Layoffs at Block
twitter.com
twitter.com
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 can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
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.
Sure the BNPL model uses effectively invoice factoring with high interest penalties but they do have a financial relationship with both vendors and buyers.
There's a lot to leverage there. It's Paypal with lending attached.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment
[2] (widely attributed to Winston Churchill)
[3] https://enroll.zellepay.com/
[4] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi...
I move thousands of dollars a month with Zelle, so I know it’s possible. My credit union allows me $3k/day, $8k/month. Chase Bank had similar limits before I left them.
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/banking/zelle-limits-at-top-banks/
I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.
Brazil’s Pix is Coming for the Card Industry - https://paymentscmi.com/insights/brazil-pix-impacts-card-ind...
> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.
> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.
> As it gains new features, Pix will continue to cut into banks’ interchange revenues and compete with the card industry, not only in terms of ‘stealing’ transactions from these legacy players but by allowing a new stack of solutions to be built on top of its scheme. What the Brazilian Central Bank created is a new payment rail that allows for fewer intermediaries and, therefore, for cheaper solutions.
Schwab's accounts are backed by Chase. Zelle comes along for the ride.
Everywhere else has instant settlement payment rails available for yonks.
And FedNow removes the need for Zelle or CashApp, assuming the banks offer it.
Of course, a regulator working for the consumers might mandate as part of a banking deposit taking license, that the bank must offer FedNow as part of the account at zero transaction cost to the account holder, perhaps with transaction limits.
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.
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.
To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.
Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.
Unionize.
Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.
Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Again cry me a river because (hypothetical) you weren’t able to save 3-6 months salary making twice the median wage.
Really, it sounds like what you want is the European system where employee protections are so strong that the tech industry is barely willing to hire and is crippled as a result. Layoffs suck but the alternative (turning hiring into a patronage system) is worse.
Sincerely hope you don't treat people around you with this disregard, but seeing how you selfishly only care about yourself I hope they find a new community that loves them more than what you can (or can't) provide.
These folks (in CA at least) have a marginal tax rate in excess of 40%. In the US they are the main payer of federal income tax - income tax that is then mostly used to fund social programs. Double your income and your taxes (at least) double.
But it's not good enough for you, apparently, because the only acceptable way for me to prove I care is to support YOU making more money and being immune to layoffs.
I'm self-interested and freely admit that I like making money because money is nice. You're self-interested but you're pretending this take is for your "fellow man."
If you're a well paid software engineer, you're already incredibly privileged. Most of the world would kill to have that job, but according to you the real unfair part is that companies can choose to pay some people more than you?
a) Fewer companies taking a chance on people because the cost of firing has risen.
b) Lower productivity growth leading to lower wages in the long run because adversarial union restrictions lead to less dynamic companies.
I'm sorry but American workers are getting bad deals, and let's not act like the largest companies in human history can't pay more in taxes to fund training, education, and healthcare for workers.
You're telling people that are fighting for scraps to start fighting over dirt.
My Qs for you are why are you so greedy? Why do you think you deserve so much because of pure luck? Why do you think workers don't deserve a larger share of the pie when the elites and rich have rat fucked this country into having more money than necessary?
The only reason we make this much is because of sustained productivity growth.
Not all unions look the same. There are unions that don’t prescribe pay to the company, leaving the company to compete for talent using salary.
If they do, then yes.
I don’t get demoralized at all. I’ve had 10 jobs in 30 years. When a company decides or I decide that the deal of they give me money and I give them work doesn’t work for one of us - I move on.
And I found a job quickly with multiple offers after being Amazoned in 2023 and again in 2024
But the good news is the mentality helps me keep costs under control. I'm nowhere near real earners in tech at only 200k, but I have two littles so haven't considered moving until they get a bit older because I'm fully remote and the flexibility with daycare sickness is helpful.
In my niche - customer facing + strategy + implementations hands on keyboard cloud/app dev consulting and every project I’ve had over the past year and half has involved integrating with LLM - my resume never gets ignored by companies looking for full time consultants not bragging I am old and experienced.
But my niche is just that a niche. “Cloud architects” who spend time doing migrations and infrastructure babysitting are far more in demand since AWS throws money at 3rd party partners for it than software developers who know AWS and can lead consulting projects
I’m very concerned about not being able to find a job in this market. It wasn’t this bad in 2000 in second tier cities as an enterprise dev working for profitable companies
And to your other point, I’m also just over $200k. But our kids (my step sons ) are “taxpayers” and fully launched and my wife and I moved to a condo 1/3 the size of our old house in state tax free Florida in 2022. Our fixed expenses are 35% of my gross. My wife has been retired since 2020 since she was 44. Push comes to shove, I could take a job making $135K (only a little less than I was making in Atlanta before 2020 and my pivot to consulting) and be fine - just wouldn’t be saving much.
I'm hoping the same for myself, but hopefully at some point in the future I at least try to go for something new. I'm torn between the status quo of the cushy role I have now and the feeling that I've never accomplished anything noteworthy. But until the kids grow a bit more I think I'll remain stationary but try to enhance my skills when possible. I'm also just starting llm integration on a project where we'll be implementing mcp for agents with google-adk. Between that, vertex ai services, etc. it seems mostly like gluing things together more than actual innovation.
But times are different now. The market isn’t what it was and it’s even worse when you want to stay remote. I live in a tourist area (central Florida), there are very few even enterprise dev jobs in the area. I’m hoping I can stay at my current job long term. I’ve never craved longevity at a job like I do now. I actually like this company. The only other two I liked as much were startups - one went out of business and I left the other when a remote job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020
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.
And more importantly, the entire premise when Square launched was that app-based "cloud" PoS systems would replace all traditional cash registers. Except now 15 years later that simply hasn't happened. Existing players in the space all caught up and shipped chip and NFC readers to their retailers, and that's all that was needed.
I run large public markets, the vendors are still almost entirely square just as they were ten years ago.
They have failed to make inroads into larger businesses like chains and stores, but that was never their customer to begin with.
Their lead absolutely has shrunk. In the mid-late 2010s it was either Square, or a bevy of shovelware Windows POS systems loosely stitched together with a tablet for rewards and maybe grubhub. Clover and Toast are both regular sights in that space now.
It has though, by a lot. Toast in particular has eaten Square's lunch in the restaurant industry and now they're expanding to retail. Even NCR has caught up, along with a long tail of newer competitors eating away at market share.
There was a window of time where Square was the default choice for small biz POS and that is most definitely not the case anymore.
And businesses I frequent over many years seem to change their POS systems often. I’ve always assumed that every year there are a bunch of new startups using their VC funds to give away free iPad minis. When the cheap hardware breaks or the software company goes under, there’s always a new one to take its place.
- the e-commerce integration (Weebly?) is very limited and the resulting sites are dog slow
- the POS itself and the backend don't work when you have hundreds of SKUs and many variants
- there's very little customization or support
My business wasn't huge but we were doing ~300k revenue annually online and in-store. We started on Square, tried Lightspeed (also garbage) and finally ended up on Shopify (best of a bad lot).
Despite making noise about "supporting small business" Shopify makes most of their money from e-commerce for giant brands. They've tried to juice returns from small customers with merchant cash advances but my sense is they make more doing professional services for big e-commerce brands
These are not mutually exclusive. How does making my “own [work life] easier” not translate into “work more efficiently.”
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.
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.
---
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.
Cultural differences. Things like "saving face" / not being able to admit a lack of knowledge in Asian cultures, Americans that need to be coddled (the higher up, the more dumbed down execs want information because they insist on micromanaging - they try to have their cake and eat it at the same time), Germans being blunt and direct to the point it offends Americans, Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff... if you just say, you hire a bunch of bodies somewhere else and expect that to work out, you end up screwed - and many did end up screwed. In both ways, by the way.
Output is good enough - much of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Broadcom, and other tech companies backbone infra or core IP is already implemented and owned by product and engineering teams in Poland and India or by foreign nationals in the US on work visas (eg. PyTorch). And if middle managers cannot manage to maintain output when faced with those with cultural differences, we'll fire them and hire people who can.
This is why you see the trope of "Indian C-Suite means layoffs and offshoring" - it's not the C-Suite that makes this decision, it's boards that decided to do so and thus hired an Indian origin C-Suite to operationalize that strategy. It's the same reason why Taiwanese Americans were over-represented in Hardware Engineering C-Suite roles 10-20 years ago when "China Shock" began in hardware industries.
It became easier to hire Jans and Jagmeets after a large number of SWEs and middle-managers in tech who were on visas were given the option to either be laid off or relocate to the old country and open a GCC during the initial COVID recession. And I may as well hire Pawel and Param as Product or Engineering Directors in MTV or SF and have them fly out to the Prague, Warsaw, Bangalore, or Hyderabad office every couple weeks.
> Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff...
That's Western Europe (think Germany, France).
Central and Eastern Europe (think Czechia, Poland, Romania) roll out the red carpet for us, and we pay 75th-90th percentile salaries in those markets (which usually ends up being in the $80K-130K TC range) meaning we get the cream of the cream.
Heck, Czechia and Poland have dedicated bureaucrats who work with us to solve regulatory issues and give several thousand dollar per year per head subsidizes when investing in building a GCC. It's the same with India as well.
If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one
That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.
5 billion in 2021
4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company)
3.4 billion in 2023
2.6 billion in 2024
2.9 billion in 2025Musk might have been right that shifting to KTLO mode was a good idea, but the company would still be better off if someone other than him had bought it and done the same thing.
X Premium subscription tiers (Basic, Premium, Premium+) with paid blue checkmark verification Post editing (limited window).
Longer posts (up to 25,000 characters).
Longer video uploads (up to hours and multi-GB files).
For You algorithmic feed and Following chronological tab.
Grok AI chatbot integration (with image/video generation via Grok Imagine).
Audio and video calls (encrypted).
XChat encrypted messaging with vanishing messages and file sharing.
Creator revenue sharing from ads and engagement.
Creator subscriptions for paywalled content.
Articles for long-form publishing.
Community Notes expansion (crowdsourced fact-checking).
Communities for interest-based groups.
Bookmark folders.
Reader mode for threads.
Reply prioritization for Premium users.
X Pro (advanced tools like multi-timelines and search).
Media Studio for managing uploads.
Job search and hiring features.
Starter Packs for curated follows.
Video reactions/responses.
Priority notifications tab.
Enhanced cashtags with real-time info.
Global trending emphasis in Explore.
Widgets for iOS home/lock screen.
Updated payouts based on verified impressions.
Topic selection in For You feed.
Free Premium access for high-follower accounts (>2,500 verified followers get Premium; >5,000 get Premium+)
The Democrats basically handed it to him with the whole Biden/Harris fiasco.
It didn't.
Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.
I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.
Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.
Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.
Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.
It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.
For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.
Plus a way to get data for xAI.
In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).
A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".
Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.
> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.
As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".
* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.
Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.
With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.
So when some people talk about tech debt we don’t talk about perfect code or file structure, it’s about painting a wall in a tropical rain, building a house during an earthquake etc. So count yourself happy I guess.
Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.
Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.
Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.
If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.
I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.
It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them. It’s just that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon.
Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.
You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.
On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.
The Cybertruck begs to differ.
>"Other companies are following the example set, they fired 70% of people without damaging the company"
>"But isn't the company in shambles?"
>"Well sure, but that's for unrelated reasons."
Surely even if that's true these famously superstitious cargo-culting executives wouldn't want to follow that example?
I remember people celebrating and praising Musk, predicting new era of free speech twitter that earns tons of money and is massively effective.
Meanwhile, it lost on value, lost on income, became nazi echo chamber and overall much worst version of itself. It did not "crash and burned" simply because Musk was willing to pay huge amount of money for all of that. What it shows is that original engineering was good and reliable, actually.
I was there, and no, it's not true. There were debates about it and no consensus.
Look at it this way. Could Google lay off 70% of employees and keep the lights on, even still launching some new features on core properties, whilst preserving revenue? It'd be surprising if the answer was no.
Twitter at the same time removed features to have fewer things to support. And didn't implement anything new (or really fix much) for ages. It's not the same service that was standing afterwards. And the "still standing" ignores the part where they started serving empty timelines, repeated messages from broken paging, broke 2fa for days, messed up whole continent access, etc. etc. They survived (and still had fewer problems than I expected), but it wasn't smooth at all - hardly a success too.
Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant 1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against 2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers 3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship 4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies
That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.
Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.
Just look at the logged out version of Musk's own profile.. at the top it's showing Tweets from 2022 & 2024 (these are not pinned Tweets)
That said, I think you've left out the impact of interest rates and the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) on this. So much of the "growth above all else", "revenue and user count matters more than profit" mindset companies had over the last 10 years was because ZIRP incentivizes them to invest in riskier assets. If safe investments pay 1% a year that's only a 10.4% return 10 years later. If safe investments pay 5% a year that's a 62.8% return 10 years later.
When rates are low, investors are more willing to focus on a company's potential because their money isn't making a lot while sitting in the bank. When rates went up (in addition to everything you said) investors all of a sudden wanted to see profit, not revenue or user base numbers which means a lot of these companies had to pivot their strategy fast. All the perks and crazy moonshot projects get cut and only things that are profitable or have a clear path to profitability are kept.
If you look back, that's exactly why we saw things like companies throwing crazy money at things like the metaverse and crypto and then practically over night pull the plug on them.
The charts below are the fed funds rate and the number of SWE jobs from Indeed, both from the fed and you can see how they align.
> 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.
I really fucking hate when people post this. It's one of those things that sounds substantive but it actually isn't. This is a social media forum, people express their opinions. Sometimes those opinions are negative about corporations or businesses. It's weird to tell people "STFU with your discussion on a discussion forum".
Interesting, in my experience this hasn't mattered at all. Generally those close enough to an employee to have had beers with them aren't the ones making any decisions related to layoffs, and may themselves be on the chopping block.
I don't avoid people higher up the org chart, our paths will just rarely cross and we generally are leading pretty different lives.
I think their attitude could be summed up with this line by the Architect from the Matrix: "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."
I would only differ on one point: the situation was not this bad 2015-22. I would actually put the painful periods around the dot-com bust and the GFC. In fact, while not as great as the post-COVID heydays, things actually took off post 2010-ish. This timeline coincided with Meta starting a talent war at the same time that the Apple/Google no-poaching collusion lawsuit was filed.
I decided to dip my toes into Reddit after a few years of irregular use. The politics there are far worse, and far more one sided. The political takes on the main page are insane. We have a lot of mentally ill people in this country.
Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!
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.
Most customers that matter to a business don't churn due to subpar user experience - discounting, roadmap, and dedicating a subset of engineering staff to handle bugs originating from a handful of the most important accounts is enough to prevent churn.
That said, this advice only really holds in the US (and that too in the major tech hubs). If you work in Western Europe you're shit out of luck as a SWE - management culture there just doesn't give a shit about software, because for most Western European businesses software is a cost center, not a revenue generator.
I agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a large cut that can happen, but Musk explicitly mentions how his plan was always to "over fire" and rehire later. Clearly 60% was too far, and he overestimated his charisma to get people back.
It'd be a stretch to call Twitter a "well oiled machine", but clearly these moves proceeded to chug the gears down to a near halt. It hasn't seen a major collapse only because Musk is playing Hollywood accounting with all his businesses these days.
>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.
I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.
>We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
Waiting to hear on job apps gives plenty of time to vent, though.
I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
I'm not agreeing with Musk - his personal brand is toxic and destroyed X/Twitter's fairly healthy ad revenue machine. That said he was right to highlight that X/Twitter was extremely overstaffed, and it was his mass layoff that showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
> I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.
Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media (the M in TMT), especially given the overlap with VFX.
As such, being close to where much of the business of media/entertainment exists is the best for your career - LA, NYC, ATL, SeaTac, and ATX, but not the Bay.
> I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
Yep. But if you are in the gaming industry, it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
"maintain" is a strong word here. You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.
Too bad the executives figured out that secret and decided they wanted to tread for a while.
>Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media
Fair enough. I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money. It's a weird overlap because the specialization and rigor needed here is still above a lot of more traditional tech domains. But ultimately the boom/bust cycle reflects much closer to Hollywood than Silicon Valley.
>it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
Not this time around, sadly. But that's my new 5 year plan when things stabilize. Use time after work to lay the groundwork for my own game. Whenever the next slump/crash is after this, I want to have something independent of these coporations to stand on.
The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.
Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.
If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.
> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money
Somewhat.
A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).
The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.
The acquisition involved a buyout which took it private. There was no period under Musk where Twitter was publically traded, let alone one that saw steadily declining stock.
1. screw up your market advantage so badly that you create a semi comoetent competitor over the course of a year.
2. Have a rampaging chatbot so utterly unhinged that it gets you litigated in multiple countries
3. Be reported that your site (which makes money off of ads provided to humans) is estimated to have at least 70% bots
4. To be hemorraging money so badly you make the company y private and then "acquire" it to further hide the losses.
Yet still insist that things are running "fine on a technical level".
Yes, if you only care about the ability to broadcast a 280 character message + media to the world, manage a "friends" list, and pay a subscription for a blue checkmark (and even longer messages! Its like Hacker News all over again!), Twitter is still operational with 40% of staff plus whoever he had to rehire back.
Let us never forget the "tweet reading limit" incident
> 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.
All you have to do is move you and your family to the most expensive places in the world. But also live lean and save for a rainy day.
And that's just for 1 person. Your spouse (if you have one) is most likely also working in a white collar job as well which we'll impute with the median income in they Bay which is $75k [1], but in reality is an underestimate as your spouse is likely to work in a tech, biotech, medicine, finance, accounting, healthcare, or government adjacent field which would increase their income significantly.
Using the $75k imputed spousal take-home, that would make your joint household income after tax and both maxing out Roth 401k to be around $180,000.
Renting a 2-4 bedroom single family home in a family friendly locale like the Tri-Valley, South Bay, or the Peninsula comes out to around $4.5K/mo, which means you have around $126K per year.
Let's remove $26K due to household expenses (which I personally think is excessive - my household operates on $1.5K/mo and we live pretty extravagantly in San Francisco) and you end up with $100K in cash after a fully loaded 401K, taxes, and rent.
Put around 60-65% of that in a couple ETFs (expecting around 5%-9% returns) and the remaining 35-40% in liquid cash savings.
That means you have around $60K per year invested in easy to liquidate assets, around $50K per year invested for retirement, and around $40K per year in hard cash.
This is why it works and why most people in Tech still remain in the Bay or NYC (similar math).
If you cannot live lean with a 3 person household using the math above in the Bay Area - a region where the MEDIAN household income is $137K [2] - then frankly you have major character defects.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
[1] - https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/median-earning...
First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.
Second, many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job necessary to live the desired quality of life.
Third, many people and/or their family may not be healthy enough to afford dual high income households.
Obviously, earning a lot of money while spending minimally is a path to success, and obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs.
For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook. But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close.
Absolutely, but then they shouldn't complain on HN that they aren't getting jobs because they aren't open to relocating from Skokie to San Jose.
> many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job
The 25th percentile TC for a SWE is 200K in the Bay Area [0]. If you are not even in the top 75 percent of SWEs you are already on the chopping block.
> obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs. For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook.
The brutal reality is, if you aren't working in the Bay or NYC, we are going to offshore you. We can get the cream of the crop in Europe, Israel, or India with a Chicago, Dallas, or Atlanta TC along with added FDI subsidizes. As such, we have no reason to hire a median employee for 100% WFH who lives outsides the Bay+NYC and pay what is essentially a premium.
Additionally, you don't have to live in the Bay or NYC forever. Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).
> But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close
If you cannot afford to fly to our fly out your retired parents to stay with you for a couple weeks and can't fly out to meet with them with the priors I mentioned, then you have major issues. Most Asian American (Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc) and Eastern European (Russians, Israelis, etc) families would do something similar in the Bay.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.
>Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).
You might have reached financial independence, or you might not. You might have been able to meet a suitable life partner in that location, or might not. Maybe you would have found a more compatible partner closer to home, via your network of family and friends. You might be able to reach financial independence before having a baby, or you might watch your prime child rearing years pass you by.
I have lived it, and I have seen my peers live it. I know lots of families split between NY/Bay Area/Seattle/LA/Boston/London/etc. The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?
woosh on my end! sorry about that! I've dealt with some people on HN who are serious about not being able to make ends meet making a mid-career SWE salary in much of the US.
> I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.
Ah yea that makes sense. I meant close emotionally, but even then if possible one should help your siblings and close friends relocate here (or nearby like Oregon, Nevada, or SoCal) as well. Most of my peers have done similar stuff as well.
> The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?
That a good point - familial dynamic plays a role as well.
I grew up in an Asian American household, and in a lot of Asian, Southern+Eastern European, and Middle Eastern cultures, a "family as a clan" mentality exists (blood is thicker than water) and that helps build and maintain ties.
We keep close professional and financial ties amongst each other - my parents paid for my college, I paid for my sibling's college, they paid a portion of my grad school, I and my parents helped them purchase a place, etc etc.
We worked hard to make sure all of our extended family was centered in the Bay Area or parts of Asia with nonstop airline access to the Bay, and our spouses do similar stuff as well. I mean this does come down to how closely knit your family is.
I will stay "Fuck you". I've been in this working field for 25 years or so (and more as a hobbyist). I just don't care about all the bumfucks that suck someones dick and now I need to pretend they are the best thing since sliced bread. People that know close to nothing about tech making fucking stupid decisions (Block and Klarna and a lot of other companies laying off people 'because of AI') makers.
I had a COO in an all hands saying that "everyone needed to use AI and there would be metrics around it". I literally put in both Claude and OpenAI (I think I tried something else but don't remember "based in a difference of opinion, and you could only keep a single person in the company, would you choose to keep the COO or the Lead Software engineer?" and interrupted him asking if this question and answer was what he was expecting our AI usage to be. (ps: try it yourself, see what the all mighty AI says). I never heard a pip from him since then.
And fuck move to Tier-1 cities. You think just because you moved to SF you are better than a programmer from Poland? I've worked with ex Google/FB/Netflix and Apple. Top senior developers. Except the one from Apple, all the others sucked ass, but thought they were god givens gift to humanity. (At least I was payed very well to fix they fucking mistakes).
And the fact you say 'it is harder to fire someone you had beers with' just really solidifies my point that was never about performance or quality of work, is just who can gargle that big fat dick the best
(ps: I'm in general not against AI but ok with people using it to improve a bit of productivity, I'm against top down decisions that AI will suck your dick while writing python at the same time and if you are a programmer, you better get your dick sucking skills up because that is the only way you will keep your job)
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 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 doesn't matter if AI is effective at reducing head count, it only matters that decision makers believe it will! If they go on twitter and see "SWE is dead" "4th industrial revolution is here" ect ect, they will eventually fall for the psyop and give half of their payroll to an AI company (or someone claiming they can do this)..
It will all backfire, probably, but in the meantime 400k SWEs have been laid off in the last 16 months while profits and equities are at all time highs. You can try to say its not AI, but I really think that's cope.
Go have lunch with a C-suite / decision maker in tech, they won't shut up about how all the jobs are going to be bots in the near future (and how rich it will make them). They are sincerly stupid but until then lives/families are going to get crushed and Dalio and Altman or similar people are going to continue to convince these people to give your salary to them..
Props to block for letting people keep their devices, and helping people out, its more than most companies but this absolutely has to do with AI BS. They've been itching to cut human labor out of the equation since slavery was crushed. They yearn for labor that doesn't demand a paycheck (slaves).
It's not cope. The math just isn't mathing. the efficiencies advertiesed don't match the layoff proportions. The earning call employment counts don't match with the idea that they are "downsizing" as a company (meanwhile, what semblence of truth we have left in the job numbers DO suggest that we lost a lot of white collar jobs in 2024/5). The output error of deployed products don't match the sentiment that AI is leading to equal/higher quality software. The volume of litigation doesn't match this sentiment that "AI is here to stay".
This is less about whatever I personally think of AI (and especially its future) and more acknowledging that this is simply an irrational market. Yes, the market can indeed remain irrational longer than I can stay solvent. But that irrationality also has a time limit. I'm sure people in 1928 can point to how high its stocks were too.
But another thing when a lot of middle-class citizens are plunged into poverty in the short term - that will look more dramatic and unpredictable.
This buys them time psyop everyone into believing that AI actually does make things easier, this includes convincing labor also. So when they go to hire everyone back in 18 months, or at least a percentage of them they can say well [insert job that required computer i/o] actually doesn't require as much skill as before (whether it does or not) so your salary is going to be 3/5ths of what it used to be, and if you don't accept there's a huge supply of desperate people. Its literally the exact same targeted operation that was pulled on factory workers in the mid to late 20th century.
The efficiencies will be gained in lower labor costs going forward, not actual productivity gains or better software.. They care about the quality of the work produced as long as they have houses in Vail/Aspen and a spot in the Bahamas..
Certain industries where quality matters, may survive on merit like medical equipment manufacturers or aviation... but will it, look at Boeing..
The ruling class is our enemy and we better start acting like that. We are going to need our generations French Revolution soon.
If we don't take this seriously, and see it for what it is, they are going to give us their own version of a war to fight, but it will be to accumulate resources for them overseas. Just like in the 20s young men and women will be so poor they'll do anything, they'll beg for a war. We need to make sure they don't channel that energy away from them, because they're going to get us to try the working class to go fight on their behalf in EU, MENA, and the Pacific again. It's the same playbook. I'll bet my last dollar on it.
On the bright(?) side: traditional propaganda is absolutely abysmal for the youth these days. If they try to pull off this kind of recruitment, I see many Gen Z/Alpha deserting or outright choosing arrest. You can't screw over a man their entire life and expect them to want to fight and die for their country.
They've basically developed mind control algorithms that live on Instagram, its not that hard to steer culture in a certain direction.
While I agree with you for the most part about the youth. I hope so. I also see a decent amount of Gen Z that glorify things like looxsmaxxing, christain nationalism, eugenics. They are actually being programmed to like Nazism/fascism aesthetics but discarding the label at the same time. You'll see them behave like racial/national supremacists while at the same time they'd be extremely offended if you called fascist or racist.
I predict we will have a false flag attack, probably with drones who's origins are impossible to track, but only after everyone has had a decent period of financial instability. Obama produced a movie about this very kind of attack lol.
This keeps coming up, but the numbers at these companies don't add up. Any given FAANG you can think of (outside of maybe Apple) has had at least 5 rounds of layoffs over the years. But can you point to any of them having a lower headcount? I doubt all those engineers are being redirected towards AI development.
And despite that similar hearcount, it seems all have decrease initiatives over the years too. Meta stepped back from the verse it re-branded under, for instance.
I'm fairly convinced that what's happening is outsourcing initiatives disguides as layoffs for AI efficiencies.
If you look at the numbers, this doesn’t resemble a company cutting because it’s in trouble. Block is profitable, gross profit has been growing double-digits year over year, and they’re guiding roughly ~18% gross profit growth into 2026 with strong expected expansion in adjusted operating income and EPS. That’s not a balance-sheet emergency.
You can argue they overhired in 2020–2022 and are normalizing. That’s plausible. But the financials don’t suggest a company scrambling to survive. Cutting that aggressively while guiding strong forward growth is unusual if the only goal were short-term margin repair.
So while “it’s AI” can sound like PR, the numbers at least make it credible that this is a structural efficiency move rather than a distress signal.
I'm not 100% convinced it means they gave up and are trying to cash out. It could also be that they just struggled to integrate all the people in a meaningful way, even if they're all really good. Having grown a company from a hand full of people to 250, I more than once fantasized about going back down to ~100. Scaling companies well is hard. 10k, I can't even imagine.
Maybe Dario Amodei saying this tsunami is coming and people are arguing it is not a tsunami and just a trick of the light are wrong.
We have had a giant bubble in white collar bullshit jobs the last 15 years and AI is going to pop that bubble incredible fast.
That doesn't mean the brilliant programmer is going to be replaced by Claude Code. The brilliant programmer type + AI what is going to do the popping, put more people out of work and massively gain from it financially themselves.
In other words, an extension of the same process that has been going on for the last 30 years.
That's not clear to me, and apparently not to Block.
> There’s definitely going to be a shift over time.
Yep, and as the transition happens, it'll probably be bell-shaped. Someone will be on the left side of the bell, and someone will be on the right side. Block has chosen to be on the left side.
Even if they are "bullshit jobs," they are what keeps food on the table for many people.
So the question is, what's bullshit about them? Are they bullshit because the capitalists could keep more money to themselves? Or are they bullshit because there are more socially beneficial jobs those people could be doing?
At some point, with increasing automation, "bullshit jobs" are going to be increasingly necessary, without radical changes in social or economic structure. Without them, you might as well just start sending the unemployed workers to death camps to be culled (though capitalism isn't so kind, and prefers to cull workers through slow deaths of neglect).
Yeah, the misanthropic individualism is really getting out of hand.
Also, the irony is a lot of people who imagine themselves as "elites/productive types" are going to find out too late that they actually aren't.
And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.
The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.
Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.
That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.
Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.
If you want to be a profit center, be one.
When the body is in danger of dying should it stop healing the fingernails or the brain?
I literally said the opposite of it. The classification is descriptive, and frequently reevaluated. It'd not a property of a person, but a function of where they currently are in the org chart.
> If you want to be a profit center, be one.
Sure.
> When the body is in danger of dying should it stop healing the fingernails or the brain?
Nothing is dying, though. The body that is the org needs both kinds of centers to function. Like any other system that resists entropy, it has parts that are sacrificed so other parts are preserved.
Thanks, I'm cured.
The brain is the most obvious cost center, consuming nutrients without doing anything to directly provide them. Legs move us towards food, but also away from it, so they're a wash. Eyes and ears are redundant with nose, in these lean times. Hands are essential to pick up food that's in a container we can't fit our face in. Mouth too. Digestive tract, on the other hand, is always complaining for more food and never generating any itself, so it has to go.
Once we've fired everyone but the C-suite, marketing, and accounts receivable, we'll have the most efficient, profit-center only company in existence!
This would make some sort of sense if it was honest. For a start, the owners and shareholders are plainly cost centers (they are literally useless sinks of revenue).
DOW is at 50.000.
HN is weird like that.
With the rise of relatively low-risk ETFs and Index Funds, we get into this kind of strange situation where people who might be able to create value by creating businesses and products will instead just invest into the stock market. On an individual level, this is an objectively good decision; most new businesses fail and most of the ones that don't still don't beat the S&P 500 in growth, and even if you manage to match the S&P that required a lot of effort on your end vs. clicking three buttons on E-Trade. Yes, maybe you'll be one of the happy few who manage to actually grow faster than the S&P, and that's great, if someone in that boat is in that position I wish you all the future success in the world [1].
I'm not judging, I'm no better that the people I'm describing. I don't run a business and I just buy ETFs for that reason; it's relatively low-risk, high-return, and basically zero effort on my end. Now it's created this situation where we a) have an over-reliance on BigCos because all of our money is tied with them, b) a shortage of people who are willing to challenge these BigCos because the risk isn't worth it, and as such we have less diversity and competition in the market.
I have thought about starting a business dozens of times. I have a few projects that I think have a non-zero chance of being something cool that instead just languish in private repos because I am too much of a coward to actually try and make a go of it. I don't really know how to find investors, and even if I knew how I would have to prepare for the (very) high potential of them not funding me, and then I have to determine if it's worth self-funding, and at that point I could just take that same capital I would spend, throw it into VOO or QQQ and likely make more money without any effort.
I doubt I'm unique in this reasoning, especially on this forum. This is a relatively well-educated group (by internet standards) and I suspect a lot of people who frequent this forum are in the same boat that I am; I've seen some very interesting stuff in the "what are you working on?" threads here that I think could become businesses but mostly just end up living on Github accruing 100 stars and then languishing into obscurity.
[1] Unless you've made it to "billionaire" status in which case I doubt you did it in a way that I would describe as "ethical", and I very likely do not wish you any success.
There's basically no consequences for lying when you get to that level, and many incentives to (let's say) embellishing. Jack Dorsey is looking to make billions of dollars because of this announcement. If we find out that the AI reasoning was a bold faced lie (e.g. a leaked email or voicemail or something), I doubt that the stock price will go below what it was priced a week ago as a consequence.
It bothers me. I know some people who were victims of these cuts. These are really smart, hardworking people, and I don't think they're going to be easily be replaced with Claude or Codex, but Jack Dorsey ostensibly does. It has to feel like a slap in the face to think that your employer thinks that you're replaceable with a $20/month subscription.
Though of course, the reasoning doesn't really make any fucking sense to me; if you're 40+% more productive with AI, isn't that a good reason to keep the workforce and have them make more and cooler stuff and/or improve your infrastructure? If it's more productive couldn't you make a lot more stuff and blow your competitors out of the water? Presumably a good chunk of those who just got laid off are going to go work for your competitors, and presumably the competitors will have access to the same OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions that you have.
The overhiring took place from mid 2020 through mid 2022. The reversal into layoffs started in late 2022 and was in full swing in 2023. While the overhiring problem was real, the correction was largely complete over a year ago. The layoffs we're seeing today have nothing to do with overhiring and everything to do with managing earnings to sustain equity valuations.
We had tariffs and other disruptions since. So more correction is required.
That's an interesting take, so eventually they'll just run out of these tricks and at that point the valuations will burst?
I am not sure how to be certain about this case, as the numbers (as far as I remember) still stayed higher than before. Moreover I do not think Blocks fired people back then?
But there is an extra factor, that around covid times hiring became signal for growth thus stocks went up after the hiring rates were announced, now firing is a signal for AI/efficiency, thus stocks go up when they fire people. It becomes easier to mass-fire people when it does not signal that there are problems going on (for the company).
I wonder how we all of sudden got so many candidates back from 2020 to 2022
I think it's called the Law of Demand?
Companies over-hired during COVID because the money was free thus making the labour cheap. Why are they not over-hiring now, during a time when workforce productivity is supposed to be at an all-time high?
Instead we are seeing layoffs, blaming AI, because the free-money chickens have come home to roost. These CEOs want to save face and not admit they were short-sighted during COVID.
But it isn't cheaper yet, right? Your current salary was defined pre-AI.
Now, though, maybe you're only worth a third of what you were but you can't live on a third, and your employer can't just start giving you less money, so... they lay you off then in a year or three when the tailspin starts to hit bottom, they hire Younger You for ~$X/3.
1. Employee costs x;
2. Employee produces output worth y;
3. Your profit from this particular employee is z = y - x.
So far so good. Let's assume z > 0, though of course it's not an easy statement to make with many roles, that are more like investments. But let's assume they're good investments and you're confident z is positive.
Now, if the same employee produces 2y, but doesn't receive a raise, z just improved significantly, it more than doubled. So effectively, labour just became cheaper in relation to the value of its output.
If it was that simple, layoffs would hurt profitability significantly.
Now what if you can't translate improved productivity to additional value? Simple example would be an agency with a fixed contract volume. If increases in y can't be realised, e.g. by finding more business, then the only way for the company to realise the gains is to reduce x, i.e. layoffs. z goes up right away, no business development required.
I think it's a defensive stance companies are taking. The economy is not great, they're hitting the breaks on investments, increasing their runway, shrinking to force the organisation to become more efficient. Once they're ready to invest again, they can always hire again. But I read layoffs-because-AI as "we don't know what to invest in right now, so we'll buy some time to figure that out".
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.
The US healthcare system is well and truly f'd, but I think 98% of these issue are government and society policy issues. If anything, I see so many companies trying to take advantage of the complete dysfunction in the US healthcare system to be yet another middlemen siphoning money from systemwide inefficiencies.
My primary point is that poor health outcomes in the US (fully admit my views are US-centric given my experience and knowledge) have nothing to do with a lack of technology and everything to do with structural systems issues rooted in government policies.
I'm a big fan of Dr. Jessica Knurick, who publishes at length about many of the systems that cause and contribute to population-wide poor health in the US. Here's one article taking about food systems and nutrition: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/the-food-sy... .
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.
AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".
And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.
There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.
It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.
The maintenance costs are kinda overrated: you fire up the LLM, point it at the code base and say "this needs fixing". I'd say that the maintenance costs of dealing with endless patches and fixes from a SaaS for features that you don't use is probably more onerous.
And generally we're talking about the situation where the SaaS customer is a domain expert in their area of expertise, but that isn't software development. They can use a system incredibly well, they just can't develop it. They have in-house IT folks to maintain their computers, networks, etc, and they're really just adding a couple of people to develop and maintain some applications via LLM to that team.
We're already seeing some of this, so it'll be interesting to see how far it goes.
That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report.
Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words.
Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.
So if it's distributed outside of the license, that's subject to contractual penalties? I guess that's what all the "wrapper" SaaS businesses will do.
Read that report, it defined the issues and the boundaries well, for the current generation of AI tools. As they develop and expand, it's going to get interesting, especially if robotics/3d printing etc get involved.
If I use an Optimus Prime to help create art, similar to Andy Warhol's "factory", do I own the copyright on the completed work?
If a person uses AI to generate work that ends up being patentable, are patents also not available?
All software licensing depends on copyright. If no-one owns the copyright than it can't be licensed; it's in the public domain immediately and irrevocably.
Of course, if you rip off someone else's work, and they DMCA you, then you might need to prove that they generated the entire thing using an LLM with zero human input. Though there's plenty of folks posting blog posts claiming that that's their process, so it might not be that hard.
Patents are different. For a start they cost money and effort to get. And there are lots of rules around how they're applied and how you can defend them. Very different from copyright.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted...
I feel like a lot of people are about to learn this lesson for the first time. Except in some very niche areas the majority of the value was never the code. The SaaSs that everyone thinks will be replaced had much more than code if they were successful -integrations, contracts, expertise, reputation, etc…
Exactly right
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.
There are still (always?) business opportunites to leverage technology, in what we used to think was a virtuous loop of positive feedback.
If corporates are going to build AIs to attempt to sell things to people, there's going to be an opportunity for AIs that work for an individual, a "de-enshittifier" for example.
The "big model providers" right now aren't necessarily the actual ones that will persist. We're in another dotcom-type boom and when the tide goes out, some of them will have been swimming naked.
No data points yet, except now this one.
FedNow is the underlying infra, Zelle will end up being the consumer brand wrapper around it.
In Australia, the equivalent is the New Payments Platform (NPP) and the consumer "brand" is PayID. I can associate an email address or a mobile number to a bank account. Anyone can transfer money from their bank account to mine using that ID, without knowing what account or what bank.
There are other things being built on top, like "PayTo" where businesses can set up the equivalent of direct debit agreements, like utilities billing, but the consumer can also control it without having to go through the bank paperwork.
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.
Oh and the opposite when you are one of the 10 "other" people on someone else's project.
In my own personal projects I’m flying with AI. I know what I’m doing, I know how I would implement the code. Now I can just save the labor of typing the boilerplate.
We can all read stock market charts - the business isn't doing well.
But will be interesting how the company is in 2 years, if quality falls and innovation stalls, or if it is as you say that they hit their ceiling and is already in "maintenance mode".
Its the same for meta, literally you could remove 2/3 of the head count and not have a problem with productivity (assuming you could not impact morale)
More to your point, to get from 6,000 back up to 10,000 requires a 67% increase in productivity on the remaining 6,000!
You should try to seriously vibe code and see for yourself.
It really helped me overcome my anxiety that programmers will be out of job soon.
Ah, and yes, you absolutely should repeat that exercise with every new model to reinforce your confidence.
I think this is entirely possible. I have cases right in front of me when one developer can do a job of 2 and still have some time to spare. The developers in question are very senior, architect type.
These people are deranged or are flat out liars. Customers building "features directly." Yet somehow still trapped inside their walled garden? I wonder why they imagine they can cannibalize their legs but pretend they can save their arms in the long run.
They either believe they can have it both ways or they're simply milking a hot market right now and know one shoe or the other has to drop.
All of this to say. I suspect a lot 10k person companies made up of white collar workers could significantly cut their staff and still survive. By the time you get to that size, there's a large middle management that is constantly looking for reasons to increase their 30 person org to 40, and who will be overbooked whether they have 20 people or 100.
* 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.
“Yall gonna get money and most yall fired. My bad woops”
Or maybe like the US employer that gave everyone at the company a flat wage?
@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?
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.
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".
But my point was that what was presented was a false dichotomy and that framing it as such is disingenuous to employees receiving those comms.
The assumption that people who get hired after interviewing are "better" than those who are fall off the hiring funnel underpins the entire hiring process that even Square relies on. Does the assumption seem outlandish to you?
Personally if I was offered 6+ months of severance I just couldn't justify staying even in the best companies I've been at.
> That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
That's the same thing. And they can't control which roles are lost. It's the worst thing for the company itself and those remaining.
I disagree. Slow bleeding just means everyone in the company walks around thinking they are next, never knowing when the next set of cuts are going to happen or when they are finished. Cutting 40% is a quick blow, and everyone that is left knows they are safe.
On paper you're right, but in reality while doing so you give the incentive to higher-ups to set in place measures that make the life of their underlings atrocious. Mandatory RTO for no clear reason, jumping through hoops to get anything done, cut to budgets, ... . At least that what I experienced and talking with friends that was the case for them as well.
The 2026 answer is that an AI wrote some parts.
My initial gut reaction was "he can't even be bothered to use his shift-key while dramatically altering 4,000 people's lives?"
It's just too casual for what is happening.
Oh and the bit where he claims AI efficiencies are the reason.
If I had to do this to a company I’d built I’d fire myself too. It’s an admission of a massive failure of leadership.
Their planning was terrible.
Their hiring was terrible.
They can’t think of any new projects to put these staff on.
It was not a management failure when construction companies had to lay people off during the GFC.
All the more reason to tax tech companies more to provide better welfare for the nation because we all know these business magnates are too greedy to care about other humans that aren't them.
Mining, farming, oil, solar, construction, child care, elder care, etc all have waxing and waning demand.
It’s completely detached from reality to think that once someone is hired for a job that the job will be around for 10+ years.
We'll see in time whether his company makes extraordinary gains to match his claims or whether he is just covering for his own incompetence.
Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you. Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.
I just hope the remaining employees realize they’re in an ejectable seat and stop working for people like that. It’s only a matter of time the founders sell to Bending Spoons for a final paycheck and everyone else is out.
I can imagine creating a system designed to allocate profits to a broader set of stakeholders, but that's not the system we have.
It's this part:
> Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you.
I don't think people should reasonably expect to be employed if a company doesn't need them for its future plans.
> Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.
It seems to me Block has tried a whole bunch of different things. Imagination isn't their problem. I'm not deeply familiar with their business, but my hunch is that it's more that they're giving up on some of their pie in the sky ideas and consolidating on what's working.
Now, why he keeps having to relearn the lesson I couldn't tell you. It's a mystery
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.
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 :)
and fwiw i dont know any swes struggling to find work personally
swe is so broad and in bubbles its hard to get an objective analysis
However, the chart settings were actually modified to hide/deemphasize the earlier decline: the the index date was changed. 2025-02-20=100 in their graph, default of 2020-02-01=100 would have the chart start at 64 and rise to 71.44.
this tracker shows continuous improvement since 2023
What's not shown in a graph of job postings is the demand side. With all the layoffs, out of work college grads, people staying put in jobs they are unhappy with, etc., I'd wager that demand per job is still at a historically high level compared to what we have been accustomed to
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
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.
absolutely be skeptical
In the last three transitions I applied to a grand total of 5 companies.
Also, looking at the recruiter emails I've been getting, they've been ramping up over the last few months, and I'm back up to one or two cold emails per week.
But again, I'm fairly senior, and I have deep domain knowledge in a few key areas. I understand the market is brutal if you're early career or your knowledge isn't "T" shaped.
Around 12 calls if I remember correctly. With the exception of those who ghosted me, every company was very prompt, respectful of my time, and had a reasonable process that went from first to final interview pretty fast. I got a ton of outright rejections to my resume, which I sent around a lot. Getting the first call was the hardest part. YC job board ultimately led to finding my new role.
The company I went with had the best, warmest process that reflected how they like to work and was built to find people who had overlapping priorities. Thinking back, I think that most companies either deliberately or inadvertently wind up with processes that sync up with how they are organized internally and what kind of people they hope to hire.
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.
I think there's MORe to GAiN from STAyiNg away from this deLicatE storY.
Sorry my keyboard acted up and I can't seem to delete that sentence.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
That doesn't scale to 10 jobs/day for very long because almost nobody has a network that big. If you don't land something through referral to the hiring manager, it's mostly a crap shoot these days.
What I had tried to do was start randomly requesting connection invites with people on LinkedIn in fields I was interested, and a surprisingly large number of them accepted my requests, but that didn't actually pan out to anything productive, which is a little depressing.
I hope I don't get laid off from my current gig, because now I really don't have a clue on the best way to find a job. Maybe I could try that "CEO at a big corporation" thing, it doesn't look too hard and apparently you can lay off half your staff and still be rewarded.
Need to tell more recruiters.
- I'm contacted less often
- Offered Salaries are lower, despite inflation
- They basically all required being in office, and relocating at my expense
- Most of them are from AI startups that have a decent chance of not lasting more than a few years.
Really? So no take-home projects? No leetcode? No six rounds of interviews? Just show up and express interest, you're hired!
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
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.
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.
“General and administrative expenses increased by $68.1m ... The increase was primarily driven by … an in-person company event held in Q3 2025”
But I would think 5 months paid time before you have to go on state unemployment is significantly better than the WARN act minimum of 60 days of notice or pay or the alternative of a campaign to raise attrition. Looks like recent google/meta layoffs are 4 months, so it's 25% better than that. I always thought I wanted to get a package, but I recognize that I would probably not have been happy if it happened.
So does being dumped from a relationship. You might not be able to find another relationship in 6+ months. But I don't think people would seriously propose that people should therefore not be able to leave a relationship.
The fundamental question is: Should employers be obligated to employ the people they hire forever?
/s
Maybe it’s just my background, but I’m starting to feel that a lot of people in the tech industry have never learned empathy.
I see you haven't visited the absolute delight that is team blind or you would have figured this out already.
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
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).
I dispute that this is a fact. Maybe within a small group, but startups shouldn't be possible if masses of more cooperating people led to better outcomes. A large company should always win there and that does not happen.
> What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
We don't come anywhere close to this on a global scale. Most countries aren't this way on a national scale.
Stability means removal of volatility, which means to stay stable they end up becoming more generalised, rather than the laser focus a small team like a startup can have. That laser focus can work out when applied to the right problem at the right time, but is very much not a guarantee.
Humans are violent, self-centered tribalists. What species are you referring to? Not homo sapiens.
(This is also my go-to argument against zero sum economics)
i personally want products i purchase to be cheaper and i don't want to be paying for products that are costly simply because they are hiring people for "human wellbeing".
i would rather people work in productive places than just exist in a company for some reason.
two options
- the 4000 employees can still be employed in block - thats around $600,000,000 that goes into literally no value and this is price borne by us consumers
- or the 4000 employees get fired and work in different companies that actually require them so that we as consumers can actually buy more products
by choosing option 1, you not only accept that as consumers we pay more for the product, but also miss out on other valuable work the 4000 employees can do. no good economy runs this way.
what you're talking about is the role of government. govt should be supporting policies like you are suggesting, by for example allowing for universal basic income or uniersal basic land or services, etc.
Why should society let the concept of a company exist if it is actively detrimental to society at large, for the gain of a very few?
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
Edit P.S. Should the individuals who don’t receive a job from a bailed out company get proportional tax refund?
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.
These are not incompatible realities.
I would be willing to accept the statement that corporate revenues increasing and consumer spending decreasing are incompatible realities.
But it’s feasible to think the following occurs:
- labor income falls
- consumer spending drops
- corporate revenues drop
- corporate profits moderately increase because profit margins get much higher
- government deficit continues (which, from an accounting perspective, means other accounts are in surplus, potentially US corporations)
I’m not saying I strongly predict the above, necessarily! I just don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a conceivable reality.
on a macro-level yes; CEOs are only thinking about firm-level though (other tech firms will act differently or tech is small part of total economy, many ways to rationalize). they should be assuming others will follow in their footsteps but they are not incentivized to model that or think in the longterm.
But if you are okay with getting some heads chopped off with a guillotine from time to time, feel free to believe that.
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...
Or just be a psychopath.
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.
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
Block has never really made a real profit. These layoffs are basically saying the company is no longer in moonshot mode and it’s now in the extraction phase of whatever it has, which means increase prices for whatever it sells and decrease expenses, i.e. payroll.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XYZ/block/net-inco...
Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."
They literally did that. The irony is that the top comment is pointing out (correctly, IMO) how Block had all these people working on speculative projects for years and none of them really panned out.
Bold of you to assume he gives a single shit about it.
Yes, because there's always work somewhere. People that can't find jobs are often just unwilling to move to where the jobs are, or unwilling to take jobs that they think are beneath them.
>> yes we over-hired during covid because i incorrectly built 2 separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than 1, which we corrected mid 2024. but this misses all the complexity we took on through lending, banking, and BNPL. and that we’re now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person, 4x our pre-covid efficiency, which stayed flat at ~$500k from 2019 until 2024. we have and do run an efficient company... better than most.
https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2027290756793135253
I.E OVER-HIRED
Now the question is will that sustain? Are 50% of us doomed? Is it temporary, and a reversal will take place? Will it start and sputter?
This was before LLMs writing code was a daily discussion topic. Blaming every layoff on AI is mostly people connecting trending headlines together.
That seems really high. Do they have such moat that nobody can move into their space?
Yeah they’re going nowhere in the long term.
Jack's trademark it seems.
I've never seen Toast outside of bars/restaurants (although they are ubiquitous in that segment). Every other service or retail shop has been Square, especially farmers markets and craft fairs.
I feel sorry for anyone who joined recently and then got laid off because they company wasn't planning properly.
> 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.
(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)
Have you considered their internal use has already proven AI's capability to them?
We're supposed to believe Jack is a victim of circumstance. He hired all those people, and now he has no choice but to fire them - he wasn't clairvoyant to the future when he hired all those people, or else he'd known he would have had to fire them. But now since he is clairvoyant to the future, he knows he must fire them.
We are all as childrens playthings right now.
He owns 1 million Class A shares and 79.7%(!!!) of Block's Class B shares: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/0cb664c...
Its funny how for him, he is enriched by this option as the stock price rises, and its couched in words like responsibility. I was taught when I failed at something that responsibility meant making amends to the people wronged. His reputation taking a hit doesn't come even close to the loss of 4000 people's livelihoods - he will not lose one of his presumably many houses.
> tacit mea culpa
This is the opposite of a mea culpa, this is saying there is no choice and the decision is inevitable, and he is only allowed (by the very framework he constructed) to do it fast or slow.
Put another way: if both parties agree on a shorter or longer notice period, I wouldn't expect that to affect any potential severance package. It's just the notice period.
We're talking about worker's comp here. In this thread specifically, the UK is brought up as having generally "better" severance packages. But that's only half the story if you count things which the workers pay the companies when they're the ones quitting.
I worked in the UK, I've had to "pay" for that notice period by hanging around where I didn't want to. It's the other side of the coin which somehow doesn't get mentioned when people bring up Europe as somehow having better employee protections. They might, but notice periods ain't that.
If I had to put as much money into a company's retirement as they put in mine, I wouldn't turn around when I retire and say, wow, great comp package. No: this was a symmetrical deal we made, this time it's working out for me--in a parallel universe it's working out for you; it's a wash.
Severance packages are comp. Notice periods are just properties of the contract. They're not a severance package.
I find this an important distinction because it lets companies pull the wool over your eyes by pretending they're being generous, when really they're just paying you the exact same thing you'd have to pay them were you the one quitting. That's not a package, that's just salary.
Working my notice period has never be even an issue for me. It gives me an opportunity to wrap up projects, say goodbye to colleagues, etc. It's usually fairly light work as well, you're not taking on new responsibilities. I didn't even realise it could be otherwise.
The reason I'm saying it's part of the redundancy package is because (some?) companies will pay off your notice period without you having to actually work it. I've taken voluntary redundancy only once, and I was told that I would stop working at the end of the month, but I was still paid my full 3 months of notice (in addition to the tax-free redundancy payout). That was not part of the initial contract.
Jack should fire himself if performance was the criteria. Like you said he has lead his company to 75% down over the last 5 years.
What kind of responsibility is he taking, exactly? Has he stepped down? How much money has he lost when stock rose 23%?
AI software development is the present, not the future. You don't need to be a clairvoyant to see AI replaced (some) developers.
AI writes code. It doesn't fix organizational problems.
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.
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!
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.
Is the site functional? Sure, I guess. I think the amount of traffic shrinking also has something to do with the viability with fewer engineers
The recommendation algorithm they implement is a choice they make, it is not that if they had more engineers they would deploy a “better” one.
Every recommendation algorithm is, in the end, “bad” in some way.
The TikTok algorithm was considered the non plus ultra among recommendation algos; now you cannot watch a video of a cat on TikTok for more than 5 seconds that the next 50 videos they serve you are of cats.
The Netflix recommendation algorithm has not shown something to me that I considered hidden but interesting in years. They just show you whatever they want to push, mostly (I worked there).
You buy a pan to cook steaks on Amazon and, for some reason, the algorithm recommends to buy it along with stroboscopic lights.
If that were the case, it would also be easy to hire hundreds more. With the confusing mix of X.ai, Grok, and SpaceX, I don't think anyone would notice.
X seems to be much more relevant to social and political debate than any other social media platform, which, despite a declining user base, makes it an extremely valuable tool for Musk and his circle.
It may seem like I'm defending or supporting Musk, but that's not my point. What I can say is that Musk made a huge bet when he substantially, even dramatically, reduced X's workforce, and I think he won that particular bet.
It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.
I remember that for years people complained about DMs in Twitter being “broken” and without any search function.
The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People talk crap about shareholders on here but in reality, shareholders would hate to know management are rejecting highly qualified candidates for people they can 'manage' better.
Dozens of rejections, and you get to a point where it becomes a waste of time to even apply. Also, many of the job postings are clearly fake; companies like Capital One, JP Morgan, or NBC, just to name the first three companies that come to my mind, have been advertising the same positions for months, if not years.
What happens is that you fall out of the loop and become invisible, if not an outcast that no one wants to touch. You reach out to your network and you receive cold indifference; all the "friends" you thought you had are not interested in providing any factual support (e.g., strong referrals). Basically, it comes to a point where you are begging for attention and some support.
What's discouraging is that there are so many people in leadership positions who have terrible leadership skills or competence. Not that it's something others should think I possess, I'm clearly biased in this case, but they certainly don't have it.
The world is what it is, and plenty of people get laid off and are able to get interviews and find jobs. I am certainly in part responsible for the situation I am in (not in the sense that I did anything shameful or despicable, in the sense that maybe I should have spent time developing a network different from the one I have), but it is not a fun situation to be in.
I interviewed dozens of candidates over the years, and I have seen some crazy resumes (10 pages, every technology under the sun listed, dubious certifications). Mine is certainly not one of them.
The part that stands out is that you are getting rejection emails from automated systems. With your pedigree, you should be talking direct to whoever is hiring — you’ve earned the right to bypass the automated system in the eyes of most people hiring.
When we are hiring and receive hundreds of applications, we only manage to review a few and send the same rejection to everyone else — even though we haven’t read their application.
At a minimum, you should be getting conversations with the teams you are applying to and then a personal rejection. If you are not getting beyond screening, with your credentials, it is a process issue.
Have you tried going direct to the teams? For larger companies, that can be via LinkedIn, and for startups / smaller companies you should be able to find their email.
If I were in your position, I would be identifying companies I want to work at that are hiring, and then send an email to their most senior technical person (probably CTO). You are talking senior-to-senior, and if they are interested, you will bypass the whole automated system. I can think of a couple of companies that regularly post in the HN hiring threads that would be a great fit for you.
Any suggestion that you are too expensive or over qualified sounds like a nice explanation but even if those things are true, you should still be getting interviews and personal rejections. Hiring is a painful process for most companies, the chance to talk to someone qualified is a nice treat.
I also contacted hiring managers via email and LinkedIn, but I received virtually no response.
At this point, you might think that there is something wrong with me (professionally speaking), that I have a bad reputation of some kind, but that is not the case.
The market is clearly telling me that there is no need for someone with my credentials on paper. Many people find jobs, even quite easily, and millions of people are employed in the tech industry. But thousands of people in the tech industry are also looking for jobs every day and have a stronger network than I do. Either they are looking for you, or they are looking for someone like you, and in the latter case, there are you and hundreds of others. Have I really tried everything? No, but I've tried a lot.
I want to make it clear that I was presenting my case in response to a question and that this is not a “poor me” post (in fact, I am anonymous and there are no links to my real identity). I am in a privileged position: I have decent savings and can get by for quite a reasonable time, but it is certainly quite disconcerting, disorienting, frustrating, and, frankly, sometimes humiliating not even to get an interview, or a call back.
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.
100% lower case is 100% a choice.
Thanks jack dorsey, for letting us know you're that sort of person. At least he refers to himself that way too, although he should sign off with: jack off.
Someone needs to have this conversation with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM
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.
"don’t care. no grammar."
Sounds like a false dichotomy. The third option is that he could have kept them around. It would be financially feasible given that "our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.".
If the company is shifting into maintenance mode, cutting 40% of the staff is the right move, but definitely hurts shareholders b/c they valued the company as growth, not maintenance.
Staying in a company where you're not wanted is a miserable experience. The company will do anything to make you leave. Plus, it weakens companies and makes for a poor general worker experience.
What should be done instead is mandate generous severance packages that increase with tenure. But give companies a clear path to fire people when they don't want to employ them anymore.
This is the reason why we need the laws in the first place. Many people leave their countries, move their families, buy houses/flats, plan for stability just to be what? Laid off, because investors said so or tripping CEO woke up on the wrong side of the bed? We’re talking about people for fucks sake, workers aren’t Docker pods that are scaled up and down. If they are, they should be compensated for the constant risk they bear.
I suspect that they are. US tech workers likely make dramatically more than the country you are from with better worker protections.
A quick check of the share price tells the story, they should really pivot back from blocks to squares.
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”.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
They had to go through a process extensively justifying losses (mostly that certain jobs were no longer relevant as they were pre-digital workforce), negotiate with unions and offer voluntary leaving conditions.
The resulting offer was good enough that more workers applied to be fired than were necesssary. For context, the deal was basically to pay them 70% of their current salary from the dismissal moment until their retirement at 63.
1. Company's in financial trouble and forced to downsize.
2. The position becomes obsolete and there's no option to transition you into some other role. In this case, the company can't hire anyone with a similar-enough skillset to yours for at least a year (or maybe even longer, I'm not sure).
3. Gross incompetence, in which case you need to be given an opportunity to course correct via a few documented warnings before being fired. Every warning requires your signature so that the company can't just make them up and backdate them.
That said, you don't become a permanent employee on day one, a company can issue up to three fixed-term contract before being forced to give you a permanent one. If you're on a fixed-term contract, they can just not extend it without having to satisfy any of the criteria above. But after a maximum of 3 years at the same company (as the maximum length for a fixed-term contract is one year), the criteria for firing you increases drastically.
So, the only way this could happen in my country is if the company stops renewing fixed-term contracts for recent employees, but then it wouldn't all be at the same time and you'd get the hint before the time comes to plan accordingly.
I like how none of you ever reveal this mysterious country you're from, probably so you don't get called on the claims you're making.
Anyway, in my country unemployment is 0% and everyone is rich and there are no problems. Why can't your country achieve the same?
Where? I want to move there immediately. I bet you’re lying though.
Nothing to do with biggest economy in the world for sure.
Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.
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.
Yes, which is why it’s not helpful to bring up a completely different economic system with an unfamiliar culture.
Why are you saying this in the next sentence:
> yet we live longer and with higher quality of life
Sure, we agree there. It’s not like needing profitability is a weird quirk of the American system. I am not criticizing the layoffs, but the layoffs while mentioning business is booming and they have no reasons forcing their hand.
I’m curious about your point of view, would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude? Firing half the workers while agreeing that there is no pressure to let anyone go looks good to you?
I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me. I think we are in business relationship where both sides win. If circumstances change I understand I may need to find a new job.
They don’t need to be. You can both recognize a freedom to do something and yet consider it wrong.
The fact that you and your employer both are approaching a negotiation freely does not make the relationship balanced.
If you leave a company of 10k people, the CEO will not be waking up the next morning in anxiety wondering how to feed their children. If said CEO fires 5k people, many of the fired workers will. A business owner who is not aware and respectful of this fact is not acting morally.
I wasn’t at all upset that they chose to lay me off. I wouldn’t have felt any guilt about leaving that job when it was no longer economically beneficial to me, so why would I expect anything different from them? This is a business transaction, I’m selling labor, I’m not entitled to a buyer. The outrage over layoffs seems so bizarre to me.
Your inefficient and non-competitive private sector isn't growing fast enough to fund your growing demand for free stuff in the public sector.
Maybe if companies and entrepreneurs were allowed to shift more rapidly to meet market demand your legacy giants (and social welfare meal ticket) wouldn't be sitting ducks for the Chinese to swoop in and kill.
Bankruptcy exists precisely so you are not in debt for life. It's a setback, but not irrecoverable.
?
The goal of the economy should be to move people quickly to where they can do the most good for society. Note that this has little to do with how hard these folks are working, how smart they are, or how 'worthy' they are. The point is just to have people doing the most useful work.
I’m guessing that by that logic, narcos and casino owners should be celebrated, and running a charity should be a crime.
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.
i.e. we finally decided to audit head count from post covid-era.
> paired with smaller and flatter teams
i.e. management was axed
I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool.
How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?
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.
Claiming than a small group with AI can accomplish more than a large group with AI doesn’t make sense.
More likely the company doesn’t have enough work for the large group.
That's not the scenario. The scenario is a large group vs a large group cut into a small group.
The chaos and disruption of slicing 1/2 the company would more than offset any gains. We got people. Not machines. Not everyone adapts so fast. Team work and efficiencies take time.
Presumably, because some of these areas are cost centers versus profit generating.
But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just paying people to sit around, or even worse, pretend they're busy.
This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best
Once projects get bigger they need more devs and also move slower.
Put a team of 1-3 devs on MS Word and see how fast they move...
[Full credits to wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division (The company behind what's gonna be essentially StarOffice/Later OpenOffice/Libreoffice given Libreoffice is a fork of OpenOffice)
Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Their number of employees by the late 1997/1990's from the wiki article suggests 170. They/StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s
There aren't many true MSword alternatives for what its worth but I found a gnome project which is interesting from alternativeto https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/AbiWord/-/project_members
There seem to be 5 main members (I am not counting the Gitlab Admin and administrator)
Interestingly, If I remember correctly, I saw Alexandar Franke in here, I have actually talked to alexandar franke a long time ago on matrix back when I used to use fractal. It was definitely a fun surprise to see him in this project as well.
Aside from that, I think the problem with MS word to me feels like it tried to copy the features of previous word processors including quirks and now anything which wants to be MS word competitor is sometimes forced to copy these quirks as well which to me feels like the stressful cause for the reason why we don't see too many new approaches within this space (in my limited opinion)
Also AbiWord is dead, sadly.
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.
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.
They're making their own accommodations, rather than trying to change the course: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
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...
And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.
If your definition of success is 'let's keep the codebase running and make sure servers don't go bust' then yes twitter is doing great with fewer people
Longer tweets? Analytics? Premium? Grok? AI autogenerated news summaries? Livestreaming? I honestly have a harder time trying to think of features launched between 2011 and 2022, besides spaces.
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
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
and the best part is that when others follow, ZIRP will be back.
this is going to be a proper mess.
Is it actually AI-related cost restructuring, or did they simply hire too many people? They will obviously prefer to tell a story about AI rather than bad management.
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.
assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.
did he suggest no difference in outcome in terms of profits?
Everything I said was based off of jack's post, as I quoted it. If you take issue with the non-specificity ot think he was being less than honest - take it up with jack.
>>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.
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 guess factory workers felt it when robots started appearing, and there are many other similar examples of tech eating entire classes of worker. Except we're so deep in this coding rabbit hole that I dunno where else we end up.
If all you know is code, where do you go?
If you don't use AI you'll fall behind. If you do, you're accelerating your own redundancy.
I wouldn't consider myself a champion for AI. If you read my comment history you'll see that. I don't preach its wonders or pretend that we're all happy-fluffy in this world of ours. I mostly write my own code, use AI for review and to handle the trivial boring bits. I do use AI to build random tools I'd never want to take time away from "real" work to build, like helper scripts, nice TUIs for manual processes, etc. I do recognise the irony though.
One thing I can say is that if we, as a collective of white collar workers gonna lose our jobs fast, then I wouldn’t fret much because it won’t be on me alone to fix it, it’ll be a large chunk of humanity’s problem. Revolutions and uprisings have ensued far less dire situations.
Sure, you can say that you won’t fret much but if you’re in a place without much social security, you’re not going to have a safety net. The revolution might not be in your benefit either, if there is one, which would only come when more people have their AI bubble popped.
It's fascinating how rich individuals like this guy still believe that shit. I told three years ago also people that you don't have to fear the ai revolution as it's only empowering us workers more. I fully believed it. I'm still one of the foremost experts on AI in my region but fast-forward im not telling people anymore that illusion. I work for a big corporation and am involved in the strategic decisions so i know that we're cutting tens of thousands of jobs because of ai while at the same time telling workforce "softer" reasons to not panic.
it's a casual point of discussion at my company because people expect a spike in attrition next year when those grants run out, everyone is holding onto the golden handcuffs.
I have heard this once in a while.. really it refers to a hair grooming aesthetic that is disallowed somehow, perhaps.
> he spends his time meditating
said like it is a bad thing. Of course yes, this is a bad thing to many people, I agree.. but among very smart people in California, if he really does that well, it is a plus actually..
> talking about Bitcoin
very polarizing, with grandstanding on both sides of the aisle, agree. However, isn't Bitcoin legal now? as in, a large scale political change in most places where readers of this page might be reading?
overall, the combination of things to point out to launch big criticisms, is more interesting than the fact of criticisms at all, at the moment
Dorsey is a certain type of character. For good or bad, it's worth understanding those who you associate with or who you allow to hold authority over you so you're not surprised when they act in entirely predictable ways.
The guy's a grifter, Block spent $68 million on a single party and we're all supposed to believe that the executive leadership is blameless? I wasn't born yesterday.
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"?
"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?
To the extent you have successful products, it's because you have product managers and engineers and data scientists and depending on the product, integration/forward deployed staff. These should be the people with a view to how the product needs to meet the needs of future customers, the challenges faced by existing customers, and the technical components needed to get there. I'm not saying you encourage them to just spitball ideas from ignorance, I'm saying you solicit their expertise on the limits and needs of your products, systems, tools, processes, messaging etc.
If your goal is to pivot the company into new verticals, or to develop an entirely new product, then "asking staff for ideas" isn't a likely way to succeed.
Most of the staff doesn't have the visibility into the business to understand what may or may not make money. You can have a great idea, even on that could be a successful product, but it could still be a bad fit for the business.
These companies could spin up entirely new lines of business, but why? It's much better for someone else to start that business and hire the best people for it.
There is no reason why businesses must continue growing, or even existing - even if they are run well and profitably. The universe changes, and business come and go to align with that.
Their stock price has been flat for like 4 years and they have no advantage in this new AI world that would change that. These layoffs would have happened AI or not.
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
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.
Owning a decision means you have something at stake if things go wrong. What would happen to Jack if this decision turns out to be wrong? Any consequences?
Honestly, If I was one of those being asked to stay, I'll be more worried and stressed because, as one commented on the tweet: to those staying...what I'm asking of you is to build with me and help me replace you too
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...
Now some here are about to experience a repeat of the years 2000 and 2008 put together.
"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?"
There’s proof of tech firms engaging in explicit collusion back in the 00’s.
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"?
It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
You must be living under a rock..
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.
Um, no?
Nailed it
> 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
Simple, 1000+ salaries > 10000 x100$/m Claude seats.
I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?
I showed ChatGPT(free-tier) the API response and the part of the code reading it, and it fixed it in 5 seconds. Would've been pretty short either way less than 30-40 mins but it's very good for simple tasks like these. The solution is just correct.
From what I hear, that's kind of true across the industry. I wonder how things would be different if all these press releases pointed to Temporal as the cause rather than AI. It's kind of weird to think about. (Not that I think Temporal is the reason behind the layoffs either, but just as a thought experiment).
The future rocks
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.
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!
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
I wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of layoffs across the industry like we had in 2022.
This has nothing to do with AI. It is just a desperate move from a badly run company.
That's like Atlassian changing its ticker to "VIBE" in desperation. Look kids, we're so in tune with you! Please come vibe on Jira!
The company is going through a hard time, and we need to let people go. So how do we explain it in a way that isn't gonna scare investors away?
Do we admit that we overhired, or that we're running out of money, or that we couldnt find the right markets? No, we don't. Instead, we explain the layoffs as AI.
This way, investors will think we are innovating, and may not think to look deeper to see the actual issues.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
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.
- 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
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.
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
Notice growth is still purportedly the priority, but if it was just about growth and AI was a growth driver they wouldn't need to cut half the company, it would just be growing. It's the transformation ritual that matters. That's what gets investor's attention. You cut thousands of jobs and announce its because of AI, congratulations you're a hot new AI company. Now the hiring can start. Faang has the same number of employees as they did before the cuts started.
Methinks "AI" is only a figleaf here.
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.
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
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.
Being in a company that has done the gradual cuts, instead of one big cut, I unironically agree. I must have dodged like 15 staff reductions at this point. Company would be in a better state if the decision was taken to go for it big time. Still, it must be hard and shocking - but only once.
I don't buy anything this weirdo says.
>in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...
It's nice that the laid off employees are treated better than many other places. Everywhere I worked, laid off employees were instantly cut off from all access. I would say my goodbyes to them later through LinkedIn.
With the changes to the H1B in the US, it seems it's trending to offshoring and a smaller market in general, which is a bummer for US-based people, but even then I'd just like this all settled.
* Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count.
* Shares of the payment company skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading. It was last seen up nearly 18% in Friday’s premarket.
2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?
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?"
Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...
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
Making it seem like there's only going to be one mass layoff round. There will be another one, you can be certain.
My goal for this year is to cost Tidal / Block at least 2x of what I pay for it (so if I pay $100, make them pay $200).
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.
In some cases, you have vast ability to produce and serve, but the buyers are gone.
To be clear I’m not saying it was AI. I just wonder, why come out and say it like that? What’s the incentive vs. other reasons?
holy moly
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
This part really fustrated me
Oh boy, I've heard that one before. They're in trouble.
World class software tinkerer, but no business running a public company.
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.
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?
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.
at the previous productivity it was 10,000 employees. not 10,001 nor 9,999.
at the current productivity it is 6,000.
why are you so sure that the 6,001th employee can increase profits but not the 10,001th employee before AI?
> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers
The implied claim is that they have more work to do but need fewer people to do the extra work effectively
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
- 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?
With transfer you have 4k people looking and eligible for new role. With no H1B transfer, less people are looking for work and citizens and green card holders have higher chance to land roles in a few companies still hiring.
Besides if you are looking for work there is very little difference between foreigner on H1B taking the role and role being outsourced to India. Either way you do not have the job.
Square’s ecosystem is expected to contribute $1.77 billion, while Cash App is expected to provide $58.3 million to transaction revenues.Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
For some reason he deliberately avoids using the word 'artificial' here.
More information: getclera.com/block It's 100% free for Talents. If you refer a talent we place into a new job, you get 1000 USD.
Called it. This will be for every single software company. Maybe all companies.
More information: getclera.com/block
Its 100% free
Imo companies cannot fucking help themselves but continue to grow. Meta is already back above 2021 headcount, after cutting 20k employees in 2022. Managers want to Senior Managers want to be Directors want to be VPs. The best way to do that is to grow "scope" aka people under you. And since Jack wants to be Elon and Elon wants to be God, they will happily buy that story...
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?
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.
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%!
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
EDIT: I guess if it comes with 300% raise I'd pause for a bit to think about it, but otherwise absolutely not.
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
All this paradox stuff is irrelevant if the constraint on human's ability to progress is imagination. LLMs wont help with that - the human still needs to have foresight and vision. Which frankly most lack.
Come on now, it's not going to be the only round.
Time will tell. As of today, there are strong indications this statement stands on weak knees. Copium is a term I recently heard in that context, and it fits.
Software developer in general are probably looking for some fucked up situation here.
But, otherwise, I'm onboard with the principle.
Why are billionaires so allergic to using capital letters at the start of sentences? You're laying people off, it just shows how little you actually care about the detail.
"i'll own it" doesn't mean ANYTHING. You've kept your job, your money, your security. You haven't owned anything because your decision doesn't make you accountable to anyone.
Additionally, not a single person is being "asked to leave". Every single one of those people is being _told_ to leave, and given no choice about it.
Language matters, and this entire post shows how little they care.
We built something amazing. You built it, technically. But now the real builders are smaller teams, intelligence tools, and whatever abstraction survives the next earnings call.
For the parade of mickey-mouse tech companies solving nothing and shipping products nobody asked for, the takeaway is simple: labor has become a narrative liability.
The whole thing reads like aestheticized detachment. A founder persuading himself, in pretentious all-lowercase, that mass layoffs are a principled design choice instead of the predictable invoice for years of vibe-driven growth theater. These seig-heiling, chest thumping technofascist founders are so cliche and nauseating, fucking Peter Thiel / Musk lord of the rings bunch of nerds.
Hard to imagine a better reminder of why walking away from tech back in 2023 for me felt like oxygen. I guess I consider it a luxury to read headlines like this and scoff at it from a safe distance. Dogshit industry.
> 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.
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
I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.
CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs.
There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you prefer it to going out and trying to grow your own company from scratch.
Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
Also, there are plenty of regular employees who suck at their jobs and yet manage to hold onto them, get promoted, get new and lucrative job offers, etc.
Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on.
Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportionate negative affects compared to what executives face for making terrible decisions in the first place. Jack still keeps his aspen home and whatever wealth he’s extracted out of the company. So he faces no real downside here. He could run block into the ground and still have more money than he would know what to do with.
You’re arguing about shares of paper entitling people to do things to other people’s lives without facing much actual consequence in their personal lives.
Not to mention professional, I’ve watched executives jump from company to company doing terrible things and they still keep getting hired.
Where as the average person is often advised to reduce or obfuscate the fact they were laid off less there be discrimination.
Now you can argue that executives shouldn’t face higher consequences in exchange for wielding such immense power over the lives of those which they employ, I ask that you say it plain, don’t hide behind feigned guise of people who live in a world where they don’t have a choice but to work for corporations or not have a roof over their head and basic needs met.
It’s fine if you want to defend that, but don’t act like people are just making a deliberate choice. This is a choice society has made for them and the wealthiest perpetuate
Yes, yes, they do. So what?
All else being equal, greater wealth generally brings greater ease and comfort. A billionaire’s life is easier than a millionaire’s, a millionaire’s life is easier than being a middle-class Westerner, middle class living is easier than living below the poverty line, living below the poverty line in a wealthy country is easier than being poor in a developing country, and being poor in a developing country is easier than surviving as a subsistence farmer or living without shelter at all.
All else being equal, if you're a majority owner in a company, you're going to get away with a lot more than if you are a smaller owner, or a non-owner, or an employee, or a customer. All else being equal, if you're a general in the military, you're going to have more power and more leeway than if you're a lieutenant or a private.
Etc etc.
I fail to see what is wrong with this.
What no_wizard and others in this thread are upset about is the owner/leadership of a company firing employees from that company. no_wizard goes so far as to suggest that that's "entitled" behavior.
IMO he has it exactly backwards.
We have at-will employment in 49 out of 50 states for a reason. You're adults entering into a mutually agreed upon contract where you trade money for services rendered. Your company is not your parent/nanny/caretaker who owes you continued employment and predictability in life. And vice versa, if you are a company owner, your employees are not your slaves who owe you work or continued employment.
Employees have the freedom to quit at any time, and owners have the freedom to fire them at any time. Both of these actions can adversely affect the other party, but that's life. People are free to do what they want with their own companies and their own availability as employees, and just because we would prefer them to continue giving us money or employment doesn't mean we are owed that. Neither quitting nor firing is entitled.
What is entitled is the belief that you are somehow owed your job (or vice versa, that you are owed continued tenure by your employees), and that for them to cancel the at-will contract when they no longer want it is worthy of punishment.
It is entitled behavior. In the very literal sense of the word entitled. They wouldn't have such power to affect so many people unless they had a form of entitlement.
>We have at-will employment in 49 out of 50 states for a reason. You're adults entering into a mutually agreed upon contract where you trade money for services rendered. Your company is not your parent/nanny/caretaker who owes you continued employment and predictability in life. And vice versa, if you are a company owner, your employees are not your slaves who owe you work or continued employment.
We don't have at will employment because workers decided its what's best for the arrangement. There's been systematic efforts by business lobbying politicians. Its a well documented history. At will employment overwhelming benefits employers, not employees. Its not an equal relationship. The reason we have at will employment so prevalent is because it undermines unions. Its not because its the best and most equitable arrangement between employers and employees
>What is entitled is the belief that you are somehow owed your job (or vice versa, that you are owed continued tenure by your employees), and that for them to cancel the at-will contract when they no longer want it is worthy of punishment.
Who said anything about owed a job? What I'm saying is there is a lack of consequences for executives and by extension companies.
Triggering a wealth tax would be one. Companies that are profitable laying off thousands of people being required to pay fairer severances would be another form of consequence.
The specifics of all that can be debated, what I'm saying head on though is there should be higher consequences for their stupidity and inability to deploy resources effectively.
At-will employment came about in the 1870s and predates the predates major union battles and influence. It's part of American culture, which treats adults like adults who are able to make decisions on their own. I support it as both an employer and and employee. It's a big reason there's so much mobility in the tech industry and in other areas with high-skilled employees.
In many places that don't have at-will employment, employees get stronger firing protections, sure, but it's also common that they have to give longer notice before quitting, can be subject to more stringing non-competes, etc.
I don't want any of that. People should be able to quit, and companies should be able to fire, and the consequences for the other party are not either party's responsibility. As a business owner, it's your company, and you need to be prepared for employees to quit. As an employee, it's your life, and you need to be financially prepared to lose your job at all times.
I absolutely do not want a nanny market that forces private citizens to be responsible for each other. That's what the government is for. We already made this mistake tying healthcare to businesses and employment. It's a huge mistake.
If you want to benefit more from at-will employment, you can learn more and get a higher skilled job with more bargaining power. Or you can take the massive risk to start and own your own company. If you don't want to do that, then that's your choice.
---
> What I'm saying is there is a lack of consequences for executives and by extension companies.
There are consequences. If you mismanage your company, it will fail. This happens tens of thousands of times per day in America.
Similarly, if you're an adult, and you go out and get a job, and you don't prepare for the fact that you might lose that job at any time for any reason, then there are consequences for you. The second you go out an sign an employment contract, you should prepare for the very obvious and predictable circumstance that your job might someday end. This is not someone else's responsibility. It's your sole responsibility.
It's not fellow citizens' or your boss' job or your company's job to nanny you and manage your financial situation in life. That's what the government is for. If you fail to prepare in life, then you can fall back to government entitlement programs, which are aptly named, because they are benefits you are entitled to.
You're absolutely not entitled to someone else who owns a company taking care of you, or worrying about what happens after you lose your job, or any other part of your private life. Just like they are not entitled to you worrying about what happens to the company if you quit.
Nor is either party entitled to some sort of weird vindictive emotion they may have to punish or hurt the other side if the employment contract is unilaterally ended. Thank god.
---
> Triggering a wealth tax would be one. Companies that are profitable laying off thousands of people being required to pay fairer severances would be another form of consequence. The specifics of all that can be debated, what I'm saying head on though is there should be higher consequences for their stupidity and inability to deploy resources effectively.
I don't see why. This just seems vindictive/punitive to me.
The market already punishes companies for mismanagement. As much as everybody likes to focus on the tiny percentage of really rich companies that do well enough to survive a big mistake, the vast majority of founders and CEOs never get to that level. They lose their companies and possibly their shirts before that ever happens.
If you start a company and you get through the gauntlet and you make it successful enough and rich enough that you can employ thousands of people, that's great. It was your competence that created those jobs, and your incompetence (or straightforward market forces) can destroy them, and that's that. If other people don't like it, they can go work somewhere else.
It's just very hard for me to understand this alternative perspective you're promoting, which imo fails to treat adults as adults, and is more akin to a nanny situation. I'm very grateful to live in the US where the game is played differently, and the last thing I want is for it to turn into something resembling Europe.
I like individual responsibility. I like treating adults like adults. I like the fact that the sky is the limit and the ceiling is high for the most skilled and ambitious people. And hell, I also like having a high floor. I just think that floor needs to come from the government and taxes.
What I don't like is this entitled idea that one's fellow citizens need to be their nannies, need to be punished, or need to be held down, just because they're successful.
And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.)
Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.
Jesus.. why do 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.
"Your call is very important to us."
"We take security very seriously."
PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
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.
I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages.
About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?
Someone will inevitably have to prompt AIs, CEOs and other executives are NOT going to be doing it themselves. The people driving those AI will have greater leverage as less and less people choose a career in tech.
Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available.
What I see more likely is a future where software engineers do even less work but frustratingly you still need them around to fix problems whenever they come up. Kind of like firefighters.
Actually its more “when an AI fucks up in a way AI that you need a human to take the blame, the human must be available”
And note, this pattern is going to repeat across the entire white collar workforce, because the same pyramid scheme holds everywhere in knowledge work.
A new equilibrium will be found, but that will be years, maybe a decade+ away? That's the period of turmoil I am concerned about.
The people decreasing headcount are already behind the curve. They're thinking about how many people they need to run things instead of how many people they need to reinvent an industry.
I think in the (very) long run it will end up being for the best. This will force us lowly serfs to grow beyond our wage-labor mindset and leverage this force multiplier for ourselves.
AI lets those with capital get rid of labor, but by the same token(s ;-)) labor can now achieve outsize results without capital!
It is going to be very uncomfortable, but evolution always is.
This is a very interesting perspective, I haven't thought of it like that.
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_/
i love that he casts it as:
a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch 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?
...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
> 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?
You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic.
They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels.
If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.
Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.
The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.
> While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.
IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...
But I guess we'll just have to defer to the AI experts at...the Financial Times...and their emotional vibes of the situation instead.
> The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.
That’s not evidence. That’s a belief. I’m not disagreeing they overhired, but this statement contains no evidence that reducing the size of the company like this is going to yield the same or greater profits.
That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place.
Literally on their homepage:
"Block builds technology for economic empowerment"
How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend started like 4-5 years ago.
But even if it was...I'm struggling to understand how "overhiring" is a bad thing for the actual workers who were overhired.
So too many people got paid massive big tech salaries for the last 5 years. How horrible for them? They were robbed of...the opportunity to be paid half as much money working in a non-tech job?
It's bad for inflation in the economy broadly since it's money not being efficiently allocated, but for these 'overhired' people it was literally a life changing amount of money they're better off having had even if it ends now (with an extremely cushy 6 month severance I should add).
It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.
A lot of smart and talented people could do this if given the opportunity. Jack was at the right place at the right time and had enough talent. Same with Elon and others. That’s kind of what happens when you have a population of hundreds of millions, a few get lucky and have enough talent to not screw it up.
It’s best to avoid being delusional and acting like billionaires are 5000 IQ geniuses. They’re regular people too, albeit, yes they are smarter than the average person you pull out of Walmart.
There are also plenty of smart people who simply do not care to run or start businesses.
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.
also you're fired
No matter what he wrote, it was going to be insulting.
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..
Maybe he should have had AI fix up the grammar/spelling for him...
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.
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.
> 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.