Comment by est31
6 days ago
From my opinion, the block layoffs were a test, to see how a) a software company manages with only half of its employees now that there's powerful LLMs, and b) how the remaining employees react to the imminent threat of them being laid off as well.
If block succeeds, we'll see more layoffs of that kind, probably even more extreme ones. You are not top senior level employee? Out. You don't single handedly cause 30% of the AI spend on your 15 person team? Out.
People say how in five years there won't be seniors because one stopped junior hiring... in five years the seniors won't be needed either. Already today, we have single person billion dollar exits, high schoolers making millions from food apps. This is thanks to LLMs.
The technology is there to replace most of the white collar work, it's just not applied enough yet. The economic system needs to adapt to not having labor being such a big redistributor.
I was there for three years. Every year a new top-level initiative, every year the new initiative failed to make a dent in the market. I think this shift was just an admission that the business is now in maintenance mode, harden up the existing cash cows and drop the new initiatives. That said, the existence of AI will impede hiring because if investors say "you should look into blub!", corp can say "our AI is already looking into it," rather than keeping extra humans on hand.
Yep.
I have started to say that it will be irresponsible for people to. Manually write code in a year or two from now - and I am setting the systems I work for up to that.
It will happen sooner than later.
Already now I can not compete with agentic programming.
> single person billion dollar exits
Single person, or single founder? I guess there's n0tch, but he hired people when he started making money. (There may very well be truly solo cases that I don't know about.)
A few others have commented that the job becomes a kind of hybrid. I already think of it like that. If you're a person who can talk to a client and then immediately implement something to solve a problem, that's still going to be part of the process for a while. The sales cycle is still going to be competitive, whether it's based on timing or insider connections. Software people are going to have to start thinking of themselves as small firms; you have to go close a deal and then your agent army can help you deliver.
That billion dollar figure is being thrown around for Steinberger's exit to OpenAI, but I couldn't find any reputable source claiming it. It might be a wrong number, idk.
> the block layoffs were a test, to see how a) a software company manages with only half of its employees now that there's powerful LLMs, and b) how the remaining employees react to the imminent threat of them being laid off as well.
The block layoffs were due to years of over hiring.
> Already today, we have single person billion dollar exits
It was nowhere near that much, and this was more a coordinated marketing move by OpenAI than an organic process.
> high schoolers making millions from food apps
This app is a sign of the massive bubble we’re in. The developer should be ashamed to make people think they could estimate calories from an image.
There’s trillions of dollars behind these AI companies succeeding. A lot of the hype you’re seeing is paid for. If you’re reading news articles, blogs, etc and not digging any further you’re being manipulated.