Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Who tf cares about a random quote included in the trailer?
Here's a subtitle for a He-Man movie trailer from the other day: "Skeletor took my family and he destroyed our world."
I mean, anything would have been better than that, and "Another attempt at live action movie based on 80s action figure" or even "in theatres on X.Y." would be Pulitzer material in comparison.
Hiring talent that is passionate about delivering a quality product is more important than ever considering there are so many ways to take shortcuts now that might not be obvious until later.
If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs.
A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also know of one F10 that's building it's own entire security platform from scratch with a team of security engineers working directly with one of the foundation model vendors.
Too many people on HN are divorced or too OOTL from some of these initiatives and then get blindsided during layoffs.
What matters now is DOMAIN EXPERIENCE. Do you understand good development principles and the problem your ICP is trying to solve and how pricing, packaging, and procurement is structured? I don't need a code monkey, process sloths, and queens of the calendar. I need domain experts who can actually execute.
What separates a code monkey from a domain expert? Can you use infosec and embedded systems as two examples please?
The "just prototype it" thinking addresses "feasibility uncertainty". It surfaces blind spots and helps people tangibly reason about what the product looks like. It's a great exploratory tool for incremental ideas.
But it doesn't address the the larger uncertainty that startups are faced with: "market uncertainty" (or pmf). It doesn't answer "should we be building in this the first place?" That's where writing as a tool of thought is most powerful -- it helps you crystallize what problem we're actually solving.
The "just prototype it" culture (which is being promoted these days because Claude Code makes it easy) risks answering the wrong question, or at least the right question but in the wrong order. You end up with organizations that are incredibly fast at building things that no one should have built.
Ironically sometimes you need to start from a lower resolution (i.e. writing a doc). Prototyping too early is premature optimization.
My anecdote is that, after a few stings with non-technical founders, a doc etc will not improve the chances to reach PMF and prototypes that they can understand can improve the chance.
Outside of the startup context, I have also seen prototypes (hand written way back when that was a thing) resonate with FAANG directors much more than brainstorming.
I am very much for not just vibe it, and the biggest risk of prototypes is they lend to just directly launching broken systems to production. But I think this is a different topic than reaching PMF.
The organizations I've worked in and funded would recognize it's a prototype and then staff accordingly unless it a vibecoded portion of a cost center part of the product - those are fine to be one-and-done.
In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.
It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.
But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.
PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.
If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.
Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).
Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.
I wonder if that's the main concern or if communication / coordination costs are the larger concern
1: https://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/goog...
See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.
To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.
It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.
If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.
Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.
Twitter was a success _despite_ him. the original idea was strong enough to blast through all of the odd/wrong decisions he took. The time it took to make hashtags a thing, the terrible scaling, the huge overhiring, and deliberate duplication of teams, and his inability/reluctance to make any product decision. Sure he's got great connections, but he is a terrible leader of a buisness
Most of his product philosophy is negatively correlated with businesses that need to make a profit to survive.
I know what he'll do, he'll have someone make a bunch of agents to manage all these poor people via chat. he'll boast about how AI native the company is, it'll be chaos.
These people are amusing to say the least.
"Keynote began as a computer program for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to use in creating the presentations for Macworld Conference and Expo and other Apple keynote events."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(presentation_software...
Employment protections usually come with a probationary period before they kick in, so employers can remove bad hires early. This creates an incentive to remove new hires before their probationary period is up if they're showing any signs they might not be the best candidate for the job.
Even when new hires are good and the company wants to keep them, heavy employment protections favor longer term employees. If the business environment changes and they need to reduce headcount their hands may be tied in ways that require cutting the new hires before the tenured employees. This happens a lot in labor unions, too, where tenured employees have greater standing than new hires when push comes to shove and someone needs to go, regardless of performance.
And this person was removed before any probationary period, before they started, without cause.
Laying off employees by seniority is not the same level in my opinion.
I am sorry for your friend, I hope that he is doing fine, Is there anything that they can legally do for this to block?
> And there is some legal actions possible, though not worth it in this case.
I'd still suggest talking to a lawyer (or a lawyer friend, for free if possible!), I don't suppose just discussing these things would hurt!
IME people good PMs already did this WITH slide decks, then tools like Balsamiq, and now AI tools, so it's made the process easier? quicker? people spend as much time but go further down actual implementation? Unfortunately I assume the last, which is too bad, but there doesn't seem to be a much story here.
I wonder what he'll think about these vibecoded prototypes and if it's more thinking or less thinking
And then there is the problem that vibecoding is addictive so the more one has done of it on the prototype, the worse one's judgement of whether it's actually something worth building...
Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become...
BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews!
Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...
Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions?
So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supposed to care?
These clowns live in a dreamworld created by their PAs and cronies
Yes it led to some degree of tech debt, but it also made it easier to experiment, validate, and identify good and bad workflows.
At least in my network, we don't think AI will replace all workers and we strongly believe AI will lead to a significant amount of tech debt, but we do also recognize a lot of work in tech today is busywork and will be automated away in the hands of actual engineers with domain expertise.
Ultimately it’s a way of saying “I have no vision so I just want to quickly throw a bunch of shit on the wall and see what sticks”.
You start off with a hypothesis (X will solve Y's problem by doing ...), you build a prototype, and then you start testing with multiple Ys. Based on that feedback, you then tweak your initial hypothesis or you scrap it and pivot.
The whole point of engineering is to build tools that solve a specific class of problems for the buyer.
IBM hadn't done many layoffs ever at that point and apparently didn't have system for it. He showed up on layoff day and they laid everyone off with a very generous baseline layoff package, including substantial education benefits. So he just went back to school on their dime for several years ;)
2 months ago they were still using PowerPoints? Jesus no wonder they had to lay so many people off. What the fuck is going on over there?
Three months ago they were still using Wordstar on IBM XTs. Block is a retro-computing powerhouse.