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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

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softwaredoug·

Pre pandemic Block had ~4000 employees

They grew to 11000

Now they’re going to shrink to 6000

The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive

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This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.

I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it

I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.

> whatever AI cost restructuring happening today

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.

> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers

and the best part is that when others follow, ZIRP will be back.

this is going to be a proper mess.

They also did all that expansion with a focus on cryptocurrencies, and the hype has died on those so it makes sense to reel in investments there.

They're back to 6,000 not 5,000.

Thank you. fixed.

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