> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
> i’m sorry to put you through this.
POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.
I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.
>>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.
I don't know why CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts. Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.
Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.
My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.
Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
it's interesting how he casts this as:
a) a drawn-out downsizing that might not meet its numbers for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty.
b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an honest decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?
but certainly most employees would prefer to be laid off in months (or even, as he says, years) "as this shift plays out." they would probably prefer that to having jack's "honesty."
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say.
While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people
I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode".
Either way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. "Necessity is the mother of invention." They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.
Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.
Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.
I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.
I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.
it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
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IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
There's still enormous potential for technology solutions in the healthcare space. The population in every developed country is getting older and sicker. AI can help a little bit with building those solutions but there are no magic bullets: we still need lots of people grinding away on hard problems.
> I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Tech has allowed a very solid middle class lifestyle for a lot of people. I can't think of another good paying job where someone is self-taught, or went to a 12-month certificate program at their local community college and now has a very good career.
If those jobs disappear, or wage growth is non-existent, I don't know where the next generation will find those jobs.
Before people jump into existential despair here about the software field, do we know the breakdown of roles? How many were tech vs support, operations, HR, and other roles?
You took the words out of my mouth. In a megacorp, AI multiplies into about 10% of my work and 10x’s it making me roughly 10% more efficient. When I use AI for side projects and don’t have to work with a bunch of stakeholders, dependency owners, and opinionated management, that 10x multiplies into my full effort and the project moves 10x faster.
Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.
Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
This is a very interesting take unlike the usual doom and gloom narrative or jevons paradox optimists.
Are there any data points which made you reach these conclusions?
I think it is a question of who is getting the benefit of these efficiencies. If it is the worker—ie they are doing the same amount of work in less time but not making that extra time available to the company—then from the company’s perspective they aren’t being more efficient. Or at least the additional efficiency doesn’t affect it.
During the massive post-pandemic hiring spree, there were a lot of threads in the vein of "why does [MATURE STARTUP] requires X,000 developers?" and I think those questions were maybe prescient. These companies have been spending free venture funds on whatever and acquiring headcount for the sake of headcount. A lot of them have tried to and failed to be "everything apps" and now they are really sitting on mature, stable and profitable platforms that don't need to move fast and break things. They just need to not crash. And the result is they need far fewer people.
Option 1) You’re right. They’re screwed because they won’t be able to keep the lights on and these layoffs make it worse.
Option 2) AI can just vibe code what block needs now, or maybe in a few years. Laying off talent makes sure there are people on the market to do the vibe coding, and that block will not be able to respond to widespread competitive pressure. They’re screwed and these layoffs make it worse.
Of course, they could realize they magically have 2-10x the engineering and organizational capabilities they used to and improve the product. They won’t because late stage capitalism only cares about weekly stock swings and graft so it can’t plan all the way to end of quarter anymore.
This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective).
* Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first.
* Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
* Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands vs breakup-via-text-message.
* Giving people a chance to say goodbye.
Not gonna go into strategic analysis of this, or Jack's leadership style in general.
But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?
> Owning the decision
Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.
> respecting the people that got you there
There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.
> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.
You cannot attrite 40% of the company in 5 months, without creating an incredibly toxic environment. Dorsey knows this; ultimately he lost Twitter over his inability to right size it. I would bet dollars to donuts he promised himself he wouldn't do it again - under no circumstances is 40% cut over six months preferable to a clean fast cut.
> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence
@grok
We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.
I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
Pre-covid, and during the early covid hiring spree, I used to get messages from eager recruiters every week, I get maybe one a month these days, and they are much more tepid.
Nobody can know they will need to lay off 10% multiple years from now. So many things can change between now and then.
For all Block knows, AI for coding kind of plateaus where it is now and there is a huge boom in software engineer hiring taking advantage of the new tech to produce even more/better features.
"Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric."
Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.
Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
Well - if "we" refers to the original selfish gene (à la Dawkins), then yes - modern capitalism has manifested as an emergent property of the core evolutionary principle. I suppose you could say that about virtually anything however...
obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
Maybe I'm a big capitalist, but 5 months of severance seems very generous; a job hasn't been a commitment that the company will take care of you forever in several generations. Covering you until the middle of this year should go a long way, and yeah the job market is messed up, but at least it's not mid-November where holidays mean hiring falls off the rails.
This used to be the accepted standard but it seems today that people think any amount of profit should primarily be directed toward paying wages. (either bigger wages to existing employees, or to new employees, or both). You have multiple sub-conversations in this very comment section wondering aloud why Block didn't invent make-work or "new projects" to keep the 4,000 employed.
The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.
Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.
I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
I know we have to balance inefficiency and optimal allocation of resources... but I agree it doesn't seem optimal for social wellbeing to remove people from their access to health and risking their ability to house and feed themselves without a financial need to do so (like Block going bankrupt).
More profits, line mustn't just go up, line must go higher. Giving away the devices is like saying "we're replacing both you and your device with AI and it's not like that device will help you get another job in this market anyway, good luck lol."
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.
Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.
There are, but there are also a number of companies (including not-particularly-AI ones like Netflix and Oracle) that are above their ZIRP peak. I think it's hard to definitively say that this story is inconsistent with one explanation or the other.
Anyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
Being rejected every day, thus subjecting myself to the humiliating ritual of modern times, by companies that I believe could make the most of my talent (my last title was Director of AI, before I was a Staff ML Scientist at a FAANG and an award-winning scientist).
They all seem rather disappointed, at least in the automated rejection emails (mailboxes not monitored, of course) they send me, that they have found other candidates more suited to the position. It seems we are both disappointed, after all.
Not all is lost, though. I am in the enviable position of having perfect health and decent savings.
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is one way of making an all-in bet on AI.
>we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
Well that's interesting, wonder if we'll actually get a proper accounting of which departments take which cuts.
Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
First you take a 50 person org. Then (for scale) you hire highly motivated performers who, because they came up in big orgs, are used to using 50 people for three years to do a project six people can do in three to six months. Then you create incentives that make them compete for standing. And the standing also depends on their personal scope (ie headcount).
They're still a megacorp, roughly, with like 6k people remaining. That's a huge company. Huge companies need hierarchy to function, the "flat" thing is a really dumb idea. There's no way to make it analogous to that <50ppl team that executes well and moves fast. To do that you actually need to have a small company.
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.
These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?
I question how much of this is really AI vs them just regrouping around their core products and shutting down a lot of ventures or tertiary projects. Either way, the messaging we're seeing is a real shift from the ZIRP ear. Tech companies used to use headcount as a metric of growth. They'd be hiring just to say they're hiring because it looks like growth. Now it's in vogue to boast about your AI adoption and how many fewer heads you need to operate. I think both are lot of blowing smoke, but now it's going to hurt a lot of people.
This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.
I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though. Being unable to lay off workers causes stagnation at companies where fast-development is paramount.
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody
It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.
Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.
I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.
This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.
Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.
Yes absolutely. Text casing is part of communication, by skipping it an author is saying: "I'm going to prioritise my preferences and making a statement above your understanding and clarity". The bigger the audience the more negative impact it has, and the more entitled the author appears.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
high impact executives like myself are too busy to use up our precious time with minutia like capitalization. every second counts when youre a high impact ceo and thats just one reason why our compensation is 1000X your own.
Yeah I was thinking the same. Pretty generous severance but I'd be pissed if I was fired by someone who can't even be bothered to press shift. Probably thinks it makes him cool and edgy.
I don’t think we’ll ever return to the glory days (2007-2023). Software engineering in the next few years will become as cool as accounting or HR (as in not cool at all). Just a generic white collar profession like it was maybe in the 80s.
it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.
what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not
Why make others misfortune a platform for ego expression? Why not doing things elegant, quiet, keep it in-house? Because misery of others drives stock prices up! It's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
>Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount. The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
All this is is evidence that Jack Dorsey had no idea what half the employees at Block were doing before he decided to do layoffs. May he know no peace, wherever he goes.
Imagine receiving this message and the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalise letters properly. How insulting. It's like being fired by a five year old child.
Sucks for the people to lose their jobs, but probably the most honest message you’ll ever see.
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
> I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...
The CEO's last visionary move was to go all in on crypto, even renaming the company. Now he's a visionary again, but firing half the company instead of himself.
What are the odds this is actually due to overhiring during the pandemic? From what I know, that was the principle reason for the Amazon layoffs. Would love to be corrected if I'm misremembering.
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
I don't understand anyone who says layoffs are due to improvements in AI tooling.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad
this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.
LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
I agree if they weren’t simultaneously claiming to be a successful growing company.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free!
Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards?
Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "continuing to support more customers" and has "improving profitability"?
I think the AI angle is a fig leaf for perpetual mismanagement. Managers at Block privately complained there were a lot of people doing almost no work. Recently, teams have lost people one at a time, sometimes laid off the day after each other.
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.
Everybody is on the edge, with the fear of a big layoff wave happening.
We see more and more people claiming they are so much more productive thanks to coding agents, big tech CEOs driving the use of AI like crazy, pundits anticipating rise of unemployment. Personally, I feel that productivity gains are overrated, but still, I'm pretty worried to lose my job in the near future. I'm saving aggressively.
This is akin to the is-ought fallacy. Just because a company had layoffs and cited AI, doesn't mean other companies should follow suit or that it will happen. As others have noted in the comments, BTC dropped heavily which Block was invested in, and a lot of their bets went south. Block managers complained at times about certain people not working privately. They also acquired a few companies at peak valuations post COVID.
Block really did not come down from it's COVID/ZIRP era high # of employees as much as many other companies, and it's COVID era headcount growth was extremely rapid by any standard.
In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
> first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
To be clear, I'm confident the impact of AI is going to be massive, and that massive impact is already underway rather than years away. But, separate from that, having seen it up close Block was bloated as hell
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
How messed up is the world that when a leader basically comes clean and says this is being done for efficiency reasons (and by extension the market's reward for bottom line impact) it starts to come across as "honest and brave"?
Agreed. Now that one more company has announced a big (40%!) headcount cut, other CEOs will feel like it is ok to do so now too (someone else stuck their neck out first, safe to pile on, "every one else is doing it", etc).
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
The wording is all nice, and at surface level it reads well. It still makes me feel super icky. Kill 4k jobs because people are more productive with AI. Fuck the people, push the profits. Make investors happy.
No, fuck the investors. Fuck the entities causing these decisions to be more common. Extra-fuck the ever-more-obvious push for profit over literally anything else, including ethics, morals, and humanity. If you're an investor causing this shit to happen, fuck you.
Somehow this makes me feel that this org is already dead, and that this is just gonna accelerate it.
>repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust [...] i'd rather take a hard, clear action now [...] than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
Their revenue is literally down over FY25. But it takes less than an hour for VC influencers to come out and and say we all need to work nights and weekends before getting displaced.
https://x.com/balajis/status/2027146933136150867?s=46
Looking at Block's Twitter bio, I see half their companies seem worthwhile, the other half is crypto stuff, and they should either sell it off, or sunset it.
If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?
Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.
The year is 2030, tech companies provide the exact same value proposition to the consumer that they did in 2024, except it is buggier, full of sparkle buttons you can’t get rid of, and isn’t a source of high-paying employment. The front page of HN still has 5 posts from Blog Guys titled “Programming is Fun Again”.
How do they work out that intelligence tools can fill the gap made by 4,000 out of 10,000 and how long did it take to do that calculation? Or are we entering a phase of layoffs under the guise of ?
"we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."
I wanted to come back to this to add that it's highly disrespectful to make a post/write a letter laying off 40% of your company and not bother to capitalize words properly.
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
A few thoughts about Block as I've worked there before:
- the company thrives on long term projects that seem to fizzle out as engineers get frustrated and leave
- there are way too many MBAs and finance people now compared to the early years where building was prioritized.
- jack is only doing part time at Block, early days he was around to chat and work with varying levels of hands on
- they've overhired and over-committed to losing projects, worst of all they've de-prioritized projects that were pretty innovative because traction wasn't there quick enough for them to justify them, e.g. terminal, POS specifically for restaurants, localization for EU
- they operate on docs and in the time of AI, the workforce is inundated with slop
- also, I hate that jack can't be bothered to capitalize anything like it's cool. come on man, you're firing 4000 people, not tweeting memes
Or how about your revenue lines are in retail and peer-to-peer finances, primarily for small-to-medium sized businesses and low-to-mid income individuals, primarily in the US market, all of which are struggling from tariffs and economic slowdown in their brackets.
AI is a transformative technology that will reshape how companies are run. More layoffs may be coming unfortunately. But on the other end, more companies and more products will be created. More competition overall, including for Block.
The overarching risk, imo, is America turning against tech and its leaders / billionaires. I think this is slowly happening. And why not, if the People decide that tech is not bringing good things to our modern society anymore, that should be respected.
I wonder what folks on 2009 Hacker News would have said if a company announced layoffs.
Would the top comments have been questioning it, telling the CEO what he should have done instead, worrying about how hard it would be for those people in today's economy?
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business
then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Dorsey is in AI psychosis. He required every employee to send him an email weekly which then he had summarized by AI because of course he aint reading it himself.
Even in "AI psychosis" I don't see how firing people is a logical response to advances in AI.
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?
- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?
- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
It is hard to tell what this company does, but it seems to be involved in bitcoin. Coincidentally we have had a huge drop in bitcoin in the last months.
They own Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Jay Z's music streaming service Tidal. They make a decent amount of money from people buying and selling Bitcoin on Cash App but most of their revenue is not related to Bitcoin.
My guess: they keep you around on contract for 1-6 months because laying you off immediately would be very disruptive.
One company I worked for did this. It felt weird to everyone. But they did give a slightly better severance to those that stuck out their contracts so it worked out slightly better for them.
Square point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
That significantly more generous than the 12-16 week severance packages being doled out by big tech during the great layoffs of 2022-2023 if I remember correctly.
In 2023 Google gave 16 weeks plus 2 for every year of tenure, so not significantly less (and more if your tenure was >5 years), plus google also vested stock for entirety of the 16+ weeks.
Honestly the whole Silicon Valley shtick is becoming old. The fake positivity, the quirky writing style, the "I think the most important quality is sticktuitiveness" linkedin-esque bullshit. Not to mention the cargo-cult that is so obvious in every GPT-wrapper startup.
This was mostly born out of counter signalling the businesses that valued serious people over competent people in the 20th century.
But, like with all things, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. I believe the next wave of tech countersignalling will be people who actually do take themselves seriously, maybe even dress in suits, etc..
I noticed that as well and it oddly made me sit for a minute to think about it. I ended up deciding that it landed a bit more 'real' and unfiltered. Could be interpreted many ways. Nobody knows the actual why but (possibly) Jack.
> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.
I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.
>> * this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff*
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.
> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
> i’m sorry to put you through this.
POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.
I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.
>>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.
I don't know why CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts. Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.
Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.
> such useless language in their posts
"Your call is very important to us."
"We take security very seriously."
PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
It's for the people who still work there.
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> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.
My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.
Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
Share
I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.
Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
… then keep cutting.
Yep, he hasn't changed. F*ck that guy.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
it's interesting how he casts this as:
a) a drawn-out downsizing that might not meet its numbers for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty.
b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an honest decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?
but certainly most employees would prefer to be laid off in months (or even, as he says, years) "as this shift plays out." they would probably prefer that to having jack's "honesty."
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
> and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming
You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!
That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say.
While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people
I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
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We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode".
Either way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. "Necessity is the mother of invention." They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.
Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.
Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.
Re: over hiring
I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.
I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.
it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
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IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
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That might have been true three years ago. But not now
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
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Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
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> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
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I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
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There's still enormous potential for technology solutions in the healthcare space. The population in every developed country is getting older and sicker. AI can help a little bit with building those solutions but there are no magic bullets: we still need lots of people grinding away on hard problems.
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> I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Tech has allowed a very solid middle class lifestyle for a lot of people. I can't think of another good paying job where someone is self-taught, or went to a 12-month certificate program at their local community college and now has a very good career.
If those jobs disappear, or wage growth is non-existent, I don't know where the next generation will find those jobs.
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Before people jump into existential despair here about the software field, do we know the breakdown of roles? How many were tech vs support, operations, HR, and other roles?
You took the words out of my mouth. In a megacorp, AI multiplies into about 10% of my work and 10x’s it making me roughly 10% more efficient. When I use AI for side projects and don’t have to work with a bunch of stakeholders, dependency owners, and opinionated management, that 10x multiplies into my full effort and the project moves 10x faster.
In what sense did CashApp not pan out? $16b revenue. Too early to say whether Afterpay will work out but looking good so far
Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.
Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.
> $16b revenue
I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
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I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
This is a very interesting take unlike the usual doom and gloom narrative or jevons paradox optimists. Are there any data points which made you reach these conclusions?
I hear about CashApp but I don’t know anybody who uses it. What’s the selling point?
Jack Dorsey likes to do side quests it seems, I see him in many things
> … using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently.
These are not mutually exclusive. How does making my “own [work life] easier” not translate into “work more efficiently.”
I think it is a question of who is getting the benefit of these efficiencies. If it is the worker—ie they are doing the same amount of work in less time but not making that extra time available to the company—then from the company’s perspective they aren’t being more efficient. Or at least the additional efficiency doesn’t affect it.
During the massive post-pandemic hiring spree, there were a lot of threads in the vein of "why does [MATURE STARTUP] requires X,000 developers?" and I think those questions were maybe prescient. These companies have been spending free venture funds on whatever and acquiring headcount for the sake of headcount. A lot of them have tried to and failed to be "everything apps" and now they are really sitting on mature, stable and profitable platforms that don't need to move fast and break things. They just need to not crash. And the result is they need far fewer people.
Option 1) You’re right. They’re screwed because they won’t be able to keep the lights on and these layoffs make it worse.
Option 2) AI can just vibe code what block needs now, or maybe in a few years. Laying off talent makes sure there are people on the market to do the vibe coding, and that block will not be able to respond to widespread competitive pressure. They’re screwed and these layoffs make it worse.
Of course, they could realize they magically have 2-10x the engineering and organizational capabilities they used to and improve the product. They won’t because late stage capitalism only cares about weekly stock swings and graft so it can’t plan all the way to end of quarter anymore.
This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective).
* Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first.
* Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
* Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands vs breakup-via-text-message.
* Giving people a chance to say goodbye.
Not gonna go into strategic analysis of this, or Jack's leadership style in general.
But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?
> Owning the decision
Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.
> respecting the people that got you there
There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.
> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.
You cannot attrite 40% of the company in 5 months, without creating an incredibly toxic environment. Dorsey knows this; ultimately he lost Twitter over his inability to right size it. I would bet dollars to donuts he promised himself he wouldn't do it again - under no circumstances is 40% cut over six months preferable to a clean fast cut.
> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
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It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."
Ye at this point the dude is just copy pasting. Gotta go do the cocaine parties with JayZ
"owning" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.
One day there will be a CEO who actually pays the severances out of their own compensation.
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Agree materially no consequences but still better than many deflection strategies we have seen from others during layoffs.
It is but those words could be long flowery corpo speak or short.
“Yall gonna get money and most yall fired. My bad woops”
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence
@grok We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.
I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
This seems … wrong.
> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
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You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
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Is this hiring people to dig ditches for data center infrastructure or something? Because it doesn't sound like software.
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To anyone who's been looking for SWE jobs lately, has this been your experience?
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Zumper says 15.6% on 1b, 21.3% on 2b - how did you get to 60? https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
> 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned.
Need to tell more recruiters.
Pre-covid, and during the early covid hiring spree, I used to get messages from eager recruiters every week, I get maybe one a month these days, and they are much more tepid.
> I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different.
With my current job search I've got the sense that sf is once again the place to be. Everything else kind of sucks, lots went back on remote work.
Can you give me your recruiters number?
It seems like the tech job market is exactly the opposite of this right now? Could you be more specific?
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>If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market?
To avoid laying them off in next year's job market.
Dripping a 10% cut every year for the next four years when you *know* that you're going to do it is cowardice.
Nobody can know they will need to lay off 10% multiple years from now. So many things can change between now and then.
For all Block knows, AI for coding kind of plateaus where it is now and there is a huge boom in software engineer hiring taking advantage of the new tech to produce even more/better features.
Or empathetic, especially when they throw money away à la $70M parties:
“General and administrative expenses increased by $68.1m ... The increase was primarily driven by … an in-person company event held in Q3 2025”
"Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric."
Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.
Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.
> If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that
We are no longer in a zero-interest rate environment, so I think those experiments are more costly than they were a few years go
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
> We all asked for this, literally.
Well - if "we" refers to the original selfish gene (à la Dawkins), then yes - modern capitalism has manifested as an emergent property of the core evolutionary principle. I suppose you could say that about virtually anything however...
Most C levels adhere to the “cattle, not pets” idea too.
No, the job market is dead outside of implementing workflows for AI.
If you think 5 months is bad, try none. Job loss is a reality. Don’t become emotionally invested in it never happening to you.
obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
Is this actual five months severance? Or five months base pay with no vesting?
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
The answer to this is in the post.
Maybe I'm a big capitalist, but 5 months of severance seems very generous; a job hasn't been a commitment that the company will take care of you forever in several generations. Covering you until the middle of this year should go a long way, and yeah the job market is messed up, but at least it's not mid-November where holidays mean hiring falls off the rails.
Just wondering, have you been unemployed for 6+ mos before?
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Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.
This used to be the accepted standard but it seems today that people think any amount of profit should primarily be directed toward paying wages. (either bigger wages to existing employees, or to new employees, or both). You have multiple sub-conversations in this very comment section wondering aloud why Block didn't invent make-work or "new projects" to keep the 4,000 employed.
The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.
Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.
But something something trickle down!
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
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I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
I know we have to balance inefficiency and optimal allocation of resources... but I agree it doesn't seem optimal for social wellbeing to remove people from their access to health and risking their ability to house and feed themselves without a financial need to do so (like Block going bankrupt).
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Because they’re not running a charity
because that doesn't increase shareholder value, at least in the short term, which is all anyone cares about now.
Have you not noticed the massive datacenter build out consuming tons of capital right now?
More profits, line mustn't just go up, line must go higher. Giving away the devices is like saying "we're replacing both you and your device with AI and it's not like that device will help you get another job in this market anyway, good luck lol."
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
We know they're not...
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
Yea, look over there!!! AI.
(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)
Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.
AI is the logical, counter proof reason, I feel it serves as a scapegoat so perfectly they pretend it replaces people.
Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.
There are, but there are also a number of companies (including not-particularly-AI ones like Netflix and Oracle) that are above their ZIRP peak. I think it's hard to definitively say that this story is inconsistent with one explanation or the other.
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Anyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
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X is the most valuable company on the planet 100x over. it buys elections which is worth more than Mag7 combined
> Is X profitable?
The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.
What do you do now?
Being rejected every day, thus subjecting myself to the humiliating ritual of modern times, by companies that I believe could make the most of my talent (my last title was Director of AI, before I was a Staff ML Scientist at a FAANG and an award-winning scientist).
They all seem rather disappointed, at least in the automated rejection emails (mailboxes not monitored, of course) they send me, that they have found other candidates more suited to the position. It seems we are both disappointed, after all.
Not all is lost, though. I am in the enviable position of having perfect health and decent savings.
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
> Musk is a deeply uncreative person
Do you have a portfolio or something you can share?
Someone can have negative character traits and we don’t have to pretend they are no longer skilled.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is one way of making an all-in bet on AI.
>we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
Well that's interesting, wonder if we'll actually get a proper accounting of which departments take which cuts.
Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
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Every business metrics needs people to safeguard. That's how you get the number of ppl.
First you take a 50 person org. Then (for scale) you hire highly motivated performers who, because they came up in big orgs, are used to using 50 people for three years to do a project six people can do in three to six months. Then you create incentives that make them compete for standing. And the standing also depends on their personal scope (ie headcount).
Sure but it'll still be a 6000+ team - I doubt nimbleness will occur now.
They're still a megacorp, roughly, with like 6k people remaining. That's a huge company. Huge companies need hierarchy to function, the "flat" thing is a really dumb idea. There's no way to make it analogous to that <50ppl team that executes well and moves fast. To do that you actually need to have a small company.
Their shareholder meeting is later today. Maybe we'll find out.
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.
These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?
I question how much of this is really AI vs them just regrouping around their core products and shutting down a lot of ventures or tertiary projects. Either way, the messaging we're seeing is a real shift from the ZIRP ear. Tech companies used to use headcount as a metric of growth. They'd be hiring just to say they're hiring because it looks like growth. Now it's in vogue to boast about your AI adoption and how many fewer heads you need to operate. I think both are lot of blowing smoke, but now it's going to hurt a lot of people.
> but something has changed
i.e. we finally decided to audit head count from post covid-era.
> paired with smaller and flatter teams
i.e. management was axed
you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?
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Pre pandemic Block had ~4000 employees
They grew to 11000
Now they’re going to shrink to 6000
The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive
This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.
I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.
> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers
and the best part is that when others follow, ZIRP will be back.
this is going to be a proper mess.
They're back to 6,000 not 5,000.
Thank you. fixed.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.
Your country also pays less and has fewer jobs.
Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
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This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though. Being unable to lay off workers causes stagnation at companies where fast-development is paramount.
Can you point to the laws in your country that would make this illegal? I’m skeptical
This is America. Like it or not.
[dead]
What government makes it illegal for management to manage their company?
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
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Vibe management at its finest
i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody
Does the lowercase convey authenticity or lack of care?
Typically, yes.
It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.
Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.
I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.
This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.
Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.
Yes absolutely. Text casing is part of communication, by skipping it an author is saying: "I'm going to prioritise my preferences and making a statement above your understanding and clarity". The bigger the audience the more negative impact it has, and the more entitled the author appears.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.
Ha glad to see I'm not the only one irked by that.
i like it. it's how you show you didn't use ai to write the message.
He 100% used AI to write it.
"ChatGPT, write a letter to my company about laying 40% of them off but don't capitalize anything"
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.
Why are companies seeing it purely in terms of "we can work with a smaller team so we must" and not "my existing team can do so much more"?
Depends on the company, but I think it's fair to say that not every company has a roadmap to infinite growth.
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)
And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...
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Couldn't even be bothered to type like an adult when he fired them.
The refusal to simply capitalize the first letter of a sentence is so obnoxious.
It feels incredibly performative. Same with sama.
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Clearly the AI is not as widely used within the company as he proclaimed :)
high impact executives like myself are too busy to use up our precious time with minutia like capitalization. every second counts when youre a high impact ceo and thats just one reason why our compensation is 1000X your own.
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Yeah I was thinking the same. Pretty generous severance but I'd be pissed if I was fired by someone who can't even be bothered to press shift. Probably thinks it makes him cool and edgy.
the epstein style guide says all lowercase and no punctuation is how you signal dominance from the top of the pyramid
I don’t think we’ll ever return to the glory days (2007-2023). Software engineering in the next few years will become as cool as accounting or HR (as in not cool at all). Just a generic white collar profession like it was maybe in the 80s.
it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
Yeah but why is working for Netflix even sexy? At the end of the day it is almost a telecom.
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I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
>And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159008
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
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Are you criticizing the folks championing AI while… effectively championing the AI? What do you think people should do?
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> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
yea but layoffs aren't usually very performance based. i agree in general though.
Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.
How magnanimous of him to let us all know of his magnanimity!
He could have been even more radical and get rid of himself, his lieutenants could ask gpt about the strategy.
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i don't think this is true.
assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.
While destroying morale, and increasing the difficulty of successfully recruiting later
I directly quoted jack - take it up with him.
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they are now estimating 18% instead of 17%
what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not
It's going to get really ugly, Jason Lemkin called this out as a possibility a few hours ago: https://youtu.be/mBE_9vGJBUM?si=WSyZXYgV48WfrNrv&t=2908
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
Why make others misfortune a platform for ego expression? Why not doing things elegant, quiet, keep it in-house? Because misery of others drives stock prices up! It's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
Because it will go out today anyway on the investor call or later via leak so might as well get ahead of it.
>Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount. The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
how do you layoff 40% quietly?
All this is is evidence that Jack Dorsey had no idea what half the employees at Block were doing before he decided to do layoffs. May he know no peace, wherever he goes.
Imagine receiving this message and the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalise letters properly. How insulting. It's like being fired by a five year old child.
Jack Dorsey looks like a homeless person and he spends his time meditating and talking about Bitcoin. People knew what they were getting into.
Sucks for the people to lose their jobs, but probably the most honest message you’ll ever see.
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
Took a quick look at their financials...
I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
> I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...
The CEO's last visionary move was to go all in on crypto, even renaming the company. Now he's a visionary again, but firing half the company instead of himself.
What are the odds this is actually due to overhiring during the pandemic? From what I know, that was the principle reason for the Amazon layoffs. Would love to be corrected if I'm misremembering.
Except the concensus around the Amazon layoffs is that it's a shift in free cashflow to capex spent towards ram/gpus.
Could be also both...
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
I miss those days. It may have been economically silly but there was so much optimism, especially in the tech world.
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I don't understand anyone who says layoffs are due to improvements in AI tooling.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad
this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.
LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
I agree if they weren’t simultaneously claiming to be a successful growing company.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
> If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000?
Simple, 1000+ salaries > 10000 x100$/m Claude seats.
"they should not have had 12,000 to begin with"
Nailed it
> The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
Um, no?
it does not work like that except in a berkeley mba mind
It's simple: it's just a lie. We are seeing the goal of AI in action here, which is reducing payroll costs.
I also don't understand that take.
Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free!
Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards?
Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "continuing to support more customers" and has "improving profitability"?
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Since the rush for AGI isn’t panning out, I can see tech firms engaging in tacit collusion that aims to reduce the salaries of software engineers.
There’s proof of tech firms engaging in explicit collusion back in the 00’s.
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I think the AI angle is a fig leaf for perpetual mismanagement. Managers at Block privately complained there were a lot of people doing almost no work. Recently, teams have lost people one at a time, sometimes laid off the day after each other.
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
Quite a few people on X mentioned Block went on a top-of-market acquisition spree (Weebly, Afterpay, Tidal) and tripled headcount during Covid.
My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.
Wishing the best for all those affected and excited to see many of you start new companies and continue to innovate.
Everybody is on the edge, with the fear of a big layoff wave happening.
We see more and more people claiming they are so much more productive thanks to coding agents, big tech CEOs driving the use of AI like crazy, pundits anticipating rise of unemployment. Personally, I feel that productivity gains are overrated, but still, I'm pretty worried to lose my job in the near future. I'm saving aggressively.
This is akin to the is-ought fallacy. Just because a company had layoffs and cited AI, doesn't mean other companies should follow suit or that it will happen. As others have noted in the comments, BTC dropped heavily which Block was invested in, and a lot of their bets went south. Block managers complained at times about certain people not working privately. They also acquired a few companies at peak valuations post COVID.
Seems like if AI is such an accelerator, leveraging 4,000 more people using AI will generate that much more shareholder value.
Any layoff that blames AI and doesn't address the fact that the company is saying it would prefer to make less, they are lying.
Rational actors should be pushing to grow when others are fearful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Block really did not come down from it's COVID/ZIRP era high # of employees as much as many other companies, and it's COVID era headcount growth was extremely rapid by any standard.
In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
Does anyone know what teams are affected?
I wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of layoffs across the industry like we had in 2022.
> first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
> Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.
We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.
For real. Very worried about when other CEOs follow suit and there is a flood of people into unemployment.
To be clear, I'm confident the impact of AI is going to be massive, and that massive impact is already underway rather than years away. But, separate from that, having seen it up close Block was bloated as hell
As someone that is only five years into their career at this point, I feel so helpless.
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
> Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality
I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?
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How messed up is the world that when a leader basically comes clean and says this is being done for efficiency reasons (and by extension the market's reward for bottom line impact) it starts to come across as "honest and brave"?
This feels similar to March 2020 when COVID was in Seattle. “It’s in the US but maybe it’s just a one-off.” We’ll see, I guess.
Agreed. Now that one more company has announced a big (40%!) headcount cut, other CEOs will feel like it is ok to do so now too (someone else stuck their neck out first, safe to pile on, "every one else is doing it", etc).
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
The wording is all nice, and at surface level it reads well. It still makes me feel super icky. Kill 4k jobs because people are more productive with AI. Fuck the people, push the profits. Make investors happy.
No, fuck the investors. Fuck the entities causing these decisions to be more common. Extra-fuck the ever-more-obvious push for profit over literally anything else, including ethics, morals, and humanity. If you're an investor causing this shit to happen, fuck you.
Somehow this makes me feel that this org is already dead, and that this is just gonna accelerate it.
>repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust [...] i'd rather take a hard, clear action now [...] than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
Block was incredibly bloated. This guy is correct: https://x.com/BamaBonds/status/2027142091596288314?s=20
Their revenue is literally down over FY25. But it takes less than an hour for VC influencers to come out and and say we all need to work nights and weekends before getting displaced. https://x.com/balajis/status/2027146933136150867?s=46
Looking at Block's Twitter bio, I see half their companies seem worthwhile, the other half is crypto stuff, and they should either sell it off, or sunset it.
I still don't get it.
If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?
Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.
Let's say AI increases productivity per capita by 50%
That means 50% of current headcount now has the same productivity as 100%
Now we calculate:
A = OPEX costs cuts by firing 50% of personal
B = Profit increase by the AI 50% productivity increase while not firing anyone
if A>B, reduce headcount
if B>A, reduce headcount and then increase workload on remaining employees until profits increase
> instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...
The year is 2030, tech companies provide the exact same value proposition to the consumer that they did in 2024, except it is buggier, full of sparkle buttons you can’t get rid of, and isn’t a source of high-paying employment. The front page of HN still has 5 posts from Blog Guys titled “Programming is Fun Again”.
The future rocks
How do they work out that intelligence tools can fill the gap made by 4,000 out of 10,000 and how long did it take to do that calculation? Or are we entering a phase of layoffs under the guise of ?
1. Is this a one off event due to Block's unique business environment?
2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?
"we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."
holy moly
I wanted to come back to this to add that it's highly disrespectful to make a post/write a letter laying off 40% of your company and not bother to capitalize words properly.
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
Jack couldn't be bothered to use capital letters in his last layoff email either.
I've defended the style of writing previously, but I agree. This felt a little disrespectful.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
you can tell he is a cracked out based tech ceo because he doesn't use capital letters
i agree
I’ll take jobs moving to India for 1000, Alex.
AI: Affordable Indian.
A few thoughts about Block as I've worked there before:
- the company thrives on long term projects that seem to fizzle out as engineers get frustrated and leave
- there are way too many MBAs and finance people now compared to the early years where building was prioritized.
- jack is only doing part time at Block, early days he was around to chat and work with varying levels of hands on
- they've overhired and over-committed to losing projects, worst of all they've de-prioritized projects that were pretty innovative because traction wasn't there quick enough for them to justify them, e.g. terminal, POS specifically for restaurants, localization for EU
- they operate on docs and in the time of AI, the workforce is inundated with slop
- also, I hate that jack can't be bothered to capitalize anything like it's cool. come on man, you're firing 4000 people, not tweeting memes
Nearly half of their employees. And yet economists tell us, AI isn't going to affect jobs.
"l00k at all my AI!"
Or how about your revenue lines are in retail and peer-to-peer finances, primarily for small-to-medium sized businesses and low-to-mid income individuals, primarily in the US market, all of which are struggling from tariffs and economic slowdown in their brackets.
Nah...definitely the AI.
AI is a transformative technology that will reshape how companies are run. More layoffs may be coming unfortunately. But on the other end, more companies and more products will be created. More competition overall, including for Block.
The overarching risk, imo, is America turning against tech and its leaders / billionaires. I think this is slowly happening. And why not, if the People decide that tech is not bringing good things to our modern society anymore, that should be respected.
I wonder what folks on 2009 Hacker News would have said if a company announced layoffs.
Would the top comments have been questioning it, telling the CEO what he should have done instead, worrying about how hard it would be for those people in today's economy?
Chopping block
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Why would you ever choose the first?
Dorsey is in AI psychosis. He required every employee to send him an email weekly which then he had summarized by AI because of course he aint reading it himself.
Even in "AI psychosis" I don't see how firing people is a logical response to advances in AI.
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
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Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?
- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?
- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
He cant write in proper case to lay off $4k people?
Block owns Tidal? who knew
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
I understand pausing completely ; can you explain how stopping the transfer of existing temporary workers will help?
Won't companies just offshore?
If only David Graeber were alive to see that Boards have finally started to appreciate his 2018 Book, Bullshit Jobs.
this is brutal. :(
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
It is hard to tell what this company does, but it seems to be involved in bitcoin. Coincidentally we have had a huge drop in bitcoin in the last months.
I don't buy anything this weirdo says.
They own Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Jay Z's music streaming service Tidal. They make a decent amount of money from people buying and selling Bitcoin on Cash App but most of their revenue is not related to Bitcoin.
Square payments, CashApp, Tidal (hi-fi music streaming), and some blockchain experiments
Square payment processing?
Block runs Square and Cash App among other payments tech.
Stock goes up in expectation of ... CEOs doing share buybacks to increase their bonus checks.
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> ThE sToCk Is UnDeRvAlUeD
Please don't post sneering comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What does “entering into consultation” mean?
My guess: they keep you around on contract for 1-6 months because laying you off immediately would be very disruptive.
One company I worked for did this. It felt weird to everyone. But they did give a slightly better severance to those that stuck out their contracts so it worked out slightly better for them.
That's a UK legal thing: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation
I think "entering into consultation" means HR calls you into a small conference room.
well, I'd like to join smaller flatter teams...
I like how it's posted to a twitter URL.
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
> but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using
For some reason he deliberately avoids using the word 'artificial' here.
So, what does Block actually do?
Square point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
They hire people, and then they fire them!
CashApp
Square is still a much, much bigger portion of the business than CashApp.
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What is it with tech execs and not using capital letters? It's bizarre. Especially in a letter about layoffs.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.
Come on now, it's not going to be the only round.
recently there has been a consistent drip of layoffs each day. they kind of chose all of the options
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
why doesn't HN rewrite this to the canonical x.com hostname?
he is worse than musk ever been. hiding behind ai
Imagine being laid off by somebody who doesn't understand capital letters.
Some choice Jack Dorsey quotes:
From New Yorker profile: “His goal… is… by making information freer, he hopes to make the world fairer, kinder, and nicer.”
Where he also writes, “I definitely feel the most fundamental issue is economic equality.”
But hey, the stock is up 25%!
Imagine not being laid off in this situation.. I'd demand to be.
EDIT: I guess if it comes with 300% raise I'd pause for a bit to think about it, but otherwise absolutely not.
The headline numbers:
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
That significantly more generous than the 12-16 week severance packages being doled out by big tech during the great layoffs of 2022-2023 if I remember correctly.
In 2023 Google gave 16 weeks plus 2 for every year of tenure, so not significantly less (and more if your tenure was >5 years), plus google also vested stock for entirety of the 16+ weeks.
They're going from over 10k employees to just under 6k. So more than 40%.
Ah yeah, that's fair. The post itself says "nearly half".
Will Randian tech bros start calling for socialism soon? Inshallah.
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Yeah, im a chronic uncapitilizer in our work slack and HN, but if I put out a 'communication' then I always shift to 'regular' grammar.
Its an extremely annoying trend among a subset of the tech industry who think it makes them cool
Is there some reason your lack of apostrophe and period is supposed to be less annoying than their lack of capitalization?
Honestly the whole Silicon Valley shtick is becoming old. The fake positivity, the quirky writing style, the "I think the most important quality is sticktuitiveness" linkedin-esque bullshit. Not to mention the cargo-cult that is so obvious in every GPT-wrapper startup.
This was mostly born out of counter signalling the businesses that valued serious people over competent people in the 20th century.
But, like with all things, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. I believe the next wave of tech countersignalling will be people who actually do take themselves seriously, maybe even dress in suits, etc..
I noticed that as well and it oddly made me sit for a minute to think about it. I ended up deciding that it landed a bit more 'real' and unfiltered. Could be interpreted many ways. Nobody knows the actual why but (possibly) Jack.
uwu i'm a smol bean
also you're fired
It was a 100% intentional act. These people simply don't care and they want that be known. It's in their ego.
There is no good way to announce layoffs.
No matter what he wrote, it was going to be insulting.
I found it completely unreadable, similar to reading code without syntax highlighting.
Maybe he should have had AI fix up the grammar/spelling for him...
Yeah I'm with you.
I write most of my emails purposely misspelling words / lacking proper capitalization so the recipient knows it wasn't written with ai. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Vibe CEOing.
Dorsey practically invented it.
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AI comment
Obviously so, yeah. Astroturfing? Or is there any other reason why this is becoming so common in HN?
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> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.
I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307549
It's AGI if it works. Didn't Salesforce lay off support people to replace them with AI but then the AI didn't work?
> this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff
Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
>> * this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff*
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.