after meaningful enterprises,
it was a race to the bottom for Akamai if they wanted to kill off CF.

Yes Cloudflare has taken some Akamai customers, but when I was working there,
it was pretty well established that we didn't directly go after existing
Akamai customers. It was a losing battle for Cloudflare. Akamai had a far
superior streaming service and there was no way Cloudflare could adequately
compete against them in the space where Akamai retained most of their
customers.

I'm not as up-to-date on the CDN wars, but I am pretty sure thats still the
case. Cloudflare launched a streaming platform, but it still couldn't compete
directly against Akamai. Cloudflare has decided that it wants to do everything
decently in an agnostic way because it allows them to pick up a wider range of
businesses vs being force to go head to head with Akamai or Fastly. Both of
those providers offer similar cache response times, and in some cases are much
faster than Cloudflare. So, Cloudflare tries really hard to not lock itself
into fighting with CDNs directly. We viewed Amazon as a more direct competitor
vs Akamai.

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mdorazio
While a nice gesture, this would mean a lot more if Cloudflare was doing
poorly right now. They're doing great, so this costs them very little and
seems mostly like a PR stunt.

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0xffff2
Huh? If they were doing poorly they wouldn't be able to afford to do this.
It's exactly the companies that are doing well that we want to step up and do
things like this.

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mdorazio
That's the entire point you and other commenters are missing here. It's very
easy to be generous when you're doing well, it's a lot harder to be generous
when you're not. The latter is far more noble as a result. Easy comparison: if
a millionaire stands up and yells at everyone about how they just donated $100
to a charity while someone else with barely any savings quietly donates the
same amount, which one is more deserving of praise? Cloudflare is the
millionaire in this example, thousands of small businesses making actual
sacrifices to keep employees from getting fired are the other person. This is
a feel-good PR stunt.

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renewiltord
Honestly, 'deserving of praise' makes no sense to me. There are only
behaviours you want to reinforce and behaviours you want to discourage. I
think I want to reinforce offering internships (giving the $100 in your
example) so I wouldn't differentiate between the two cases and I'd praise them
both.

This company is stepping up when they are able to. Good. I want more of that.

