We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode".
Either way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. "Necessity is the mother of invention." They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.
Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.
Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
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.
> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
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.
Unfortunately this insane perspective is common. I’ve literally been told by a past employer that the revenue that I, personally, was bringing in to the company (by going way above and beyond) was greatly appreciated, but that they were unhappy about the cost of paying me a small fraction of this revenue as a pre-agreed performance bonus.
> we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.
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).
> As if some people are born as cost centers, like it’s the genetic programming for pupillary distance.
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.
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!
Ah, so this is why many companies end up full of sociopaths who contribute nothing to the actual revenue of the company: they all managed to weasel themselves into the “profit centers” while the chumps doing actual work that keeps the lights on remain in the “cost centers”.
Remember that economists think that this process you're talking about is healthy, good and this is how companies should be run. Take massive loans, hire, then discard people when you don't need them.
Peak Capitalism was grandmas investing in companies to receive a dividend in retirement. This hunt for unicorns and magic forever growth is ruining everything.
I saw a video recently that talked about something kind of strange and upsetting about the stock market.
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.
It is extremely frustrating that the people who actually make these decisions are pretty shielded from the consequences, but I have learned to never take anything a billionaire says at face value.
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 absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
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.
> the correction was largely complete over a year ago
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).
Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.
Good point. What's interesting is that startups with solid remote infrastructure now have access to talent pools that were harder to tap before. Engineers in places like LATAM or Eastern Europe who might have held tight to their FAANG remote gigs are now reconsidering options. The timezone alignment with US companies makes this particularly interesting for early-stage teams that need real-time collaboration but can't afford Bay Area salaries.
It might actually be that they mean what they say.
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 don’t know… If the company is so healthy and has some nice financial buffer, I would expect the increased productivity due to AI to be used for more revenue generation.
So either they don’t know how to translate all the quality hires they got into (enough) revenue, they can’t afford it, or maybe they they hired too fast to maintain quality :shrug:
That’s my read at least
It likely has to do with changed investor preferences. In the boom years, it was OK to grow at all costs, make money whenever. Nowadays investors are looking to cash out earlier, from what I observe. Gotta find ways to make the stock move up in that environment, cost-cutting-because-AI seems to work right now.
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.
> 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.
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).
The despising drug addicts and welfare moms being supported by 'productive people' has now spread to despising working people making six figures. The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.
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.
My take is that if AI really improved productivity, then that makes labour effectively cheaper. Usually, when labour is cheap, then you buy lots and lots of it so that you can get a lot of things done.
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.
If AI makes people more productive then labor is cheaper than it was pre-AI, even at pre-AI salaries, because you're getting more done at the same cost.
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'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
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.
it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
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IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.
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
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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.
You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.
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.
The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.
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
You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.
So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.
Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing.
But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.
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.
> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time
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.
I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.
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.
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.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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.
For that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs.
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.
It doesn’t cost much to keep the lights on. As far as I know, X post-acquisition is not investing in innovation anymore.
Musk 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.
Valuation is not important. These are private market transactions. Ultimately all the investors made out well, and it seems the company is more profitable than it was before. At least expenses are way down and if those expenses are correct then they are paying off the debt and making a good profit.
I couldn't possibly disagree with this more. Since the acquisition Twitter/X has had far more features at a far faster pace than in the 10 years prior. They've added all sorts of great stuff, and recently have been near the top of the charts in the Apple App Store.
I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.
This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.
Oh sorry, no I meant them shoving Biden into the candidacy despite clear health issues, shutting down any primary challenge, and swapping Harris in late in the game when it was abundantly clear Biden's health was a problem.
> After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
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.
The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.
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.
> 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.
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.
So you just discovered offshoring of jobs? Like it has been going for the past decades.
I don't see how AI or twitter changes anything to the outlook of the C suite. Lower spending increase productivity. If hiring Poles instead of Americans can achieve this goal, they were always going to do that.
> 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.
> 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.
The median SWE TC in the Bay Area is $272k [0]. After tax and a fully loaded Roth 401K that is around $143,000.
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.
It was mostly a joke about the flippant way your comment added in "keep your family and friends close" after moving to highest cost places in the world.
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.
> First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.
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.
Flying parents in for a couple weeks is not what I interpret as "keeping friends and family close".
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.
This is the recommendation I have heard peers, both technical and managerial, echo for years in one form or another:
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.
The above involves one thing people can possess which GenAI cannot; understanding stakeholder problems which need to be solved and then doing so.
You seem to have forgotten politics, since at the managerial level that is the most effective tool at hand. Engineers with their arguments and rethoric be damned.
Engineers can make an argument if you can also logically and coherently tie your argument with outcomes that can grow pipeline and/or revenue.
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.
> It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with
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.
>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
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.
>showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again.
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.
This is right on all counts and matches what I've seen and heard. And to all the sibling comments arguing about Elon's Twitter shenanigans being a bad move, it doesn't matter. I know because that's exactly what I said to a senior executive who deals with even more senior executives, and those were his exact words: "It doesn't matter." (A bit more in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750804)
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.
That sentiment really makes it feel like this entire global economy is balancing on a toothpick of vibes and peer pressure, rather than some carefully navigated system of systems and backups. Wonder how long it can hold out before the camel breaks.
I fully agree with everything you've said and think the Twitter one is a really good point that I haven't heard before.
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.
Sure it is not a smoking crater in the ground but outages are frequent, multi-media content loads about 50% of the time and search is basically non-functional at this point.
Let us never forget the "tweet reading limit" incident
Twitter is a strange example given it has experienced a massive drop in valuation and ad revenue as well as struggled with user acquisition since Musk bought it. By all metrics it has declined in value except it where it serves as a powerful megaphone for the US right.
> Twitter was a megaphone for the US far left, it's now more balanced and centred so allows both sides to post without censor.
I would say it leaned left, didn’t censor the right, and now it’s over corrected and absolutely has not stopped playing games with the content. It is not the space Musk claims and it is hardly a bastion of free speech.
You are VC. Your opinion literally doesn't matter, you're high on your own supply. I go to lunches and dinners with people like yourself frequently and every VC and finance guy wont stop talking about their idiotic delusions of having an AI workforce (slaves). You people yearn for the days of slavery again, but without humans.
Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!
I don't know that I agree with most of what you wrote but others have already addressed that.
> 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".
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)
Twitter is just a misinformation machine now. They got rid of anyone that made it a decent place. No more pesky moderation, sales and ad teams, etc. as long as it’s up and the sock puppets can foment dived, it’s serving its purpose.
I left Twitter a few months ago because the overall experience was getting worse and I had no desire to be fed culture war propaganda and AI slop non-stop.
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.
Stoping trying to cope that AI/LLM augmented automation isn't to blame here. equities and profits are at all time highs, rates are still really low!! This has nothing to do with the cost of money.
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).
>Stoping trying to cope that AI/LLM augmented automation isn't to blame here.
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.
Because it doesn't matter if it actually works, or is creating efficiencies. As long as they can justify making a huge % of labor unemployed, not just SWE. The more people laid off the less bargaining power labor has in the future.
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.
I wonder if we can really repeat such revolution. Our communities are fractured and politics more partisan than ever. Be it collective bargaining or more, any fractured attempt to rebel will only end in failure. Perhaps by the working class eating itself alive a la Jay Gould (even if misattributed, the sentiment matches).
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.
Hard to measure just yet, as it stands I think you're correct. But what if 100k drones (assembled in el segundo and painted with Chinese flags) pop out of shipping containers at the port of LA and kill a bunch of their families, beloved celebrities. I think they have the means to tilt popular opinion in any given direction relatively easily, but I do hope they fail (or don't even try something like this).
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.
I'm wondering what the heck will pay the bills on all that 'AI' hardware that's being put out there. So far the number of ideas that sound like an episode of some tech-horror show far outweigh the ones that sound like a Star Trek utopia.
They'll kill off whatever percentage of the working class they don't need like they did in WW2 during the last great depression, although I'd argue they have more efficient methods of purging the working class now. They'll make everyone so poor they beg to fight in a war, like in the 20s-30s.
Russia is already doing this, USA is gearing up for a war with Iran but can't see the USA wanting the PR of losing many soldiers, they could just increase the forces so basically every working class person is low paid potential cannon fodder.
The difference is that in Russia those who are willing to go to war have lived in poverty for decades already, those are not middle-class Muscovites who prefer to stay away from it (in terms of direct participation).
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.
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
Over the last 10 years or so in SF and LA, I’ve seen so many countless POS systems at restaurants and small businesses that it’s difficult to believe that Square is anything more than 1 player in an enormous field.
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.
Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:
- 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
It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.
Toast has already caught up in market share, and dominates the restaurant industry. Square's numbers have been stagnant for many years.
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.
The ubiquity of NFC has made specialized hardware irrelevant for entire industries. It's set dressing for small businesses. The ruggedized enclosures and swiveling touchscreens are cute, but that's not a moat.
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.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.
I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.
The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.
> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.
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.
It is a healthy mentality. After staying at my second job for too long - 9 years until 2008, I was uncompetitive in the job market and I didn’t have a network. I was 34 then. I said never again.
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
I think part of my anxiety is this. I went to IBM, stayed until my subsidiary went under, and then started job 2 in 2019, and I've been there sense. I'm a bit terrified of my market competitiveness.
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.
Glad to hear you're doing well. Hopefully it continues and you don't have to enter the job market.
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.
There is absolutely no need to be torn about anything. Stability is important when you have kids. While I did change jobs 4 times between when I married my wife in 2012 and 2020 when my youngest stepson graduated, my wife was able to work part time in the school system so we could have stable insurance and she could be there for them.
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
> 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.
So exactly what will the magic of unionization do when any company can hire developers from LatAm (much easier to deal with in the same time zone) that are good enough enterprise devs for half the price?
Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]
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.
Why should workers care about productivity growth when income inequality is at its highest levels in the United States? Companies already don't take chances on American workers, hence why companies need so much corporate welfare to stay competitive.
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?
European countries with labor regs that make firing more expensive tend to have higher unemployment rates (specially youth unemployment) because hiring becomes more risky.
Cry me a river for the “average” senior developer who as a rule, makes twice the median income of whatever city they live in. It’s called saving money and living below your means. Yes I was a standard enterprise dev for 25 years before 2020 living in a second tier city.
Hey buddy, you may not believe this but helping workers does in fact help everyone. Maybe get out of the crab bucket mentality and help your fellow human, as I'm confident you would want your fellow man to help you when you make the call.
This is a terrible plan to get those devs onboard, and unless your theory is "these companies are idiots who don't know how much to pay for devs" they're still gonna try and find ways to hire them.
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.
No, it just sounds like you deeply hate your fellow man which I find profoundly sad. Not wanting to better the lives of people around you and would rather greedily hoard all the resources just shows your lack of humanity.
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?
I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
Right, there are dozens of open source versions of wikis/task trackers/CRMs/ERPs/whatevers. Just because you can vibecode your way to a bad version of a bunch of SaaS products shouldn't fundamentally change anything. Companies buy SaaS products to make running the thing someone else's problem. It's times like these where I wish we had a functional SEC; I really wonder how much market manipulation is going on.
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…
Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.
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.
That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”
Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed.
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.
Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI.
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.
I hear that, and yeah, it's a possible future but I'm not sure it's the certain one.
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.
As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.")
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.
Can the output of the service be licensed? A bit like the AGPL, you're licensed to use/reuse/derive new works.
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?
There's already been a case where an artist generated art using an LLM, and could not claim copyright on it [0]. Though the guy was torpedoing his own case by claiming the machine created the entire thing. The courts are supporting copyright claims when using an LLM as a tool to support human effort.
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.
Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.
Canva is my go-to example - you can just get NanoBanana/whatever to generate and iterate on the image. Same for all those stock photo services. I used to use them a lot, now I just generate blog images
The biggest limiting factor is user acquisition. Just because you can build a competitor in a weekend doesn't mean you can easily acquire a user base. it's dam hard to get users even if your product is twice as good and your giving it away for free!
There's still enormous potential for technology solutions in the healthcare space. The population in every developed country is getting older and sicker. AI can help a little bit with building those solutions but there are no magic bullets: we still need lots of people grinding away on hard problems.
Perhaps this is too US-centric, but as someone who used to work in health fintech, I strongly disagree.
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.
There's a lot more to healthcare than just fintech. I've been the field for decades and I've never seen such rapid progress before in areas like clinical and administrative interoperability, digital health, software as a medical device, telehealth, clinical decision support, cost transparency, etc. Despite the structural problems with incentives that create that make the financial side so dysfunctional, there has never been a better time to build.
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... .
Sure, I generally agree: the social problems that cause (relatively) low life expectancy in the US can't be solved with technology. But that's a separate problem. There's still a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and technologists to improve the healthcare system in ways that deliver real benefits to patients / providers / payers, and make some money in the process.
> I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Tech has allowed a very solid middle class lifestyle for a lot of people. I can't think of another good paying job where someone is self-taught, or went to a 12-month certificate program at their local community college and now has a very good career.
If those jobs disappear, or wage growth is non-existent, I don't know where the next generation will find those jobs.
Just one correction though: Your definition of middle class has to be super wide to call many tech jobs "solid middle class". It's not as if everyone ends up in the billionaire column, most definitions of middle class end with household income at $165k. Many in tech go over with one job. Once a family has two jobs and one is in tech, basically everyone counts as upper middle or above. With two tech jobs in a household, claiming middle class is often denying one's actual status.
That's true. For context, I reside in Canada where good tech jobs fit the definition of the low end of upper class (250k CAD) where I am not sure the same is true in the USA? Regardless my definition is wrong.
Prompt companies are already evolving, establishing specific contexts to become business facilitators. That might be a "wrapper" project, but I bet there will be copyright litigation between these companies for "prompt piracy".
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.
Folks at Jack's level are just as susceptible to flawed reasoning and trend following as anyone else. Sometimes it feels like more so, possibly because they have so much buffer to absorb the consequences of bad ideas (see how Twitter ended up). A person living paycheck to paycheck has less leeway to veer too far away from reality.
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.
Before people jump into existential despair here about the software field, do we know the breakdown of roles? How many were tech vs support, operations, HR, and other roles?
During the massive post-pandemic hiring spree, there were a lot of threads in the vein of "why does [MATURE STARTUP] requires X,000 developers?" and I think those questions were maybe prescient. These companies have been spending free venture funds on whatever and acquiring headcount for the sake of headcount. A lot of them have tried to and failed to be "everything apps" and now they are really sitting on mature, stable and profitable platforms that don't need to move fast and break things. They just need to not crash. And the result is they need far fewer people.
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
Absolutely, most of this is private corporate duct tape over a lack of Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), Instant SEPA (Europe), etc [1]. “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” [2] In a US financial services market, Venmo and CashApp are unnecessary assuming you procure a deposit account from a bank or credit union with instant payment rails access [3] [4]. Even Schwab has access to Zelle, for example. You need not extend credit and have credit risk exposure for paper checks anymore as well as an issuer of a deposit account.
Transfer limits are selected by each network participant [1], based on their risk tolerance. Four years ago Zelle was moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume [2]. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits. Zelle is baked into each financial institution’s app, there is no stand alone app anymore (as of March 2025) [3]. If you don’t like the UX, switch banks or credit unions, they’re mostly interchangeable. There are thousands to pick from.
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.
Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.
Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.
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 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.
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.
Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.
Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.
Afterpay (and the other Buy Now Pay Later competitors like Klarna) are potential financial arrangement facilitators for their customers.
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.
You took the words out of my mouth. In a megacorp, AI multiplies into about 10% of my work and 10x’s it making me roughly 10% more efficient. When I use AI for side projects and don’t have to work with a bunch of stakeholders, dependency owners, and opinionated management, that 10x multiplies into my full effort and the project moves 10x faster.
Yep. I find it helps best when I'm off script/going rogue doing something that I think will help, rather than working with 10 other people all with different opinions and knowledge that just absolutely bogs something down.
What makes you think corporate hierarchies and processes won't infect their use of AI so that you won't be able to "go rogue" and you'll be held up by AI reviews, not humans.
Oh and the opposite when you are one of the 10 "other" people on someone else's project.
I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.
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.
If its run anything like twitter then there are loads of teams running around trying random shit, along lots of duplication.
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)
I think it is a question of who is getting the benefit of these efficiencies. If it is the worker—ie they are doing the same amount of work in less time but not making that extra time available to the company—then from the company’s perspective they aren’t being more efficient. Or at least the additional efficiency doesn’t affect it.
I think your final sentence is more accurate than your churn argument. AI doesn't double output, but actually writing the code is only a small part of the job.
Seeing the >20% stock increase by just mentioning the "Replacing workers for AI", makes me wonder if there isn't a huge pressure from the shareholders to get on the trend no matter what. Short-term baby, rules the world.
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".
This is a very interesting take unlike the usual doom and gloom narrative or jevons paradox optimists.
Are there any data points which made you reach these conclusions?
To be fair I've been all over the map on this. But lately neither of these scenarios seemed quite right. Reflecting on my own experience, I find that sometimes AI is great, but sometimes it feels like a return of https://xkcd.com/303/. So, putting 2 and 2 together and picturing it from C-level perspective, this is where I landed.
Yeah, the narratives diverge. He said "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." So, if these tools actually deliver this 90% productivity improvement? Will he let another 5k or then start cutting gradually over months?
We can all read stock market charts - the business isn't doing well.
It provides a facility that FedNow and Zelle will replace. It's a US specific solution for instant settlement payment rails that other nations have had for a while.
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.
Just to nitpick the math. If you are going to fire 50% of the company, the AI tools should actually make the remaining people 100% more efficient, not 50% :)
Option 1) You’re right. They’re screwed because they won’t be able to keep the lights on and these layoffs make it worse.
Option 2) AI can just vibe code what block needs now, or maybe in a few years. Laying off talent makes sure there are people on the market to do the vibe coding, and that block will not be able to respond to widespread competitive pressure. They’re screwed and these layoffs make it worse.
Of course, they could realize they magically have 2-10x the engineering and organizational capabilities they used to and improve the product. They won’t because late stage capitalism only cares about weekly stock swings and graft so it can’t plan all the way to end of quarter anymore.
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.
> towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
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.
This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective).
* Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first.
* Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
* Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands vs breakup-via-text-message.
* Giving people a chance to say goodbye.
Not gonna go into strategic analysis of this, or Jack's leadership style in general.
But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."
> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?
> Owning the decision
Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.
> respecting the people that got you there
There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.
> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.
You cannot attrite 40% of the company in 5 months, without creating an incredibly toxic environment. Dorsey knows this; ultimately he lost Twitter over his inability to right size it. I would bet dollars to donuts he promised himself he wouldn't do it again - under no circumstances is 40% cut over six months preferable to a clean fast cut.
What is the age distribution of employees at Block? I'd guess it skews quite young. You won't have much natural attrition or interest in early retirement. And in this job market, voluntary severance is also not very attractive.
Young people love to be paid to switch jobs too - who would refuse 20 weeks of doubled income? From Squares perspective, this would lead to an adverse selection, because Square would lose the people who can easily get jobs elsewhere.
That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better than the ones who remain. If you have people you feel are under performers then yes, ideally you would lose those specifically but then it’s not a reorganization it’s a performance based layoff where you’re outright saying “you’re not good at your job”
> That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better
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?
I think that assumption is not unreasonable - but I don’t think it’s a reasonable conclusion to say the people who are more confident to jump ship are inherently better for the future of a company than those who have been around for just as long and don’t want to risk it in the market.
Sure but 5 months isn't the comparison. They state that they're cutting early. We don't know the exact position, but perhaps over 2-3 years would be ok, and 40% in 3 years isn't unheard of, particularly in the valley, and particularly with incentives.
> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
It's a nuanced trade-off. It's worse for the company as you said, it may be worse for the employees because some will leave from burnout without severance, those remaining will have more work to do typically.
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.
I guess you could consider it that, I read "prolonged bleeding" as more smaller layoffs. That's a fair point. Although then I'd say it's still disingenuous to frame it that negatively when many may see it as a better option.
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.
>That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
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.
Attrition by definition implies no cuts: just people leaving for the usual reasons people leave, and not replacing them. Attrition can be accelerated by providing incentives like exit bonuses.
You're right, it's worse. It's hurting people's lives, maybe it should be considered a crime in America due to how intertwined having a job is with also having access to healthcare, social services, government services, the ability to eat, the ability to have a place to sleep; it all seems extremely dramatic in this context.
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.
An external tech appears that eliminates the need for human labor. But a CEO acknowledging its arrival and adjusting for it is a 'massive failure of leadership'?
I wonder if the lack of capital letters is a clever trick to make this whole annoucement look more humane and natural. Surely it's intentional: only "U.S" deserves capitals, not even his own name in the signature.
So, like Nintendo and other Japanese and Chinese companies where the CEO of a company treats the company like their child and takes the hit when they make errors?
Or maybe like the US employer that gave everyone at the company a flat wage?
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.
Yeah but the purpose of a company is not to employ people, it is to make money. The employment is a means to an end. If the money continues to flow without the people, that is better.
I can imagine creating a system designed to allocate profits to a broader set of stakeholders, but that's not the system we have.
> 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.
Sorry, but it would only be “ownership” of the decision if he himself resigned for making the terrible decisions that led to than”necessity” in the first place.
Spot on. This tweet will go down in history — right next to Jack's first tweet. We all understand businesses require difficult decisions. This is one of the best layoff letters I've seen. Short, honest, and human.
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence
@grok
We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.
I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
The trick to applying these days is to have a contact on the inside that can tell you what the hiring manager is actually looking for, vs what's in the public JD, and then to refer you.
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.
Yeah, it wasn't lost on me that a lot of job listings are fake, even at the time (I think I even wrote comments saying as much on this very forum). I did reach out to contacts asking if they had openings but of course that's a finite set and most of them told me they didn't.
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.
I'm a senior in NYC, considering changing jobs but haven't pulled the trigger. I've got a good amount of reachouts from finance recruiters and small-to-medium sized startups but haven't heard anything from the established players (admittedly I haven't been looking).
I got a number of finance recruiters reaching out then too but nothing stuck. I got a few interviews (even got to meet a few interesting characters like Martin Shkreli) but nothing panned out until my friend gave me a referral to my current gig.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
I think it's starting to turn around. My sense is there's still a ton of devs on the market but there's a lot of jobs opening recently. Here's the data from the st luis fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
No, that's just the reality of the market right now. Software engineers are an extremely hot field, likely because everybody is trying to add AI to their products.
I'm being very picky with what I look at, which doesn't help, but yeah, it doesn't seem great. Maybe they're all in person gigs? Or is there some ageism? (There has always been some ageism in software)
Easier to hire consultants to add AI to do your software engineering for you than temporarily hire humans with needs and benefit costs to add AI to do your software engineering for you.
Just the current reality in SFBA. 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.
Not being obtuse, I even googled it, but I have no idea what SFBA is in this context. I'm assuming it's not to do with windsurfing in the San Francisco Bay Area or some kind of insulation. Could you elaborate?
They're just saying the job market is hot in the location of the S (San) F (Francisco) B (Bay) A (Area) it's not cryptic, I'll assume you had a brain fart here it happens.
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
For what it's worth I actually took "SFBA" and Googled it because I wasn't sure either. I've always heard of it referred to as SF or SV. Learn new stuff every day.
Pre-covid, and during the early covid hiring spree, I used to get messages from eager recruiters every week, I get maybe one a month these days, and they are much more tepid.
I've actually had really positive responses. I'm fairly senior (~20 years of experience). I was laid off by Meta in 2022, started at Block 3 months later. Laid off by Block in 2024, started at a smaller company 1 month later. Decided to leave that company in early 2025, contacted one company from a HN Who's Hiring post and took that job. That ended up being a poor fit, and I went back to a FAANG around July of 2025.
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.
Started looking in November, four offers by end of January, all decent, last two competing offers were fantastic with great companies and I accepted one. Past few months and even now I’ve had more inbounds from recruiters than any time since Covid boom. Offer salaries aren’t as high as Covid boom days but there are a ton of startups that need people.
Varied. Most were exactly the same processes I remembered from interviewing years ago: some startups with no processes and unable to get signals, big public tech companies abusing leetcode, awkward screeners hoping for keywords, and everything in between for the most part. Biggest change is they all asked about AI and wanted to hear that I embrace modern tools and am hungry to find the best ways to work. I am positive that skepticism about AI in November prevented me from getting some interviews; demonstrating fluency (insofar as one can be fluent in these racing waters) and excitement for it in January was key to getting some (but not all) offers.
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.
Wildy varies. I'm a new grad and got my first offer after 8 applications and got another offer last week unprompted. Meanwhile my friend graduating from the same university has done 300 applications and a couple dozen interviews with no offer.
Yeah, mid-late last year was one of the worst markets I've seen in my career, but the last couple of months things have really seemed to pick up speed.
They did not, you get the same date range and the same graph shape going to FRED and pressing the "1Y" option, and the series includes the first two months of 2026 so it's 12 months: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1SGzm
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.
Sure, I assumed status quo everyone is talking about is basically the several years before that graph. I still think it's relatively bad compared to that despite the modest improvement.
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
Nobody can know they will need to lay off 10% multiple years from now. So many things can change between now and then.
For all Block knows, AI for coding kind of plateaus where it is now and there is a huge boom in software engineer hiring taking advantage of the new tech to produce even more/better features.
Part of the trouble for software companies is that AI hype is sucking 99% of investments in the space. You might have a solid but non-sexy software business and struggle to find the investment you need
"Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric."
Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.
Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.
> Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric.
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.
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
Well - if "we" refers to the original selfish gene (à la Dawkins), then yes - modern capitalism has manifested as an emergent property of the core evolutionary principle. I suppose you could say that about virtually anything however...
The people let go can form their own companies. I don't believe anyone has a guarantee to have a high paying white collar job until they choose to retire.
Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."
Even better, start a new company with the previous coworkers who are all versed in the same industry as you just left! Block is profitable, so there’s a lunch to eat.
They don’t because of at-will employment. It’s just sort of the more moral, empathetic, right thing to do instead of leaving them with no income, no insurance, etc.
This used to be the accepted standard but it seems today that people think any amount of profit should primarily be directed toward paying wages. (either bigger wages to existing employees, or to new employees, or both). You have multiple sub-conversations in this very comment section wondering aloud why Block didn't invent make-work or "new projects" to keep the 4,000 employed.
The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.
Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.
> that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities
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.
I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
I know we have to balance inefficiency and optimal allocation of resources... but I agree it doesn't seem optimal for social wellbeing to remove people from their access to health and risking their ability to house and feed themselves without a financial need to do so (like Block going bankrupt).
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to put those responsibilities on individual firms. In the USA, achieving maximum employment has been a mandate for the Federal Reserve to achieve through monetary policy. There are many advantages to allowing individual firms to optimize for productivity. There are also a lot of harms caused by forcing firms to adopt unproductive methods. Even Keynes' joking solution for unemployment was that the treasury might bury bottles of money for private industry to dig up.
> with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating.
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.
Startups generally _don't_ end up with better outcomes. Large companies stay stable, startups are volatile and often end in failure.
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.
I do mean homo sapiens. Humans are a cooperative species. They will hunt and gather together in loose communities naturally, sharing excess resources even if individuals are not directly contributing to the resource creation due to being too young, too old, sick or injured. Having inter-societal competition doesn't mean we don't still have cooperative society. Just because ants will fight other ants in different colonies doesn't mean ants are not a social species.
I think we Humans can be both cooperative species and violent,self-centered tribalists species and definitely all the grey area between the two at the same time as well.
And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?
This has always been and always will be an excuse for the person saying it to be a "violent, self-centered tribalist". Humans have worked together for the benefit of the community for the longest time. Rugged individualism is inherently linked to capitalism.
exactly - end consumers like you and me will end up having to pay for their jobs indirectly.
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.
more money for doing nothing? i don't want to live in a world like that. what part of this is not clear?
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.
I actually don’t think you do. At the least, the question then becomes “is wellbeing most well served by paying a small number of software engineers a lot of money”. That is prima facie absurd.
that's not the job of a company. companies are suposed to be profit centered, their purpose is to make money.
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? This is asserted throughout this HN thread as an obvious truism, but it seems precipiced on some dramatic right wing free market concept of how the world works that I can't tell is coming from the libertarians of hacker news, or is some kind of USA concept.
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?
You can believe that only if you don't care about getting a revolution in your country or extreme populist movements gaining traction. When large numbers of people feel economically disposable, the issue stops being about an individual firm’s right to hire and fire and starts becoming a systemic stability problem.
But if you are okay with getting some heads chopped off with a guillotine from time to time, feel free to believe that.
You sound like you are laying blame at the feet of companies following employment laws when you should be complaining to the government that makes the employment laws the company is abiding by.
If firms laying off employs they have no use for causing a stability problem then you do indeed have a systemic stability problem which need much deeper fixes than any one firm can provide.
Maybe I'm a big capitalist, but 5 months of severance seems very generous; a job hasn't been a commitment that the company will take care of you forever in several generations. Covering you until the middle of this year should go a long way, and yeah the job market is messed up, but at least it's not mid-November where holidays mean hiring falls off the rails.
Most people in tech still think people who are getting laid off deserve it and that they themselves are immune to it. People won’t change until they experience it first hand.
Not really, no. I was underemployed for 6+ months at the start of my career, but it's easier to take whatever is available at that point. I did some data entry and then first tier ops desk restart the server when the light turns red stuff, before I got a "real job". Doing that mid career and keeping a good attitude would be difficult.
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.
A lot of people would focus on the many obvious differences, and use those to deflect attention from the important similarity I was highlighting: That they are both things that ought to exist only so long as both parties want them to.
I know they might sound superficially similar, if you're 12 years old, so let me breakdown a little bit why your analogy is a bad one.
Relationships are between two people, not between a human and a public entity like a company.
My partner doesn't have extremely disproportionate leverage over me, if tomorrow I leave – company will chug along just fine, if I'm laid off tomorrow – I might lose my home, relationship, well-being, never recover from the layoff (meaning I won't contribute back to economy and go on well-fare, and potentially start a revolution if there are millions of me) or ultimately die.
I know it's a difficult concept for 20 year old tech-bros who sucked VC money with the milk of their mother to grasp, but money does dry out. You might think you're invincible right now and that it's you and companies against them (lazy, stupid coworkers), but you're the same cattle to them as the rest of us. As you can see by the topic of the thread.
Back to the analogy: Main goal of a company is to produce value for society, not making money for VCs. It's a difficult pill to swallow, I know, tech bros been taught for decades that job security, health insurance, taxes, value creation – all of those are commie concepts aimed to undermine our God given right to make money, and we – temporary embarrassed millionaires – need to fight it with every ounce of our existence by working 60 hours a week.
Labor IS the main input that turns capital + IP into products and services. Without those people Block would be nowhere near the current position it is in. But when business is strong, though, VCs and C level get obscene bonuses while employee compensation stays flat. Go figure.
I could go on and on, talk about tax reliefs [0], that countries and companies exist for people and not the other way around, but this should be enough to understand that THIS IS NOTHING LIKE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A HUMAN BEING.
> My partner doesn't have extremely disproportionate leverage over me
This is the most... hinged... thing you said. I totally agree that bargaining power is usually far more skewed in the employment case. I think unequal bargaining power is the root of much unfairness in the world, and that the only way to really counteract this is through organising, i.e., unionisation. It's far from a panacea, mind you.
With all that said: Fundamentally, I don't think that an employer should be obligated to employ someone indefinitely. If you do: Think about whether regulations enforcing this would make an employer more likely, or less likely, to hire someone they are on the fence about.
Everybody realises this. That said, a huge number of people around the world are financially dependent on their partner. (One of the main goals of feminism has been to normalise relationships where this is not the case.)
The fundamental question is: Should employers be obligated to employ the people they hire forever?
> 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?
Bold of you to assume he gives a single shit about it.
obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
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.
> does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
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.
More profits, line mustn't just go up, line must go higher. Giving away the devices is like saying "we're replacing both you and your device with AI and it's not like that device will help you get another job in this market anyway, good luck lol."
>> 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.
Block job listings were all over for a couple years. I thought it was odd that they were hiring so much given what we know about their business lines. I assumed there were some internal projects or new business lines.
I feel sorry for anyone who joined recently and then got laid off because they company wasn't planning properly.
Payment processing is one of the most tightly regulated, and some might say corrupt, industries. Replicating the tech wouldn't be difficult. The social and regulatory part is effectively impossible for anyone who's not already in the inner circle.
Ironically Square isn’t good at anything in particular. Square fails to have a good point of sale (Toast wins) and fails for online store fronts (Shopify wins). Square is in a position where they spread themselves thin and aren’t at the top of anything in particular.
With light CRM, Staffing, and Banking tools, it seems like Square's strategy is to be best-of-suite for small businesses rather than best-of-breed.
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 think they dont have a great moat in their individual offerings, but across square, cash app, and afterpay they offer a pretty good suite of products for the entire transaction stack.
It doesn't matter if the main reason is they over-hired. Financial services is going to eat it up, there are eyes going wide all over the place in the C-suites, I am certain. Companies/Funds that own other companies see an opportunity to reduce input costs (human costs). Even if over-hiring and AI are both explained reasons, the second one is going to win out as it's a narrative that lines up with what their goal is, to reduce costs.
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?
"over-hired" seems like mostly copium of engineers being very afraid that their company will discard them like this and are trying to rationalize why they won't follow.
There was obvious over-hiring in the couple years after COVID while interest rates were low. A lot of companies corrected and laid off staff when that stopped.
This was before LLMs writing code was a daily discussion topic. Blaming every layoff on AI is mostly people connecting trending headlines together.
I don't think it's copium because it doesn't really matter if it's due to AI or COVID-era ZIRP-infused overhiring. If your company hasn't done multiple rounds of layoffs since 2022, they're going to come.
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
If AI makes people twice as productive and you're a mature software company chasing marginal value, if the marginal value people added was worth it before AI, surely more marginal value at the same cost is better. It's also the wrong side of the AI curve to be on. Maybe AI will replace dev jobs, but why not wait to find out? And if it does, prompt-coding is a different skill than traditional coding, and it's not what you interviewed people for, so you don't even have a guess as to if you're keeping the right people.
The sense was that it got a lot better late last year. There hasn't been enough time to make this call holistically, from development to market reaction to turndown. It also doesn't address the Jevons paradox take that with more people and AI, they can get even more done. Every place I've worked has had an idea and tech debt backlog far deeper than the companies' capacity.
Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.
Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.
There are, but there are also a number of companies (including not-particularly-AI ones like Netflix and Oracle) that are above their ZIRP peak. I think it's hard to definitively say that this story is inconsistent with one explanation or the other.
Oracle is definitely an AI stock, as much as that's silly. Between being a cloud provider with GPUs, and investments in OpenAI, it's certainly part of the AI meme in the stock market, and possibly even a reasonable way to get some AI exposure if that's what you want to invest in.
This reminds me of the meme of Margaret Thatcher: "And There is No Alternative" - a way to justify the policies she desired to implement and attempt to preempt any other view.
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.
Because Block is a mature company now and they don't need the extra productivity. It's not just better for Block but also for the whole society that these developers leave for more innovating companies.
AI writes code. It doesn't fix organizational problems.
But there were no organisational problems according to Jack. Also do you really believe Block has reached peak productivity? Does any company ever reach it?
Because productivity doesn't scale linearly with quantity of developers. There's a point where it plateaus or even descends as quantity of developers goes up.
I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.
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.
Id say 2 months is about normal for non tech maybe 3.5 at solid companies. This also adds a week per year at the company so plenty of people will be getting 5 months+ and $5k on top of that
Fair enough. It's nothing crazy by UK standards, you'd usually get your notice period paid off (2-3 months), plus another few months negotiated by your union, plus the statutory week's pay for each year worked (1.5 weeks if you're over 40). You don't normally get to keep your devices, I guess.
Double counting the notice period is unfair IMO. You already pay for the notice period by having the notice period when you want to quit. Companies having to pay you the notice period when they fire you is symmetrical and IMO is not a severance package. Maybe that's just my assumption, but IMO a severance package is the asymmetrical pay-out when one party quits an agreement, not the communal wager you both put down when you enter the contract.
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.
It reads as hypocritical because he frames it as himself making a sacrifice when what he's really taking responsibility for is choosing the outcome that makes himself the most money.
Anyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
Also if you put a product in maintenance mode you can easily get away with a fraction of your devs. Most people are at all times working on some definition of something new
Also have to consider that it’s now private which removes the pressure of having to show any semblance of a profit or, critically, share usage or advertising statistics which could (and probably are) down dramatically since the acquisition. Being private allows the fictitious storyline to persist that “we’re doing great and everyone is using our products.”
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
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.
I didn't say they were all working on the algorithm, there were a lot of people working in various content-related jobs: moderation, algorithm, partnership management with content creators, ad sales, and more
Without getting into a she-said/he-said debate, I don't believe traffic is shrinking because of the viability of fewer engineers.
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.
X has added more useful functionality in the last year or two than twitter did in their entire existence, it is also much snappier and reliable, that's with 5% of the workforce. I don't put this down to AI though it's more like a very lean, talented and motivated teams without layers of pointless middle people. Add AI into the mix and it's naturally going to be the way forward. Companies that stay bloated and not utilising AI will die.
Being rejected every day, thus subjecting myself to the humiliating ritual of modern times, by companies that I believe could make the most of my talent (my last title was Director of AI, before I was a Staff ML Scientist at a FAANG and an award-winning scientist).
They all seem rather disappointed, at least in the automated rejection emails (mailboxes not monitored, of course) they send me, that they have found other candidates more suited to the position. It seems we are both disappointed, after all.
Not all is lost, though. I am in the enviable position of having perfect health and decent savings.
Which companies are you applying to? Even in this new world, titles still matter a great deal. A former “director of AI” and FAANG data scientist is valuable even before considering whether you are competent.
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.
At first, I was a bit selective about my applications (meaning I was applying to maybe 5 positions per week, not one per month), but in the last six months, I have sent dozens of applications for positions (real or fake, I don't know) that I thought were appropriate for my skills and experience (director, manager, some senior IC positions, not even staff).
I have no problem relocating; I could do so in 15 days (I currently live in California).
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.
Thanks for your frank comments. There are a lot of people in your position for the first time, I think, and many more to come. It sounds quite undeserved and is rather a symptom of our poor system. All I can say is I think it's likely that someone like you (who I read as both cognitively and emotionally intelligent) is likely to adapt and will thrive eventually, both due to your characteristics, and because the system isn't that broken, and will also adapt. Good luck, and don't take it personally.
Could it be that these other candidates work for cheaper? They might be scared of your credentials. It's disheartening that this field has come to a race to the bottom, accelerated by AI. It's not the juniors that are at risk, it's the seniors.
This could be a problem, but only if I had interviews or even just a phone call from a recruiter. But I'm not even getting to that stage. I just get rejection after rejection via email for every type of company and position I apply for.
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.
Something is obviously very wrong if you're not even getting to the first (zeroth?) stage. It could be something very obvious. Have you tried asking for professional help with your resume / CV?
It may appear so, in the sense that I would think the same if I were the one reading my comments, but, even if I am sure that my resume could be improved (I worked on it multiple times, asked colleagues to have a look, as well as getting some feedback from LLMs), there is nothing obviously wrong with it.
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.
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.
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody
Yes absolutely. Text casing is part of communication, by skipping it an author is saying: "I'm going to prioritise my preferences and making a statement above your understanding and clarity". The bigger the audience the more negative impact it has, and the more entitled the author appears.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
Bad grammar is usually lack of care or education or knowledge.
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.
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.
ur right it dosnt matter. im gonna type all my communications at work like thisn wo. im sure noone will mind. my choice to completely disregard the rules fo english orthography doestn convey anything at all
Not saying this is the case here by any means, but I've disabled all the assistive/autocorrecting technology on my phone's keyboard because ironically it make it more usable. So now I don't even get automatic capitalization.
He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.
> 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.
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 AI was that much more productive, then Block would be able to take on much bigger challenges and expand their revenue even faster. The AI explanation doesn't add up.
Indeed. If you suddenly have a workforce that can be 2x as productive (or whatever multiple), why would you cut them? You already have these people under your control, direct them towards profitable ventures.
It suggests that there is no more innovation, no compliments to the business and the management have identified no areas for R&D. In the tech (or tech adjacent) space that should really be a death knell.
A quick check of the share price tells the story, they should really pivot back from blocks to squares.
As someone who comes from a country where it's very hard to fire people, don't make that mistake.
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.
As someone who comes from a country where it’s very hard to fire people: fuck the companies.
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 am not saying that he should. He is pretending that his hand was forced. I am saying that it wasn't. He made a choice. You may say that it is the rational choice, but that is a different debate.
If there are growth opportunities for the company, selectively choosing the top 90% YoY, minimizing backfills (in theory...) will result in a company full of high achievers that can execute on that growth vision.
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.
Sometimes I feel like “shareholder first” mentality has gone a bit too far. Most of the majority shareholders are a handful of people who have too much money, they don’t really put in any work, but are more than happy to put people out of work if it meant they’d get a bit more money.
I am just saying that the decision was not some kind of inevitable result of forces beyond their control. They just made a business decision to line their pockets better.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.
This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though. Being unable to lay off workers causes stagnation at companies where fast-development is paramount.
That helps, but there's a reason why the collective economy of the EU has produced only like 1/10 the number of unicorns over the past 30 years despite their GDP being around 2/3 the US's
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
>If the business is not able to be profitable everyone is screwed.
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 actually was laid off by Block, about eleven months ago. I got slightly less severance than these folks.
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.
> would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude?
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.
>I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me.
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.
Are you glad to have people spending their lives on jobs that don't contribute to society, just because the business is already profitable? Wouldn't it be better to have those people move into whatever job would contribute more to society? Have you considered that allowing people to remain in jobs that contribute less than they could in other jobs is the reason why your per-capita production lags the US?
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.
Great point, thanks god we’re eliminating the majority of the creative arts industry with dogshit ai slop so people with actual talent can be redeployed to DoorDash or whatever (I guess until driverless cars can take that over?)
I can, easily. Speaking for my country and assuming you are not on a fixed-term contract, you can only get fired for one of the three reasons:
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.
People don't want to leak their personal information, duh. The country they are from is another bit of information that you can't take back from the internet once published. Why would you do that?
This is also why your countries social welfare systems are teetering on fiscal insolvency and deficits are ballooning.
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.
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
But in your country (Spain), Telefónica de España laid off 3649 workers in Dec 2023 (about 40% of that unit) despite growing net income by 17% that year.
Nice googling, but that’s just an example that proves my point.
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.
spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. maybe you are ignoring important tradeoffs and are a little too confident about your own opinion on what it means to "manage your company just fine"
Maybe, or maybe you’re about to find out what happens to the consumer side when a large percentage of companies decide they no longer need half their workforce judging on linkedin vibes.
But the definition of economically active differs between the two: Finland includes people from ages 15-89, while in Spain you need to be 16 or older. And judging from what I read the rise in unemployment in Finland is attributed to more people entering the workforce.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is one way of making an all-in bet on AI.
>we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
Well that's interesting, wonder if we'll actually get a proper accounting of which departments take which cuts.
Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
I found this an interesting question and did some research out of curiosity
[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 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)
Yeah what I really meant is imagine if you reduced the actual MS Word team to just 3 people. They would not move fast because by this point Word is an enormous mature project and they wouldn't even be able to touch 1% of it.
Brooks explains this in The Mythical Man Month when he discusses how adding people to a delayed project increases the delay. Communication complexity grows exponentially as team size increases. It quickly reaches the point where it has to be controlled by procedures, forms, approvals, etc.
They're still a megacorp, roughly, with like 6k people remaining. That's a huge company. Huge companies need hierarchy to function, the "flat" thing is a really dumb idea. There's no way to make it analogous to that <50ppl team that executes well and moves fast. To do that you actually need to have a small company.
First you take a 50 person org. Then (for scale) you hire highly motivated performers who, because they came up in big orgs, are used to using 50 people for three years to do a project six people can do in three to six months. Then you create incentives that make them compete for standing. And the standing also depends on their personal scope (ie headcount).
I question how much of this is really AI vs them just regrouping around their core products and shutting down a lot of ventures or tertiary projects. Either way, the messaging we're seeing is a real shift from the ZIRP ear. Tech companies used to use headcount as a metric of growth. They'd be hiring just to say they're hiring because it looks like growth. Now it's in vogue to boast about your AI adoption and how many fewer heads you need to operate. I think both are lot of blowing smoke, but now it's going to hurt a lot of people.
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.
These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?
They already understand the current system and status quo is going away. They understand, on some level, the consequences of the technocapitalist system they've built and perpetuated.
I think assuming human agency (building technocapitalism, correcting course) or the possibility to escape capitalism and its consequences (in bunkers), underestimates what capitalism is.
Because there isn't an unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Sure, a bowling ball factory in a world that demands unlimited bowling balls should take the productivity multiplier AND retain the employees, because they ought to make all the bowling balls they possibly can.
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.
He explains the rationale, smaller teams work faster.
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.
Have you worked at a big company? It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a large group, even without AI. Throw in some AI help, and it could be much better.
> It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a 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.
I would say the vast majority of people in this thread don't believe that this is related to AI at all, other than as a pretext. It's kind of incredible.
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
Experience is usually a subjective thing. But it seems pretty clear to me. I’m was huge advocate of free speech and a political moderate
but X made me question my priors on content moderation. There was genuinely heinous shit on my feed and i had no good way to filter it.
I don't use that site much nowadays, but every time I do, I am shocked at just how many fucking bugs there are. This idea that they laid off whatever percentage of their workforce with no impact to the quality of the software is not based in reality whatsoever.
And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.
I logged into xitter recently after a long time, and my feed was cluttered with anti immigrant scare stories, western values under threat etc. that I got really scared thinking what the future holds if people are getting brain washed to this extent. It was things I never followed anywhere, so Elon is literally stuffing this crap down everyone's throat. Vibes of invention of radio and television powering the Holocaust.
And twitter hasn't launched one single meaningful anything since.
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
> And twitter hasn't launched one single meaningful anything since.
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.
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.
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'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
Mark Fisher is excellent. It will be interesting to see if his claim that the human face is required for capitalism's functioning will hold (does not look like it).
Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.
He did get rid of himself as Twitter’s CEO. He founded Block and Bluesky which employ thousands of people, instead of enjoying the fortune of an ex-CEO. Maybe you should be open minded a little bit?
That's called quiting for better opportunities. I doubt the thousands who contributed to block's success will all land on their feet. I'm open ended I'm not a CEO forced to make those contradictory decisions.
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.
what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not
high impact executives like myself are too busy to use up our precious time with minutia like capitalization. every second counts when youre a high impact ceo and thats just one reason why our compensation is 1000X your own.
Of course it's performative. They're all presumably on Apple devices. They literally went to their settings to disable auto-capitalization to make some kind of ridiculous point, i.e. "I'm too important too think about capital letters".
Yeah I was thinking the same. Pretty generous severance but I'd be pissed if I was fired by someone who can't even be bothered to press shift. Probably thinks it makes him cool and edgy.
I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
Yeah, if this is going to be a nuclear bomb for software developers, imagine what it's going to be like for people in customer service, account managers, etc.
Yeah, I suppose I limited it to software devs since this is HN, but other industries will definitely be hit harder.
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.
don't worry! you can get a few insecure part-time jobs in the retail and/or services industries, and perhaps supplement your meager income with the gig economy TM
I honestly have no idea. We're stuck either way. I don't know what to do. What do you do if all you know is code and you're helping yourself out of a job whether you like it or not?
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.
I can sympathize. If you feel you’re in limbo, emotionally, and feel helpless, it’s natural. I’m in the same profession and what you’re experiencing is not unthinkable but sometimes depending on one’s life conditions, everything might seem more daunting than it should. I believe talking to a professional about this may help. I’d do the same.
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.
I wouldn’t call it limbo, and I don’t think I need therapy for this. It’s more like, the future is so uncertain but all signals are pointing in one direction.
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.
> I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism
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.
I don’t think we’ll ever return to the glory days (2007-2023). Software engineering in the next few years will become as cool as accounting or HR (as in not cool at all). Just a generic white collar profession like it was maybe in the 80s.
it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
I mean, maybe it's not, honestly it was the first FAANG that popped in my head as I typed the comment. But for most software engineers working at a place like that even as boring or not sexy as it may have become in SF, they won't ever even get close
ymmv of course, but 2023 was a low point for tech stocks that have exploded since then, and at companies with four-year grants it's going very well for people that got good refreshers, or even better an initial grant, in 2023. well, if they haven't been fired, but statistically most haven't.
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.
Imagine receiving this message and the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalise letters properly. How insulting. It's like being fired by a five year old child.
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
The homeless person thing was a bit of a mean way to put it, but I don't think the parent commenter meant it critically or as an insult tbh, more an observation.
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.
Admittedly, Dorsey is nowhere near Ellison or Musk levels of evil. Maybe he's too stupid, maybe he's not ambitious enough. Who knows. But he is an unprincipled chud with a track record that makes his contemporaries look like Einstein by comparison.
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.
There is not always a lot more to do. If your business is making typewriters then what? Or you mine coal that nobody wants to use anymore?
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.
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
You can say yes to more of them, _but they still need to be worth it._ If you have an infinite well of ideas to grow your business, awesome. But there are a lot of companies that just don't have those ideas, where their growth is limited on some other factor related to the market they're in.
I've never seen a roadmap planning process that didn't involve some component of asking departments and teams what needs to be done.
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.
This depends on your goals. If your goal is to drive efficiency into your processes, drive down tech debt, or fix pain points for customers of your existing products, sure. Most people at a your company with have thoughts, and lots of them will have good ideas.
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.
This has nothing to do with AI or any of that shit.
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.
Why make others misfortune a platform for ego expression? Why not doing things elegant, quiet, keep it in-house? Because misery of others drives stock prices up! It's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
>Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount. The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
> everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
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
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?
I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
> I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...
The CEO's last visionary move was to go all in on crypto, even renaming the company. Now he's a visionary again, but firing half the company instead of himself.
What are the odds this is actually due to overhiring during the pandemic? From what I know, that was the principle reason for the Amazon layoffs. Would love to be corrected if I'm misremembering.
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
I don't understand anyone who says layoffs are due to improvements in AI tooling.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
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"?
Now imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly an unbounded number of people appear on the job market who are ready to work for your company at a 5% the cost of your previous employees. Best of all, they become more competent and less expensive over time. You can't yet fire your entire original roster all at once since they need to teach the new hires the specifics of the job, but after that's done, what do you need them for?
A fundamental attribute of capitalism is that labor costs are a regrettable cost center, and any reduction in labor costs without a resulting loss in profit/perceived productivity is a big win. AI is a big win for capitalists, and not so much for anyone who is now suddenly "made redundant". And since we treat shareholder value as sacred and inviolate, too bad for workers who lose their job in this deal.
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad
this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.
LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
I agree if they weren’t simultaneously claiming to be a successful growing company.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
A parallel but not too different situation is happening in the hospital space. Corps fire experienced nurses and hire newbies at half the price. Then they realize the newbies aren't performing so they downsize staff. Then a flu or other seasonal event drives up need for staff so they turn to temp agencies (per diem nurses or 'travelers'). These travelers get 150% to 200% of what staff nurses get. The remaining staff nurses start to leave and become per diem. hospital costs double, quality of care declines.
Same. Plus I have kids and a mortgage. My company just had a 5% layoff and I survived. Seems like it will be the first of many rounds. It's a really stressful time.
To be clear, I'm confident the impact of AI is going to be massive, and that massive impact is already underway rather than years away. But, separate from that, having seen it up close Block was bloated as hell
Yeah. We are coping. Just today, I had a simple bug where the data received was throwing undefined because it was in 2 alternate formats.
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.
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
I recognize that my experience may not be typical, but I spend the vast majority of my development time improving the quality of the systems I work on, in response to specific customer demands for it. The last time I had multiple consecutive weeks of greenfield development was in 2021.
Sucks for the people to lose their jobs, but probably the most honest message you’ll ever see.
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.
How messed up is the world that when a leader basically comes clean and says this is being done for efficiency reasons (and by extension the market's reward for bottom line impact) it starts to come across as "honest and brave"?
I think the AI angle is a fig leaf for perpetual mismanagement. Managers at Block privately complained there were a lot of people doing almost no work. Recently, teams have lost people one at a time, sometimes laid off the day after each other.
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
All this is is evidence that Jack Dorsey had no idea what half the employees at Block were doing before he decided to do layoffs. May he know no peace, wherever he goes.
The year is 2030, tech companies provide the exact same value proposition to the consumer that they did in 2024, except it is buggier, full of sparkle buttons you can’t get rid of, and isn’t a source of high-paying employment. The front page of HN still has 5 posts from Blog Guys titled “Programming is Fun Again”.
Temporal had a far greater impact on dev velocity than AI ever did. It's not even close. It saves not only coding, but design, planning, coordination, maintenance, etc that AI doesn't even touch. But that's not very buzzy, is it.
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).
Having spent years in fintech partnerships (Kabbage-Amex, Lendio), the pattern Block is going through is familiar — the post-ZIRP reckoning where sprawling product bets get consolidated back to core revenue drivers. I'll also be interested to see whether their Bitcoin/decentralized payments thesis survives the cost-cutting or gets put on the "block" as well (bad Dad jokes). Tpypicall, from what I've seen, the companies that come out stronger from these cycles are the ones that cut to focus/customer value, not just cut to save.
Agreed. Now that one more company has announced a big (40%!) headcount cut, other CEOs will feel like it is ok to do so now too (someone else stuck their neck out first, safe to pile on, "every one else is doing it", etc).
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
This is how I see this and most other "AI layoffs".
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.
Everybody is on the edge, with the fear of a big layoff wave happening.
We see more and more people claiming they are so much more productive thanks to coding agents, big tech CEOs driving the use of AI like crazy, pundits anticipating rise of unemployment. Personally, I feel that productivity gains are overrated, but still, I'm pretty worried to lose my job in the near future. I'm saving aggressively.
Investors and share holders want to hear that you're an "AI" company now. That implies some kind of transformation so a ritual needs to be performed. Transformations and rituals are right up "jack"'s alley, so in this case, and unfortunately for employees, it dovetails perfectly.
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.
A few thoughts about Block as I've worked there before:
- the company thrives on long term projects that seem to fizzle out as engineers get frustrated and leave
- there are way too many MBAs and finance people now compared to the early years where building was prioritized.
- jack is only doing part time at Block, early days he was around to chat and work with varying levels of hands on
- they've overhired and over-committed to losing projects, worst of all they've de-prioritized projects that were pretty innovative because traction wasn't there quick enough for them to justify them, e.g. terminal, POS specifically for restaurants, localization for EU
- they operate on docs and in the time of AI, the workforce is inundated with slop
- also, I hate that jack can't be bothered to capitalize anything like it's cool. come on man, you're firing 4000 people, not tweeting memes
Block really did not come down from it's COVID/ZIRP era high # of employees as much as many other companies, and it's COVID era headcount growth was extremely rapid by any standard.
In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
>repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust [...] i'd rather take a hard, clear action now [...] than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
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.
> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
> i’m sorry to put you through this.
POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.
I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.
My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.
Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
> Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory.
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.
Yes, unfortunately. Each headcount, properly trained and reskilled, is now worth a whole team by themselves! I blame capitalism and the inability to look past the next quarterly earnings statement for what's happening instead.
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.
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.
Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents.
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.
Agreed, and the AI wranglers will be the equivalent of architects and staff+ engineers today, and they will be paid handsomely. BUT! They are a pretty small fraction of the current developer workforce. The remaining junior-to-mid level engineers will have to uplevel themselves while having no opportunity for hands-on experience to do so as they get laid off in bulk.
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.
>>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.
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.
To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
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.
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
> he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
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.
First, I posted the numbers below, it's not ZIRP overhiring in this case.
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).
I'm generally anti-corpo and capitalism but I agree with you. The guy could've done better but so far he's on a good trajectory and much much better than most. Doesn't mean that he isn't going to make mistakes nor that this might turn out badly but that's the point of leading - making bets.
It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.
If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP.
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.
The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.
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.
I just posted the hard evidence (the actual numbers). 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.
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 future is not evidence? I don’t understand what you’re saying.
> 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.
> What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
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.
That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say.
While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people
I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board.
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.
It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap.
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
To me what you're upset about basically sounds like, "People who have more money/power/etc have it easier than those who don't."
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.
Potentially, universal human rights is what's wrong with it. Much depends on what "get away with" and "leeway" actually mean. There's a difference between owning a jacuzzi and owning a high court judge. Between these there's a gray area of things people vaguely disapprove of, and sometimes it turns out that they're decided to be illegal.
Sure, we're all in agreement that one should not be able to buy a judge, or violate human rights. But that's not what we're talking about.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions.
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.
I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate
When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check.
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.
> first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
10,000 employees for what? I never thought of Block to be that big.
If Elon came in, he would probably fire 80% meaning 8000. Like he did with Twitter/X and Twitter ran fine this whole time.
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.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus
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 agree. I experienced both setups and the drag was awful for people's morale and internal politics and made the company do really shady things like letting people go before bonus milestones are reached eventhough they were key contributors.
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
Whoever is that "jack", he should go back to school to learn how to use capital letters, commas, periods and all other difficult stuff. Or, just ask Chat GPT to write this kind of letters to the people. Maybe, after comparing "jack" writing with AI's writing company stakeholders would figure out, that maybe it is "jack", who should be replaced by some Open AI et. al. tools...
AI increases productivityvastly, but it cuts down buyers also vastly, through removal of jobs etc. So deflation could result, exposeing the disparities even more.
I strongly look forward to it being 5 years from now and having "what the software industry looks like with AI factored in" question settled. I'm tired of the uncertainty in our industry.
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.
For a lot of high value per employee businesses it usually makes more sense to hire local. Offshoring is usually for jobs that don’t directly generate profits and more of a necessity. If you’re a programmer you shouldn’t work for a company where coding isn’t a profit center
I had never heard of Block before, but I visited their website and downloaded one of their open-source projects, Goose (an OpenCode alternative). I ran a very simple prompt on one of the projects I’m working on to implement a small feature. It ended up going into what seemed like an infinite loop and consumed three-quarters of my monthly Poe subscription on a single prompt. I uninstalled it immediately.
Never heard of them either. But the link in the title is to Jack Dorsey's tweet. Now him I have heard of. Didn't know he was involved in that company too.
It is hard to tell what this company does, but it seems to be involved in bitcoin. Coincidentally we have had a huge drop in bitcoin in the last months.
They own Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Jay Z's music streaming service Tidal. They make a decent amount of money from people buying and selling Bitcoin on Cash App but most of their revenue is not related to Bitcoin.
If AI really was the cause, why would a company eliminate people who could use it to multiply output and widen the gap between them and their competitors?
Beyond that, why would you just eliminate half of your staff overnight? That causes massive disruption. You would phase the employees out over some number of months to ensure a smooth transition.
This is akin to the is-ought fallacy. Just because a company had layoffs and cited AI, doesn't mean other companies should follow suit or that it will happen. As others have noted in the comments, BTC dropped heavily which Block was invested in, and a lot of their bets went south. Block managers complained at times about certain people not working privately. They also acquired a few companies at peak valuations post COVID.
Feel like I tried to get a job here before/did some online test, had to find hidden code in HTML (some broken message scattered across CSS classes) and yeah it took me a bit to do it, didn't hear anything or was denied ahh well. That wasn't the full test, that was the start of it.
The $2M+ gross profit per person target is the number that actually explains this. That's 4x their pre-covid baseline. Every company that over-hired during ZIRP is running this same math correction. The AI framing helps the stock. The underlying correction was always coming.
Their revenue is literally down over FY25. But it takes less than an hour for VC influencers to come out and and say we all need to work nights and weekends before getting displaced.
https://x.com/balajis/status/2027146933136150867?s=46
If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?
Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.
> 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.
Making it seem like there's only going to be one mass layoff round. There will be another one, you can be certain.
This will bite back. People being out of jobs means less spending by the public which affects all businesses, which then offsets the productivity gains given by AI.
In some cases, you have vast ability to produce and serve, but the buyers are gone.
The wording is all nice, and at surface level it reads well. It still makes me feel super icky. Kill 4k jobs because people are more productive with AI. Fuck the people, push the profits. Make investors happy.
No, fuck the investors. Fuck the entities causing these decisions to be more common. Extra-fuck the ever-more-obvious push for profit over literally anything else, including ethics, morals, and humanity. If you're an investor causing this shit to happen, fuck you.
Somehow this makes me feel that this org is already dead, and that this is just gonna accelerate it.
Yes 10k? Insane we have companies larger than counties. This all depends on how many they needed to hire in the first place. Also, I don't this reflects the AI transition at all.
Which functions? which projects? If you have 10,000 talented engineers and you're choosing to reduce headcount it's because you don't know how to attack the business and drive revenue in a significant way.
In this market it is probably smarter to fire a large block of people. Chances are good that you can rehire some where you went too aggressive. Sucks for the people that got laid off though.
herd effect (doesn't stand out, everyone's using it), 'forward-thinking' i.e. preventing ostensible future problem rather than admitting fault of overhiring or bad mgmt/initiatives, juices stocks, keeps wages down and employees in line, if no ability or opportunity to expand (market saturated or bad biz outlook ahead) it gives cover to scale down labor force
How do they work out that intelligence tools can fill the gap made by 4,000 out of 10,000 and how long did it take to do that calculation? Or are we entering a phase of layoffs under the guise of ?
"we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."
I wanted to come back to this to add that it's highly disrespectful to make a post/write a letter laying off 40% of your company and not bother to capitalize words properly.
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
I totally agree. In this strange era we're all in, it seems that not using proper capitalization is a sign of "importance". Other high ranking people/CEOs/technologists don't use the correct rules, especially for important announcements like laying off 4000 people.
O tempora, o mores!
Looking at Block's Twitter bio, I see half their companies seem worthwhile, the other half is crypto stuff, and they should either sell it off, or sunset it.
My guess: they keep you around on contract for 1-6 months because laying you off immediately would be very disruptive.
One company I worked for did this. It felt weird to everyone. But they did give a slightly better severance to those that stuck out their contracts so it worked out slightly better for them.
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business
then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Dorsey is in AI psychosis. He required every employee to send him an email weekly which then he had summarized by AI because of course he aint reading it himself.
Even in "AI psychosis" I don't see how firing people is a logical response to advances in AI.
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
because demand is weak and the product markets are saturated. there are dimishing returns to increasing investment. so these companies switch to managing their earnings ratio. if you cant grow revenue, then cut costs.
Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?
- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?
- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
Lots of people laid off by Block are on H1B Visas. With transfer they have 60 days to find new role. If they could not find new job in 60 days, they "fake" transfer to "bodyshop" company while they are looking for real work so status does not lapse.
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.
Even if you consider 50% of them are H1Bs, and out of them even majority don’t find jobs in 60 days (it’s actually more since they are keeping them on payroll for 5 months) that’s still a low number. Couple with the fact that not all would like to join body shops. I understand your frustration but I don’t think stopping H1B transfers is the solution.
Not really. I expect with AI and increased productivity allure of outsourcing will diminish. You want super productive engineers to be close to product and customers.
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 point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
Our team at getclera.com is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.
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.
We are an ai headhunting startup and ready to support all affected from the lay-off.
Our team at clera is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee we can with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.
Bets on how long it takes to get back to 10k employees?
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...
I wonder what folks on 2009 Hacker News would have said if a company announced layoffs.
Would the top comments have been questioning it, telling the CEO what he should have done instead, worrying about how hard it would be for those people in today's economy?
Lord, here comes the flood. I'm sure there will still be lots of denial, and ofc it isn't just 'ai takin our jobs', but my gut and personal experience is saying this is just the first wave.
AI is a transformative technology that will reshape how companies are run. More layoffs may be coming unfortunately. But on the other end, more companies and more products will be created. More competition overall, including for Block.
The overarching risk, imo, is America turning against tech and its leaders / billionaires. I think this is slowly happening. And why not, if the People decide that tech is not bringing good things to our modern society anymore, that should be respected.
FFS. What is it with these weirdo "leader" types and the all lower case writing? Are they trying to come off as "cool" in the "hello fellow children" way or are they just implying they are so important, they don´t even have to observe the rules of writing and grammar?
Do you think (great) ideas for projects fall out of thin air?
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.
> They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
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.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.
Translation from a long diatribe: we see that devs using AI are way more productive so we can save some money here for shareholders, hence 40% of you are laid off.
Software developer in general are probably looking for some fucked up situation here.
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.
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.
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
That significantly more generous than the 12-16 week severance packages being doled out by big tech during the great layoffs of 2022-2023 if I remember correctly.
In 2023 Google gave 16 weeks plus 2 for every year of tenure, so not significantly less (and more if your tenure was >5 years), plus google also vested stock for entirety of the 16+ weeks.
Honestly the whole Silicon Valley shtick is becoming old. The fake positivity, the quirky writing style, the "I think the most important quality is sticktuitiveness" linkedin-esque bullshit. Not to mention the cargo-cult that is so obvious in every GPT-wrapper startup.
This was mostly born out of counter signalling the businesses that valued serious people over competent people in the 20th century.
But, like with all things, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. I believe the next wave of tech countersignalling will be people who actually do take themselves seriously, maybe even dress in suits, etc..
I noticed that as well and it oddly made me sit for a minute to think about it. I ended up deciding that it landed a bit more 'real' and unfiltered. Could be interpreted many ways. Nobody knows the actual why but (possibly) Jack.
> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.
I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.
>> * this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff*
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.
We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode".
Either way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. "Necessity is the mother of invention." They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.
Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.
Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
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.
> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.
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.
Unfortunately this insane perspective is common. I’ve literally been told by a past employer that the revenue that I, personally, was bringing in to the company (by going way above and beyond) was greatly appreciated, but that they were unhappy about the cost of paying me a small fraction of this revenue as a pre-agreed performance bonus.
You dont understand; after they pay me, my boss and the c-suite their bonuses there is nothing left of the revenue that you, personally, bring in.
> we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.
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).
As if some people are born as cost centers, like it’s the genetic programming for pupillary distance.
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?
> As if some people are born as cost centers, like it’s the genetic programming for pupillary distance.
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.
That's true, let's think about it.
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!
> If you want to be a profit center, be one.
Thanks, I'm cured.
Ah, so this is why many companies end up full of sociopaths who contribute nothing to the actual revenue of the company: they all managed to weasel themselves into the “profit centers” while the chumps doing actual work that keeps the lights on remain in the “cost centers”.
Remember that economists think that this process you're talking about is healthy, good and this is how companies should be run. Take massive loans, hire, then discard people when you don't need them.
DOW is at 50.000.
what is sad is that it's not possible to tell if this is a genuine thought or sarcasm.
HN is weird like that.
Peak Capitalism was grandmas investing in companies to receive a dividend in retirement. This hunt for unicorns and magic forever growth is ruining everything.
I saw a video recently that talked about something kind of strange and upsetting about the stock market.
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.
It is extremely frustrating that the people who actually make these decisions are pretty shielded from the consequences, but I have learned to never take anything a billionaire says at face value.
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 absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
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.
> the correction was largely complete over a year ago
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 think it's a bit of both and perhaps 10% AI. Companies like Block are bloated for what they offer.
> managing earnings to sustain equity valuations
That's an interesting take, so eventually they'll just run out of these tricks and at that point the valuations will burst?
No, there'll always be a new trick.
That's what the MBA are paid for. New magic tricks.
Bingo. Yes. The trick, as usual, is timing the pop.
> the correction was largely complete over a year ago
We had tariffs and other disruptions since. So more correction is required.
Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.
Good point. What's interesting is that startups with solid remote infrastructure now have access to talent pools that were harder to tap before. Engineers in places like LATAM or Eastern Europe who might have held tight to their FAANG remote gigs are now reconsidering options. The timezone alignment with US companies makes this particularly interesting for early-stage teams that need real-time collaboration but can't afford Bay Area salaries.
It might actually be that they mean what they say.
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 don’t know… If the company is so healthy and has some nice financial buffer, I would expect the increased productivity due to AI to be used for more revenue generation. So either they don’t know how to translate all the quality hires they got into (enough) revenue, they can’t afford it, or maybe they they hired too fast to maintain quality :shrug: That’s my read at least
It likely has to do with changed investor preferences. In the boom years, it was OK to grow at all costs, make money whenever. Nowadays investors are looking to cash out earlier, from what I observe. Gotta find ways to make the stock move up in that environment, cost-cutting-because-AI seems to work right now.
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.
Profitable, and yet missed their revenue targets in Q3, causing their stock to tumble. That's an emergency. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-06/dorsey-s-...
Or it just really is AI.
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.
There’s definitely going to be a shift over time. But it’s clearly not here just yet. So why preemptively lay off anyone? Isn’t that inefficient?
> But it’s clearly not here just yet.
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.
> 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.
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).
The despising drug addicts and welfare moms being supported by 'productive people' has now spread to despising working people making six figures. The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.
> The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.
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.
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Re: over hiring
I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.
I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.
wow which company was this?
Not op, but GitLab fits the form.
but was GitLab sold? I don't think so
I'll give you a hint: the company was featured prominently in the preface to The Dilbert Principle.
Pacific Bell
My take is that if AI really improved productivity, then that makes labour effectively cheaper. Usually, when labour is cheap, then you buy lots and lots of it so that you can get a lot of things done.
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.
> that makes labour effectively cheaper.
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.
If AI makes people more productive then labor is cheaper than it was pre-AI, even at pre-AI salaries, because you're getting more done at the same cost.
Exactly, I find the math fairly simple:
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'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
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.
it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
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IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.
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
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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.
You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.
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.
The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.
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).
Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.
Shape national conversations*, sure.
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
You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.
So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.
Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing. But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.
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.
> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time
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.
I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.
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.
Weren’t most of the losses down to Musk’s weird political stance rather than the effects of the staff reduction?
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.
> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.
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.
> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.
The Cybertruck begs to differ.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that monstrosity.
I mean your point isn't unfair, but the conversation so far os going something like
>"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?
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
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've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.
Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months
I was there, and no, it's not true. There were debates about it and no consensus.
He's a VC now. That's how they think
For that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs.
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.
Really? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023.
That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.
My understanding is that Twitters revenue was
What's the operational cost now? 10K to 2K employees. 30 Engineers.
It doesn’t cost much to keep the lights on. As far as I know, X post-acquisition is not investing in innovation anymore.
Musk 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.
Elon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.
That would be the good argument, yes.
Mo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine
The company lost about $12 billion in enterprise value between the last two transactions.
Valuation is not important. These are private market transactions. Ultimately all the investors made out well, and it seems the company is more profitable than it was before. At least expenses are way down and if those expenses are correct then they are paying off the debt and making a good profit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176049
I couldn't possibly disagree with this more. Since the acquisition Twitter/X has had far more features at a far faster pace than in the 10 years prior. They've added all sorts of great stuff, and recently have been near the top of the charts in the Apple App Store.
What features are you referring to?
There's more but this is a most of them.
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+)
I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.
This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.
Oh I don't think Trump needed Elon buying Twitter to win his second term.
The Democrats basically handed it to him with the whole Biden/Harris fiasco.
If by that you mean their unrelenting support for Israel, then yes, That was the reason.
Oh sorry, no I meant them shoving Biden into the candidacy despite clear health issues, shutting down any primary challenge, and swapping Harris in late in the game when it was abundantly clear Biden's health was a problem.
> After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
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.
The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now
The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.
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.
Also the logged out experience is broken and has been broken for years since it was acquired by Musk.
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)
https://x.com/elonmusk
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> 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.
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.
It doesn't matter anymore.
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.
So you just discovered offshoring of jobs? Like it has been going for the past decades. I don't see how AI or twitter changes anything to the outlook of the C suite. Lower spending increase productivity. If hiring Poles instead of Americans can achieve this goal, they were always going to do that.
Take a look at his post history, all he does is shill for offshoring so his portfolio companies can save a buck on labor costs.
> 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.
> 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.
The median SWE TC in the Bay Area is $272k [0]. After tax and a fully loaded Roth 401K that is around $143,000.
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...
[2] - https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/income
It was mostly a joke about the flippant way your comment added in "keep your family and friends close" after moving to highest cost places in the world.
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.
> First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.
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...
Flying parents in for a couple weeks is not what I interpret as "keeping friends and family close".
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?
> It was mostly a joke...
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.
you're doing the honorable by offering solutions
This is the recommendation I have heard peers, both technical and managerial, echo for years in one form or another:
The above involves one thing people can possess which GenAI cannot; understanding stakeholder problems which need to be solved and then doing so.You seem to have forgotten politics, since at the managerial level that is the most effective tool at hand. Engineers with their arguments and rethoric be damned.
Engineers can make an argument if you can also logically and coherently tie your argument with outcomes that can grow pipeline and/or revenue.
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.
> It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with
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.
Network higher up the stack and be extremely likable
I'm not going to go out of my way to kiss asses, of that's what you mean.
I don't avoid people higher up the org chart, our paths will just rarely cross and we generally are leading pretty different lives.
>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
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.
> but this example is awful.
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.
>showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again.
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.
Think its a bit absurd to pretend Twitter (content and politics aside) isn't running just fine from technical point of view with 40% of the staff.
I think it's absurd to
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.
Highest usage day for Twitter was yesterday btw.
This is right on all counts and matches what I've seen and heard. And to all the sibling comments arguing about Elon's Twitter shenanigans being a bad move, it doesn't matter. I know because that's exactly what I said to a senior executive who deals with even more senior executives, and those were his exact words: "It doesn't matter." (A bit more in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750804)
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.
That sentiment really makes it feel like this entire global economy is balancing on a toothpick of vibes and peer pressure, rather than some carefully navigated system of systems and backups. Wonder how long it can hold out before the camel breaks.
I am beginning to think it's always been like this, which is why the global economy goes through wild ups and downs every few years.
I fully agree with everything you've said and think the Twitter one is a really good point that I haven't heard before.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
Sure it is not a smoking crater in the ground but outages are frequent, multi-media content loads about 50% of the time and search is basically non-functional at this point.
Let us never forget the "tweet reading limit" incident
Twitter is a strange example given it has experienced a massive drop in valuation and ad revenue as well as struggled with user acquisition since Musk bought it. By all metrics it has declined in value except it where it serves as a powerful megaphone for the US right.
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> Twitter was a megaphone for the US far left, it's now more balanced and centred so allows both sides to post without censor.
I would say it leaned left, didn’t censor the right, and now it’s over corrected and absolutely has not stopped playing games with the content. It is not the space Musk claims and it is hardly a bastion of free speech.
You are VC. Your opinion literally doesn't matter, you're high on your own supply. I go to lunches and dinners with people like yourself frequently and every VC and finance guy wont stop talking about their idiotic delusions of having an AI workforce (slaves). You people yearn for the days of slavery again, but without humans.
Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!
I don't know that I agree with most of what you wrote but others have already addressed that.
> 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".
Not directly at YOU.
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)
Twitter is just a misinformation machine now. They got rid of anyone that made it a decent place. No more pesky moderation, sales and ad teams, etc. as long as it’s up and the sock puppets can foment dived, it’s serving its purpose.
It is a misinformation machine. Funny thing is, it always was. People just want their misinformation reign supreme.
I left Twitter a few months ago because the overall experience was getting worse and I had no desire to be fed culture war propaganda and AI slop non-stop.
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.
What are the insane takes on the main page? It's typically average american-left takes. What makes you think people with these takes are mentally ill?
Are you expecting an honest reply from a fresh troll account?
> save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
I wonder how we all of sudden got so many candidates back from 2020 to 2022
Never let a crisis go to waste, right?
Stoping trying to cope that AI/LLM augmented automation isn't to blame here. equities and profits are at all time highs, rates are still really low!! This has nothing to do with the cost of money.
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).
>Stoping trying to cope that AI/LLM augmented automation isn't to blame here.
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.
Because it doesn't matter if it actually works, or is creating efficiencies. As long as they can justify making a huge % of labor unemployed, not just SWE. The more people laid off the less bargaining power labor has in the future.
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.
I wonder if we can really repeat such revolution. Our communities are fractured and politics more partisan than ever. Be it collective bargaining or more, any fractured attempt to rebel will only end in failure. Perhaps by the working class eating itself alive a la Jay Gould (even if misattributed, the sentiment matches).
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.
Hard to measure just yet, as it stands I think you're correct. But what if 100k drones (assembled in el segundo and painted with Chinese flags) pop out of shipping containers at the port of LA and kill a bunch of their families, beloved celebrities. I think they have the means to tilt popular opinion in any given direction relatively easily, but I do hope they fail (or don't even try something like this).
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.
I'm wondering what the heck will pay the bills on all that 'AI' hardware that's being put out there. So far the number of ideas that sound like an episode of some tech-horror show far outweigh the ones that sound like a Star Trek utopia.
They'll kill off whatever percentage of the working class they don't need like they did in WW2 during the last great depression, although I'd argue they have more efficient methods of purging the working class now. They'll make everyone so poor they beg to fight in a war, like in the 20s-30s.
Russia is already doing this, USA is gearing up for a war with Iran but can't see the USA wanting the PR of losing many soldiers, they could just increase the forces so basically every working class person is low paid potential cannon fodder.
The difference is that in Russia those who are willing to go to war have lived in poverty for decades already, those are not middle-class Muscovites who prefer to stay away from it (in terms of direct participation).
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.
That might have been true three years ago. But not now
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
Over the last 10 years or so in SF and LA, I’ve seen so many countless POS systems at restaurants and small businesses that it’s difficult to believe that Square is anything more than 1 player in an enormous field.
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.
What's wrong with being 1 player in enormous field? Does everything need to be a monopoly in US nowadays?
And before people like my barber would have had a square reader. With NFC in modern phones, they just use that
Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:
- 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
It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.
Toast has already caught up in market share, and dominates the restaurant industry. Square's numbers have been stagnant for many years.
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.
Square was never competitive in the restaurant space. Toast took market share there, but from other companies.
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.
The ubiquity of NFC has made specialized hardware irrelevant for entire industries. It's set dressing for small businesses. The ruggedized enclosures and swiveling touchscreens are cute, but that's not a moat.
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.
> Their lead has not shrunk
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.
You might think Square has better hardware/software, but they absolutely are extra cost-wise for small businesses if you compare them to e.g. Helcim.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.
I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.
The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.
The only thing it served was to distract Jack from building real products.
> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.
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.
It is a healthy mentality. After staying at my second job for too long - 9 years until 2008, I was uncompetitive in the job market and I didn’t have a network. I was 34 then. I said never again.
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
I think part of my anxiety is this. I went to IBM, stayed until my subsidiary went under, and then started job 2 in 2019, and I've been there sense. I'm a bit terrified of my market competitiveness.
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.
Well two things in my case can both be true.
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.
Glad to hear you're doing well. Hopefully it continues and you don't have to enter the job market.
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.
There is absolutely no need to be torn about anything. Stability is important when you have kids. While I did change jobs 4 times between when I married my wife in 2012 and 2020 when my youngest stepson graduated, my wife was able to work part time in the school system so we could have stable insurance and she could be there for them.
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
Are you scarface_74?
I am that account has been dead for awhile
> 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.
Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.
> but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
Unionize.
So exactly what will the magic of unionization do when any company can hire developers from LatAm (much easier to deal with in the same time zone) that are good enough enterprise devs for half the price?
block the hiring.
So you are going to tell a company that has an international business that they can only hire in the US?
For shops on the US soil, yes.
Let’s be clear what you are saying - no international company based in the US should be allowed to hire anyone outside of the US?
If we unionize, will I still be paid $500k with four years of experience?
Yes. This is still possible.
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.
Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]
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/...
I would like all these things too but I wouldn't like the downstream side effects:
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.
Why should workers care about productivity growth when income inequality is at its highest levels in the United States? Companies already don't take chances on American workers, hence why companies need so much corporate welfare to stay competitive.
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?
Is $130k a year 'scraps'? If you're making the average dev salary you're richer than %99.9 of people across the world [1].
The only reason we make this much is because of sustained productivity growth.
[1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
UPS (and all of Europe) says otherwise.
European countries with labor regs that make firing more expensive tend to have higher unemployment rates (specially youth unemployment) because hiring becomes more risky.
Cry me a river for the “average” senior developer who as a rule, makes twice the median income of whatever city they live in. It’s called saving money and living below your means. Yes I was a standard enterprise dev for 25 years before 2020 living in a second tier city.
Hey buddy, you may not believe this but helping workers does in fact help everyone. Maybe get out of the crab bucket mentality and help your fellow human, as I'm confident you would want your fellow man to help you when you make the call.
Right because software engineers making $140K a year have the same grievances as the McDonalds workers who can’t get a set schedule.
Again cry me a river because (hypothetical) you weren’t able to save 3-6 months salary making twice the median wage.
This is a terrible plan to get those devs onboard, and unless your theory is "these companies are idiots who don't know how much to pay for devs" they're still gonna try and find ways to hire them.
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.
No, it just sounds like you deeply hate your fellow man which I find profoundly sad. Not wanting to better the lives of people around you and would rather greedily hoard all the resources just shows your lack of humanity.
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.
I find this take to be very distasteful.
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?
I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
The value in SaaS was never the code, it was the focus on the problem space, the execution, and the ops-included side.
AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".
Right, there are dozens of open source versions of wikis/task trackers/CRMs/ERPs/whatevers. Just because you can vibecode your way to a bad version of a bunch of SaaS products shouldn't fundamentally change anything. Companies buy SaaS products to make running the thing someone else's problem. It's times like these where I wish we had a functional SEC; I really wonder how much market manipulation is going on.
> The value in SaaS was never the code
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…
Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.
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.
That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”
Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed.
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.
Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI.
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.
I hear that, and yeah, it's a possible future but I'm not sure it's the certain one.
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.
Why is it public domain because it's LLM-generated?
As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.")
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.
Can the output of the service be licensed? A bit like the AGPL, you're licensed to use/reuse/derive new works.
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?
There's already been a case where an artist generated art using an LLM, and could not claim copyright on it [0]. Though the guy was torpedoing his own case by claiming the machine created the entire thing. The courts are supporting copyright claims when using an LLM as a tool to support human effort.
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...
Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.
Canva is my go-to example - you can just get NanoBanana/whatever to generate and iterate on the image. Same for all those stock photo services. I used to use them a lot, now I just generate blog images
> AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".
Exactly right
The biggest limiting factor is user acquisition. Just because you can build a competitor in a weekend doesn't mean you can easily acquire a user base. it's dam hard to get users even if your product is twice as good and your giving it away for free!
The implied risk isn't more SaaS competitors, it's that B2B SaaS consumers will just code up their own product instead of going with a SaaS vendor.
Started seeing even B2C folks just get the LLM to do it, or code up a quick solution that does most of it.
There's still enormous potential for technology solutions in the healthcare space. The population in every developed country is getting older and sicker. AI can help a little bit with building those solutions but there are no magic bullets: we still need lots of people grinding away on hard problems.
Perhaps this is too US-centric, but as someone who used to work in health fintech, I strongly disagree.
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.
There's a lot more to healthcare than just fintech. I've been the field for decades and I've never seen such rapid progress before in areas like clinical and administrative interoperability, digital health, software as a medical device, telehealth, clinical decision support, cost transparency, etc. Despite the structural problems with incentives that create that make the financial side so dysfunctional, there has never been a better time to build.
I never said health was just fintech.
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... .
Sure, I generally agree: the social problems that cause (relatively) low life expectancy in the US can't be solved with technology. But that's a separate problem. There's still a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and technologists to improve the healthcare system in ways that deliver real benefits to patients / providers / payers, and make some money in the process.
> I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Tech has allowed a very solid middle class lifestyle for a lot of people. I can't think of another good paying job where someone is self-taught, or went to a 12-month certificate program at their local community college and now has a very good career.
If those jobs disappear, or wage growth is non-existent, I don't know where the next generation will find those jobs.
Just one correction though: Your definition of middle class has to be super wide to call many tech jobs "solid middle class". It's not as if everyone ends up in the billionaire column, most definitions of middle class end with household income at $165k. Many in tech go over with one job. Once a family has two jobs and one is in tech, basically everyone counts as upper middle or above. With two tech jobs in a household, claiming middle class is often denying one's actual status.
That's true. For context, I reside in Canada where good tech jobs fit the definition of the low end of upper class (250k CAD) where I am not sure the same is true in the USA? Regardless my definition is wrong.
Prompt companies are already evolving, establishing specific contexts to become business facilitators. That might be a "wrapper" project, but I bet there will be copyright litigation between these companies for "prompt piracy".
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.
Folks at Jack's level are just as susceptible to flawed reasoning and trend following as anyone else. Sometimes it feels like more so, possibly because they have so much buffer to absorb the consequences of bad ideas (see how Twitter ended up). A person living paycheck to paycheck has less leeway to veer too far away from reality.
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.
Before people jump into existential despair here about the software field, do we know the breakdown of roles? How many were tech vs support, operations, HR, and other roles?
During the massive post-pandemic hiring spree, there were a lot of threads in the vein of "why does [MATURE STARTUP] requires X,000 developers?" and I think those questions were maybe prescient. These companies have been spending free venture funds on whatever and acquiring headcount for the sake of headcount. A lot of them have tried to and failed to be "everything apps" and now they are really sitting on mature, stable and profitable platforms that don't need to move fast and break things. They just need to not crash. And the result is they need far fewer people.
In what sense did CashApp not pan out? $16b revenue. Too early to say whether Afterpay will work out but looking good so far
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
It also solves an exclusively American problem. In my country anyone can send money bank to bank, no need for a separate service.
Absolutely, most of this is private corporate duct tape over a lack of Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), Instant SEPA (Europe), etc [1]. “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” [2] In a US financial services market, Venmo and CashApp are unnecessary assuming you procure a deposit account from a bank or credit union with instant payment rails access [3] [4]. Even Schwab has access to Zelle, for example. You need not extend credit and have credit risk exposure for paper checks anymore as well as an issuer of a deposit account.
[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...
> Even Schwab has access to Zelle
Schwab's accounts are backed by Chase. Zelle comes along for the ride.
Zelle has a transfer limit of $1000 per day and has a bad user interface.
Transfer limits are selected by each network participant [1], based on their risk tolerance. Four years ago Zelle was moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume [2]. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits. Zelle is baked into each financial institution’s app, there is no stand alone app anymore (as of March 2025) [3]. If you don’t like the UX, switch banks or credit unions, they’re mostly interchangeable. There are thousands to pick from.
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/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32512052
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552030
Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.
Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.
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.
Thanks! I will request my bank to increase my limit.
It's a US only problem.
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.
Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.
Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.
Afterpay (and the other Buy Now Pay Later competitors like Klarna) are potential financial arrangement facilitators for their customers.
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.
> $16b revenue
I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
You took the words out of my mouth. In a megacorp, AI multiplies into about 10% of my work and 10x’s it making me roughly 10% more efficient. When I use AI for side projects and don’t have to work with a bunch of stakeholders, dependency owners, and opinionated management, that 10x multiplies into my full effort and the project moves 10x faster.
Yep. I find it helps best when I'm off script/going rogue doing something that I think will help, rather than working with 10 other people all with different opinions and knowledge that just absolutely bogs something down.
What makes you think corporate hierarchies and processes won't infect their use of AI so that you won't be able to "go rogue" and you'll be held up by AI reviews, not humans.
Oh and the opposite when you are one of the 10 "other" people on someone else's project.
Agree
I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
Yep. I don't understand "Look at me! With AI I can do 10x work now". Like congrats, your prize is 10x work and new baseline expectations.
The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.
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.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
If its run anything like twitter then there are loads of teams running around trying random shit, along lots of duplication.
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)
> … using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently.
These are not mutually exclusive. How does making my “own [work life] easier” not translate into “work more efficiently.”
I think it is a question of who is getting the benefit of these efficiencies. If it is the worker—ie they are doing the same amount of work in less time but not making that extra time available to the company—then from the company’s perspective they aren’t being more efficient. Or at least the additional efficiency doesn’t affect it.
I think your final sentence is more accurate than your churn argument. AI doesn't double output, but actually writing the code is only a small part of the job.
Seeing the >20% stock increase by just mentioning the "Replacing workers for AI", makes me wonder if there isn't a huge pressure from the shareholders to get on the trend no matter what. Short-term baby, rules the world.
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".
This is a very interesting take unlike the usual doom and gloom narrative or jevons paradox optimists. Are there any data points which made you reach these conclusions?
To be fair I've been all over the map on this. But lately neither of these scenarios seemed quite right. Reflecting on my own experience, I find that sometimes AI is great, but sometimes it feels like a return of https://xkcd.com/303/. So, putting 2 and 2 together and picturing it from C-level perspective, this is where I landed.
No data points yet, except now this one.
Yeah, the narratives diverge. He said "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." So, if these tools actually deliver this 90% productivity improvement? Will he let another 5k or then start cutting gradually over months?
We can all read stock market charts - the business isn't doing well.
> how much the AI aspect is true
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 hear about CashApp but I don’t know anybody who uses it. What’s the selling point?
It's of course an exaggeration to say white people use Venmo and black people use CashApp, but it's not too far off the mark: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/08/payment-a...
It provides a facility that FedNow and Zelle will replace. It's a US specific solution for instant settlement payment rails that other nations have had for a while.
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.
Jack Dorsey likes to do side quests it seems, I see him in many things
Just to nitpick the math. If you are going to fire 50% of the company, the AI tools should actually make the remaining people 100% more efficient, not 50% :)
And if you kept everyone and used AI you could expand the business. Oh wait, they are out of ideas.
> 40%
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!
Option 1) You’re right. They’re screwed because they won’t be able to keep the lights on and these layoffs make it worse.
Option 2) AI can just vibe code what block needs now, or maybe in a few years. Laying off talent makes sure there are people on the market to do the vibe coding, and that block will not be able to respond to widespread competitive pressure. They’re screwed and these layoffs make it worse.
Of course, they could realize they magically have 2-10x the engineering and organizational capabilities they used to and improve the product. They won’t because late stage capitalism only cares about weekly stock swings and graft so it can’t plan all the way to end of quarter anymore.
>"(40%? come on)"
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.
> towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
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.
This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective).
* Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first.
* Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
* Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands vs breakup-via-text-message.
* Giving people a chance to say goodbye.
Not gonna go into strategic analysis of this, or Jack's leadership style in general.
But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."
"some of you may die, but it's a risk I'm willing to take"
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> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.
That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?
> Owning the decision
Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.
> respecting the people that got you there
There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.
> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.
You cannot attrite 40% of the company in 5 months, without creating an incredibly toxic environment. Dorsey knows this; ultimately he lost Twitter over his inability to right size it. I would bet dollars to donuts he promised himself he wouldn't do it again - under no circumstances is 40% cut over six months preferable to a clean fast cut.
Voluntary severance/ERO is possible without a bad culture. I’ve seen it done, people love it.
Doesn't that make people with best opportunities (most skilled workers) leave and people with least opportunities (least skilled workers) stay?
Personally if I was offered 6+ months of severance I just couldn't justify staying even in the best companies I've been at.
Yes but usually that’s fine because you structure it to happen over a timeframe that you (the company) chooses based on the person.
What is the age distribution of employees at Block? I'd guess it skews quite young. You won't have much natural attrition or interest in early retirement. And in this job market, voluntary severance is also not very attractive.
Young people love to be paid to switch jobs too - who would refuse 20 weeks of doubled income? From Squares perspective, this would lead to an adverse selection, because Square would lose the people who can easily get jobs elsewhere.
That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better than the ones who remain. If you have people you feel are under performers then yes, ideally you would lose those specifically but then it’s not a reorganization it’s a performance based layoff where you’re outright saying “you’re not good at your job”
> That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better
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?
I think that assumption is not unreasonable - but I don’t think it’s a reasonable conclusion to say the people who are more confident to jump ship are inherently better for the future of a company than those who have been around for just as long and don’t want to risk it in the market.
Sure but 5 months isn't the comparison. They state that they're cutting early. We don't know the exact position, but perhaps over 2-3 years would be ok, and 40% in 3 years isn't unheard of, particularly in the valley, and particularly with incentives.
a donut costs way more than a dollar so losing your bet makes you win?
I like donuts too so..checkmate
> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
It's a nuanced trade-off. It's worse for the company as you said, it may be worse for the employees because some will leave from burnout without severance, those remaining will have more work to do typically.
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.
It is not a false dichotomy. Reducing headcount via attrition is a subset of "prolonged bleeding", if you've already decided it needs to happen.
I guess you could consider it that, I read "prolonged bleeding" as more smaller layoffs. That's a fair point. Although then I'd say it's still disingenuous to frame it that negatively when many may see it as a better option.
> prolonged bleeding.
> 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 don't agree about the attrition bit.
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.
>That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
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.
Attrition by definition implies no cuts: just people leaving for the usual reasons people leave, and not replacing them. Attrition can be accelerated by providing incentives like exit bonuses.
Apart from the bit where he lays 4000 people off, but himself is untouched.
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.
Yeah it's a great layoff letter in the same way that the invasion of Iraq due to WMD was a great speech.
Companies grow and shrink. That’s not “a massive failure”.
You're right, it's worse. It's hurting people's lives, maybe it should be considered a crime in America due to how intertwined having a job is with also having access to healthcare, social services, government services, the ability to eat, the ability to have a place to sleep; it all seems extremely dramatic in this context.
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.
This is extremely naive. A huge portion of industries are cyclical by the nature of the markets they target.
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.
Cutting staff by half is an admission of massive management failure.
Their planning was terrible.
Their hiring was terrible.
They can’t think of any new projects to put these staff on.
Not really. Sometimes markets fail.
It was not a management failure when construction companies had to lay people off during the GFC.
An external tech appears that eliminates the need for human labor. But a CEO acknowledging its arrival and adjusting for it is a 'massive failure of leadership'?
Well that's certainly the story that Jack is selling.
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.
I wonder if the lack of capital letters is a clever trick to make this whole annoucement look more humane and natural. Surely it's intentional: only "U.S" deserves capitals, not even his own name in the signature.
I don't know, I personally find it kind of disrespectful.
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.
It's just a Shibboleth used by SV types to signal their disdain for convention. Altman is also a fan.
Why does he write i’m at some sentences but i'm at others (different ')?
The 2021 answer would be that he wrote part of this in a basic text editor, and part in a word processor that does “smart quotes”.
The 2026 answer is that an AI wrote some parts.
That’s how Jack writes to everyone (and comms drafts his announcements true to his style)
Yeah somehow this make me instantly dislike him.
its the Black Turtleneck of 2025/2026
That appears to be the preferred writing style of the Epstein class
"owning" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.
One day there will be a CEO who actually pays the severances out of their own compensation.
So, like Nintendo and other Japanese and Chinese companies where the CEO of a company treats the company like their child and takes the hit when they make errors?
Or maybe like the US employer that gave everyone at the company a flat wage?
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Even better they fire themself, the exec team can replace them with AI
Agree materially no consequences but still better than many deflection strategies we have seen from others during layoffs.
It is but those words could be long flowery corpo speak or short.
“Yall gonna get money and most yall fired. My bad woops”
Owning it doesn’t make it less of a shit move.
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.
Yeah but the purpose of a company is not to employ people, it is to make money. The employment is a means to an end. If the money continues to flow without the people, that is better.
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 called a co-op.
You haven’t seen toxic work culture until you’ve seen a co-op reduce its size (or rather, tighten the circle of distributions.)
So we shouldn't call it a shit move? I'm not sure what your point is.
I think it's fine to call it a shit move.
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.
a company's purpoe is profits not being a socialist scheme to support people
Its getting a bit repetitive to see this type of comment on every tech layoff letter
fawning over the CEO is certainly a type of tech poster
Sorry, but it would only be “ownership” of the decision if he himself resigned for making the terrible decisions that led to than”necessity” in the first place.
No you see, he learned a lesson. Its a very expensive lesson so we shouldn't fire him.
Now, why he keeps having to relearn the lesson I couldn't tell you. It's a mystery
I am not sure the exists a good way to say "the business is doing great, but we still fire you".
And also not doing it on a Friday.
Spot on. This tweet will go down in history — right next to Jack's first tweet. We all understand businesses require difficult decisions. This is one of the best layoff letters I've seen. Short, honest, and human.
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence
@grok We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.
I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
This seems … wrong.
> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
The trick to applying these days is to have a contact on the inside that can tell you what the hiring manager is actually looking for, vs what's in the public JD, and then to refer you.
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.
Yeah, it wasn't lost on me that a lot of job listings are fake, even at the time (I think I even wrote comments saying as much on this very forum). I did reach out to contacts asking if they had openings but of course that's a finite set and most of them told me they didn't.
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.
Blink once if the bank rhymed with face
Not that one.
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 like your style :)
I'm a senior in NYC, considering changing jobs but haven't pulled the trigger. I've got a good amount of reachouts from finance recruiters and small-to-medium sized startups but haven't heard anything from the established players (admittedly I haven't been looking).
I got a number of finance recruiters reaching out then too but nothing stuck. I got a few interviews (even got to meet a few interesting characters like Martin Shkreli) but nothing panned out until my friend gave me a referral to my current gig.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
I think it's starting to turn around. My sense is there's still a ton of devs on the market but there's a lot of jobs opening recently. Here's the data from the st luis fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
Thanks for the link. Looks like it's the best it's been in ~2 years
From now on I'll never not think of St. Louis as San Luis.
NYC population dropped by almost half a million since 2020.
You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
No, that's just the reality of the market right now. Software engineers are an extremely hot field, likely because everybody is trying to add AI to their products.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
I'm an software engineer with 17 years experience and I can't even get an interview at most places I put my resume in to.
I'm being very picky with what I look at, which doesn't help, but yeah, it doesn't seem great. Maybe they're all in person gigs? Or is there some ageism? (There has always been some ageism in software)
Largely in-person gigs in the SF Bay Area, yeah. One reason the rents are up so much.
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Easier to hire consultants to add AI to do your software engineering for you than temporarily hire humans with needs and benefit costs to add AI to do your software engineering for you.
Yeah that would make me consider finding a different recruiter. Real estate agent mentality means their interests are not aligned properly.
Is this hiring people to dig ditches for data center infrastructure or something? Because it doesn't sound like software.
Just the current reality in SFBA. 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.
Not being obtuse, I even googled it, but I have no idea what SFBA is in this context. I'm assuming it's not to do with windsurfing in the San Francisco Bay Area or some kind of insulation. Could you elaborate?
you're so close!
So, onsite work in an area with no available housing?
Probably a bunch of performative 9-9-6 BS too.
They're just saying the job market is hot in the location of the S (San) F (Francisco) B (Bay) A (Area) it's not cryptic, I'll assume you had a brain fart here it happens.
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
For what it's worth I actually took "SFBA" and Googled it because I wasn't sure either. I've always heard of it referred to as SF or SV. Learn new stuff every day.
This guy used the expanded acronym in his question though!
I'm not sure it was a brain fart, more I was expecting an area of industry rather than geography.
> I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different.
With my current job search I've got the sense that sf is once again the place to be. Everything else kind of sucks, lots went back on remote work.
London is pretty hot right now. But lots of the jobs are Founding Engineer roles at startups which I’m deeply skeptical will get out of seed.
Founding Eng roles will ask you to take a cash haircut in return for equity.
absolutely be skeptical
Pre-covid, and during the early covid hiring spree, I used to get messages from eager recruiters every week, I get maybe one a month these days, and they are much more tepid.
I'm not actively looking, but what I've noticed from recruiters contacting me (I'm not in SFBA) is:
- 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.
To anyone who's been looking for SWE jobs lately, has this been your experience?
I've actually had really positive responses. I'm fairly senior (~20 years of experience). I was laid off by Meta in 2022, started at Block 3 months later. Laid off by Block in 2024, started at a smaller company 1 month later. Decided to leave that company in early 2025, contacted one company from a HN Who's Hiring post and took that job. That ended up being a poor fit, and I went back to a FAANG around July of 2025.
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.
Also getting lot's of direct recruiter and engineering leadership pings.
Eng leadership pings seems to be one of the few strategies that's been working on the hiring side for finding great talent the last few months
Started looking in November, four offers by end of January, all decent, last two competing offers were fantastic with great companies and I accepted one. Past few months and even now I’ve had more inbounds from recruiters than any time since Covid boom. Offer salaries aren’t as high as Covid boom days but there are a ton of startups that need people.
How was the interview process? If you don't mind me asking
Varied. Most were exactly the same processes I remembered from interviewing years ago: some startups with no processes and unable to get signals, big public tech companies abusing leetcode, awkward screeners hoping for keywords, and everything in between for the most part. Biggest change is they all asked about AI and wanted to hear that I embrace modern tools and am hungry to find the best ways to work. I am positive that skepticism about AI in November prevented me from getting some interviews; demonstrating fluency (insofar as one can be fluent in these racing waters) and excitement for it in January was key to getting some (but not all) offers.
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.
Wildy varies. I'm a new grad and got my first offer after 8 applications and got another offer last week unprompted. Meanwhile my friend graduating from the same university has done 300 applications and a couple dozen interviews with no offer.
What differentiates your resume from your friend's?
Likely it's something about the two individuals. GP probably interviews better, is more confident, more attractive, something like that.
I'm curious too but the phrase "random is clumpy" comes to mind.
Just left amazon for Stripe. Not part of a layoff. It wasn't too bad for me. Remote middle of the country too
> 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned.
Need to tell more recruiters.
Zumper says 15.6% on 1b, 21.3% on 2b - how did you get to 60? https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
This is one of the most "AI tech bro bubble" comments I've ever seen. The broader job market is a bloodbath right now.
Also seeing this in the UK right now.
Yeah, mid-late last year was one of the worst markets I've seen in my career, but the last couple of months things have really seemed to pick up speed.
Can you give me your recruiters number?
That has not been my experience.
> We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look
Really? So no take-home projects? No leetcode? No six rounds of interviews? Just show up and express interest, you're hired!
It seems like the tech job market is exactly the opposite of this right now? Could you be more specific?
trimodal swe compensation (elite, big tech, everyone else) extends to the job markets too
They generalized "the market." I know a lot of out of work SWEs right now.
is there any data about the overall job market on whether it's been good or bad? genuinely curious the most recent data point shows a rebound https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
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
Software development jobs are up 10%. Jobs in general are down 6%
https://x.com/perborgen/status/2025890393166917857
I collect data from "Who wants to be hired" threads. This month is one of the highest in years.
You'd think "past year" would include a full 12 months. This person has chosen a ~10 month period to hide the large drop off in early 2025 as you can see here: https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
They did not, you get the same date range and the same graph shape going to FRED and pressing the "1Y" option, and the series includes the first two months of 2026 so it's 12 months: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1SGzm
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.
Job openings are down, but total jobs are up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
Their graph shows a rebound to early-mid 2024 levels which is promising but still a relatively bad job market
i guess it depends on what you define as bad and what that threshold is
https://trueup.io/job-trend
this tracker shows continuous improvement since 2023
Sure, I assumed status quo everyone is talking about is basically the several years before that graph. I still think it's relatively bad compared to that despite the modest improvement.
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
>If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market?
To avoid laying them off in next year's job market.
Dripping a 10% cut every year for the next four years when you *know* that you're going to do it is cowardice.
Nobody can know they will need to lay off 10% multiple years from now. So many things can change between now and then.
For all Block knows, AI for coding kind of plateaus where it is now and there is a huge boom in software engineer hiring taking advantage of the new tech to produce even more/better features.
Part of the trouble for software companies is that AI hype is sucking 99% of investments in the space. You might have a solid but non-sexy software business and struggle to find the investment you need
Or empathetic, especially when they throw money away à la $70M parties:
“General and administrative expenses increased by $68.1m ... The increase was primarily driven by … an in-person company event held in Q3 2025”
"Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric."
Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.
Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.
> If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that
We are no longer in a zero-interest rate environment, so I think those experiments are more costly than they were a few years go
> Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric.
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.
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
> We all asked for this, literally.
Well - if "we" refers to the original selfish gene (à la Dawkins), then yes - modern capitalism has manifested as an emergent property of the core evolutionary principle. I suppose you could say that about virtually anything however...
> To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction.
Or just be a psychopath.
Most C levels adhere to the “cattle, not pets” idea too.
The people let go can form their own companies. I don't believe anyone has a guarantee to have a high paying white collar job until they choose to retire.
Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."
Even better, start a new company with the previous coworkers who are all versed in the same industry as you just left! Block is profitable, so there’s a lunch to eat.
I really don't understand the notion that a company owes you a job for work that doesn't produce a financial result for them.
They don’t because of at-will employment. It’s just sort of the more moral, empathetic, right thing to do instead of leaving them with no income, no insurance, etc.
Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.
This used to be the accepted standard but it seems today that people think any amount of profit should primarily be directed toward paying wages. (either bigger wages to existing employees, or to new employees, or both). You have multiple sub-conversations in this very comment section wondering aloud why Block didn't invent make-work or "new projects" to keep the 4,000 employed.
The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.
Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.
> that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities
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.
> that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities
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.
But something something trickle down!
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
Block has never been bailed out.
Wasn’t mentioned in the parent comment either.
Edit P.S. Should the individuals who don’t receive a job from a bailed out company get proportional tax refund?
It has gotten plenty of government support and easy cash though.
I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
I know we have to balance inefficiency and optimal allocation of resources... but I agree it doesn't seem optimal for social wellbeing to remove people from their access to health and risking their ability to house and feed themselves without a financial need to do so (like Block going bankrupt).
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to put those responsibilities on individual firms. In the USA, achieving maximum employment has been a mandate for the Federal Reserve to achieve through monetary policy. There are many advantages to allowing individual firms to optimize for productivity. There are also a lot of harms caused by forcing firms to adopt unproductive methods. Even Keynes' joking solution for unemployment was that the treasury might bury bottles of money for private industry to dig up.
> with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating.
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.
Startups generally _don't_ end up with better outcomes. Large companies stay stable, startups are volatile and often end in failure.
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 a cooperative species"
Humans are violent, self-centered tribalists. What species are you referring to? Not homo sapiens.
I do mean homo sapiens. Humans are a cooperative species. They will hunt and gather together in loose communities naturally, sharing excess resources even if individuals are not directly contributing to the resource creation due to being too young, too old, sick or injured. Having inter-societal competition doesn't mean we don't still have cooperative society. Just because ants will fight other ants in different colonies doesn't mean ants are not a social species.
I think we Humans can be both cooperative species and violent,self-centered tribalists species and definitely all the grey area between the two at the same time as well.
I don't live in a cave, so humans probably cooperated at least a few times over our history.
(This is also my go-to argument against zero sum economics)
And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?
Tribalism implies cooperation
Telling on yourself
This has always been and always will be an excuse for the person saying it to be a "violent, self-centered tribalist". Humans have worked together for the benefit of the community for the longest time. Rugged individualism is inherently linked to capitalism.
outside of the west yes.
fundamentally you see jobs as more important than the end product. this is a tension i keep finding in many minds.
I see fundamentally human wellbeing as more important. Jobs are just the structure society has built as a gateway for this.
exactly - end consumers like you and me will end up having to pay for their jobs indirectly.
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.
Alternatively, instead of things being cheaper, you could receive that amount more money.
who? the employees? for doing what? i don't want to live in a world where people are getting paid when they don't add any value
I too spend my life ensuring that my only purpose in life is creating shareholder value
you are literally complaining about the idea of having more money
more money for doing nothing? i don't want to live in a world like that. what part of this is not clear?
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.
[dead]
I actually don’t think you do. At the least, the question then becomes “is wellbeing most well served by paying a small number of software engineers a lot of money”. That is prima facie absurd.
Then I suggest fixing society or finding a better one
So you think companies should hire and pay employees they don't have any use for out of charity?
that's not the job of a company. companies are suposed to be profit centered, their purpose is to make money.
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? This is asserted throughout this HN thread as an obvious truism, but it seems precipiced on some dramatic right wing free market concept of how the world works that I can't tell is coming from the libertarians of hacker news, or is some kind of USA concept.
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?
You are trying to pitch marxist theory to a bunchof liberals. It won't end well. (and it's not, judging by the first comments)
You can believe that only if you don't care about getting a revolution in your country or extreme populist movements gaining traction. When large numbers of people feel economically disposable, the issue stops being about an individual firm’s right to hire and fire and starts becoming a systemic stability problem.
But if you are okay with getting some heads chopped off with a guillotine from time to time, feel free to believe that.
You sound like you are laying blame at the feet of companies following employment laws when you should be complaining to the government that makes the employment laws the company is abiding by.
If firms laying off employs they have no use for causing a stability problem then you do indeed have a systemic stability problem which need much deeper fixes than any one firm can provide.
Are you arguing for or against capitalism here?
If you think 5 months is bad, try none. Job loss is a reality. Don’t become emotionally invested in it never happening to you.
No, the job market is dead outside of implementing workflows for AI.
Maybe I'm a big capitalist, but 5 months of severance seems very generous; a job hasn't been a commitment that the company will take care of you forever in several generations. Covering you until the middle of this year should go a long way, and yeah the job market is messed up, but at least it's not mid-November where holidays mean hiring falls off the rails.
Just wondering, have you been unemployed for 6+ mos before?
Everyone is an atheist until the plane starts crashing.
Don’t knock me for deciding “deathbed repentance” is a decent plan.
/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’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.
I took one look at it, realized it was a cesspool and noped out.
replace tech industry with hn and you’ll be spot on.
why not both?
Most people in tech still think people who are getting laid off deserve it and that they themselves are immune to it. People won’t change until they experience it first hand.
One of the highest leverage events you can have in life is being laid off early in career. Really hammers home the importance of living below means.
Not really, no. I was underemployed for 6+ months at the start of my career, but it's easier to take whatever is available at that point. I did some data entry and then first tier ops desk restart the server when the light turns red stuff, before I got a "real job". Doing that mid career and keeping a good attitude would be difficult.
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.
Being let go from a job sucks.
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.
great analogy dude. Totally relevant.
Thanks!
A lot of people would focus on the many obvious differences, and use those to deflect attention from the important similarity I was highlighting: That they are both things that ought to exist only so long as both parties want them to.
I know they might sound superficially similar, if you're 12 years old, so let me breakdown a little bit why your analogy is a bad one.
Relationships are between two people, not between a human and a public entity like a company.
My partner doesn't have extremely disproportionate leverage over me, if tomorrow I leave – company will chug along just fine, if I'm laid off tomorrow – I might lose my home, relationship, well-being, never recover from the layoff (meaning I won't contribute back to economy and go on well-fare, and potentially start a revolution if there are millions of me) or ultimately die.
I know it's a difficult concept for 20 year old tech-bros who sucked VC money with the milk of their mother to grasp, but money does dry out. You might think you're invincible right now and that it's you and companies against them (lazy, stupid coworkers), but you're the same cattle to them as the rest of us. As you can see by the topic of the thread.
Back to the analogy: Main goal of a company is to produce value for society, not making money for VCs. It's a difficult pill to swallow, I know, tech bros been taught for decades that job security, health insurance, taxes, value creation – all of those are commie concepts aimed to undermine our God given right to make money, and we – temporary embarrassed millionaires – need to fight it with every ounce of our existence by working 60 hours a week.
Labor IS the main input that turns capital + IP into products and services. Without those people Block would be nowhere near the current position it is in. But when business is strong, though, VCs and C level get obscene bonuses while employee compensation stays flat. Go figure.
I could go on and on, talk about tax reliefs [0], that countries and companies exist for people and not the other way around, but this should be enough to understand that THIS IS NOTHING LIKE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A HUMAN BEING.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/businesses?utm_source...
> My partner doesn't have extremely disproportionate leverage over me
This is the most... hinged... thing you said. I totally agree that bargaining power is usually far more skewed in the employment case. I think unequal bargaining power is the root of much unfairness in the world, and that the only way to really counteract this is through organising, i.e., unionisation. It's far from a panacea, mind you.
With all that said: Fundamentally, I don't think that an employer should be obligated to employ someone indefinitely. If you do: Think about whether regulations enforcing this would make an employer more likely, or less likely, to hire someone they are on the fence about.
You do realize that having a girlfriend actually doesn't pay for your rent, food and medication?
Everybody realises this. That said, a huge number of people around the world are financially dependent on their partner. (One of the main goals of feminism has been to normalise relationships where this is not the case.)
The fundamental question is: Should employers be obligated to employ the people they hire forever?
> 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?
Bold of you to assume he gives a single shit about it.
obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
> If the profits are still up and growing
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...
> does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
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.
Is this actual five months severance? Or five months base pay with no vesting?
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
The answer to this is in the post.
Because they’re not running a charity
More profits, line mustn't just go up, line must go higher. Giving away the devices is like saying "we're replacing both you and your device with AI and it's not like that device will help you get another job in this market anyway, good luck lol."
because that doesn't increase shareholder value, at least in the short term, which is all anyone cares about now.
Have you not noticed the massive datacenter build out consuming tons of capital right now?
Straight from the horses mouth:
>> 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
Block job listings were all over for a couple years. I thought it was odd that they were hiring so much given what we know about their business lines. I assumed there were some internal projects or new business lines.
I feel sorry for anyone who joined recently and then got laid off because they company wasn't planning properly.
> that we’re now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person
That seems really high. Do they have such moat that nobody can move into their space?
Payment processing is one of the most tightly regulated, and some might say corrupt, industries. Replicating the tech wouldn't be difficult. The social and regulatory part is effectively impossible for anyone who's not already in the inner circle.
Is it hard to break into? Theres tons of tech companies that are playing in that space. Stripe, Braintree, Toast, Adyen, etc.
Ironically Square isn’t good at anything in particular. Square fails to have a good point of sale (Toast wins) and fails for online store fronts (Shopify wins). Square is in a position where they spread themselves thin and aren’t at the top of anything in particular.
With light CRM, Staffing, and Banking tools, it seems like Square's strategy is to be best-of-suite for small businesses rather than best-of-breed.
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.
Basically… no vision.
Yeah they’re going nowhere in the long term.
> no vision
Jack's trademark it seems.
Yeah the whole bitcoin stuff is cringe.
Just wait till they start vibe coding more features!
i think they dont have a great moat in their individual offerings, but across square, cash app, and afterpay they offer a pretty good suite of products for the entire transaction stack.
It doesn't matter if the main reason is they over-hired. Financial services is going to eat it up, there are eyes going wide all over the place in the C-suites, I am certain. Companies/Funds that own other companies see an opportunity to reduce input costs (human costs). Even if over-hiring and AI are both explained reasons, the second one is going to win out as it's a narrative that lines up with what their goal is, to reduce costs.
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?
"over-hired" seems like mostly copium of engineers being very afraid that their company will discard them like this and are trying to rationalize why they won't follow.
There was obvious over-hiring in the couple years after COVID while interest rates were low. A lot of companies corrected and laid off staff when that stopped.
This was before LLMs writing code was a daily discussion topic. Blaming every layoff on AI is mostly people connecting trending headlines together.
I don't think it's copium because it doesn't really matter if it's due to AI or COVID-era ZIRP-infused overhiring. If your company hasn't done multiple rounds of layoffs since 2022, they're going to come.
It depends. Maybe constant escalations at customers with unmaintainable products comes first.
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
We know they're not...
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
Yea, look over there!!! AI.
(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)
The bitcoin investment had 2/3/4x'd at that point - so the negative 75% means the business is the shitter.
If AI makes people twice as productive and you're a mature software company chasing marginal value, if the marginal value people added was worth it before AI, surely more marginal value at the same cost is better. It's also the wrong side of the AI curve to be on. Maybe AI will replace dev jobs, but why not wait to find out? And if it does, prompt-coding is a different skill than traditional coding, and it's not what you interviewed people for, so you don't even have a guess as to if you're keeping the right people.
> It's already the wrong side of the AI curve to be on. Maybe AI will replace dev jobs, but why not wait to find out?
Have you considered their internal use has already proven AI's capability to them?
The sense was that it got a lot better late last year. There hasn't been enough time to make this call holistically, from development to market reaction to turndown. It also doesn't address the Jevons paradox take that with more people and AI, they can get even more done. Every place I've worked has had an idea and tech debt backlog far deeper than the companies' capacity.
AI is the logical, counter proof reason, I feel it serves as a scapegoat so perfectly they pretend it replaces people.
Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.
If AI were that impactful, they’d re-organize and double their output of quality products instead of laying people off.
Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.
There are, but there are also a number of companies (including not-particularly-AI ones like Netflix and Oracle) that are above their ZIRP peak. I think it's hard to definitively say that this story is inconsistent with one explanation or the other.
Oracle is definitely an AI stock, as much as that's silly. Between being a cloud provider with GPUs, and investments in OpenAI, it's certainly part of the AI meme in the stock market, and possibly even a reasonable way to get some AI exposure if that's what you want to invest in.
Owning SP500 gives me too much AI exposure by default
2021 was when Square pivoted to Block in the great Blockchain pivotting
This reminds me of the meme of Margaret Thatcher: "And There is No Alternative" - a way to justify the policies she desired to implement and attempt to preempt any other view.
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.
> since he is clairvoyant to the future
AI software development is the present, not the future. You don't need to be a clairvoyant to see AI replaced (some) developers.
Nah, if AI were truly revolutionary, those developers would all be twice as productive. So why would you fire them?
Because Block is a mature company now and they don't need the extra productivity. It's not just better for Block but also for the whole society that these developers leave for more innovating companies.
AI writes code. It doesn't fix organizational problems.
But there were no organisational problems according to Jack. Also do you really believe Block has reached peak productivity? Does any company ever reach it?
Because productivity doesn't scale linearly with quantity of developers. There's a point where it plateaus or even descends as quantity of developers goes up.
The quantity of devs is not changing though. If AI really makes the existing devs more productive then the plateau should become higher.
I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.
> admitting that he's taking responsibility
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.
It's easy to take responsibility when all you have to do is say "I'm taking responsibility". Or, in his case, "i'm taking responsibility".
He's also giving out massive severance packages
Is four and a half month's pay considered massive in the US? What do you normally get when you're made redundant?
This site has stats. According to it, 20 weeks is way above average.
https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
Id say 2 months is about normal for non tech maybe 3.5 at solid companies. This also adds a week per year at the company so plenty of people will be getting 5 months+ and $5k on top of that
Fair enough. It's nothing crazy by UK standards, you'd usually get your notice period paid off (2-3 months), plus another few months negotiated by your union, plus the statutory week's pay for each year worked (1.5 weeks if you're over 40). You don't normally get to keep your devices, I guess.
Double counting the notice period is unfair IMO. You already pay for the notice period by having the notice period when you want to quit. Companies having to pay you the notice period when they fire you is symmetrical and IMO is not a severance package. Maybe that's just my assumption, but IMO a severance package is the asymmetrical pay-out when one party quits an agreement, not the communal wager you both put down when you enter the contract.
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.
What's fair is what I, my union, and my employer believe is fair. Why should it be symmetrical?
I mean fair in conversation, not in negotiation.
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.
Okay, gotcha.
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.
Yes, it is considered generous here. I have been laid off or taken a voluntary severance 3 times and never got anywhere near 5 months.
I got one month and unused PTO last time I was laid off.
its certainly not "massive"
Block is up 25%.
Down 15% yoy. Down 75% over last 5 years
Up 25% because of his decision to layoff. He is richer from this decision.
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.
"Massive"
It reads as hypocritical because he frames it as himself making a sacrifice when what he's really taking responsibility for is choosing the outcome that makes himself the most money.
He owns 1 million Class A shares and 79.7%(!!!) of Block's Class B shares: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/0cb664c...
Insert Michael Scott shouting "I AM DECLARING BANKRUPTCY" meme. Change that to "I AM TAKING RESPONSIBILITY".
> but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility
What kind of responsibility is he taking, exactly? Has he stepped down? How much money has he lost when stock rose 23%?
Anyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
Also if you put a product in maintenance mode you can easily get away with a fraction of your devs. Most people are at all times working on some definition of something new
X is the exact opposite of in “maintenance mode” by any counts
Really? Has it meaningfully changed since 2022? Everything they promised like payments and a "super app" seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Also have to consider that it’s now private which removes the pressure of having to show any semblance of a profit or, critically, share usage or advertising statistics which could (and probably are) down dramatically since the acquisition. Being private allows the fictitious storyline to persist that “we’re doing great and everyone is using our products.”
This is not true. Its about 200ish devs now on x side. Rest are other functions, and its not close to 2800
Source?
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
a lot of the people laid off from X were working on content on things like moderation, and yes, the algorithm
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
I don’t think it is true at all.
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.
I didn't say they were all working on the algorithm, there were a lot of people working in various content-related jobs: moderation, algorithm, partnership management with content creators, ad sales, and more
Without getting into a she-said/he-said debate, I don't believe traffic is shrinking because of the viability of fewer engineers.
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.
Are you not paying attention? X has gotten waaaay worse.
It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.
As a casual user, I don’t think it works any worse than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok.
I remember that for years people complained about DMs in Twitter being “broken” and without any search function.
Exactly, Twitter was known as a rock solid platform before. It even had a mascot for reliability, in the form of a whale.
Social media has just gotten way worse across the board. X is just a reflection of trend.
i've been using twitter/x since 2007 and it has not gotten way worse -- specially if you try comparing to truly bad era of the #failwhale.
So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.
And it's all preposterously even when it's working.
*preposterously slow
> Is X profitable?
The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.
[flagged]
X has added more useful functionality in the last year or two than twitter did in their entire existence, it is also much snappier and reliable, that's with 5% of the workforce. I don't put this down to AI though it's more like a very lean, talented and motivated teams without layers of pointless middle people. Add AI into the mix and it's naturally going to be the way forward. Companies that stay bloated and not utilising AI will die.
What do you do now?
Being rejected every day, thus subjecting myself to the humiliating ritual of modern times, by companies that I believe could make the most of my talent (my last title was Director of AI, before I was a Staff ML Scientist at a FAANG and an award-winning scientist).
They all seem rather disappointed, at least in the automated rejection emails (mailboxes not monitored, of course) they send me, that they have found other candidates more suited to the position. It seems we are both disappointed, after all.
Not all is lost, though. I am in the enviable position of having perfect health and decent savings.
Which companies are you applying to? Even in this new world, titles still matter a great deal. A former “director of AI” and FAANG data scientist is valuable even before considering whether you are competent.
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.
At first, I was a bit selective about my applications (meaning I was applying to maybe 5 positions per week, not one per month), but in the last six months, I have sent dozens of applications for positions (real or fake, I don't know) that I thought were appropriate for my skills and experience (director, manager, some senior IC positions, not even staff). I have no problem relocating; I could do so in 15 days (I currently live in California).
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.
Thanks for your frank comments. There are a lot of people in your position for the first time, I think, and many more to come. It sounds quite undeserved and is rather a symptom of our poor system. All I can say is I think it's likely that someone like you (who I read as both cognitively and emotionally intelligent) is likely to adapt and will thrive eventually, both due to your characteristics, and because the system isn't that broken, and will also adapt. Good luck, and don't take it personally.
Could it be that these other candidates work for cheaper? They might be scared of your credentials. It's disheartening that this field has come to a race to the bottom, accelerated by AI. It's not the juniors that are at risk, it's the seniors.
This could be a problem, but only if I had interviews or even just a phone call from a recruiter. But I'm not even getting to that stage. I just get rejection after rejection via email for every type of company and position I apply for.
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.
Something is obviously very wrong if you're not even getting to the first (zeroth?) stage. It could be something very obvious. Have you tried asking for professional help with your resume / CV?
It may appear so, in the sense that I would think the same if I were the one reading my comments, but, even if I am sure that my resume could be improved (I worked on it multiple times, asked colleagues to have a look, as well as getting some feedback from LLMs), there is nothing obviously wrong with it.
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.
Principle-agent problem.
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.
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
your argument becomes equals to 0 once you involve your personal feelings
Why?
> Musk is a deeply uncreative person
Do you have a portfolio or something you can share?
Someone can have negative character traits and we don’t have to pretend they are no longer skilled.
Do you have a source for your post?
A source for what? Are we pretending Elon is not one of the most successful promoters of new ventures?
i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody
Ha glad to see I'm not the only one irked by that.
Does the lowercase convey authenticity or lack of care?
Yes absolutely. Text casing is part of communication, by skipping it an author is saying: "I'm going to prioritise my preferences and making a statement above your understanding and clarity". The bigger the audience the more negative impact it has, and the more entitled the author appears.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
Bad grammar is usually lack of care or education or knowledge.
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
Typically, yes.
It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.
Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.
I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.
This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.
Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.
ur right it dosnt matter. im gonna type all my communications at work like thisn wo. im sure noone will mind. my choice to completely disregard the rules fo english orthography doestn convey anything at all
bro, dO yOu eVEN cARe?
It is a stupid trend happening between kids in the Internet. Dumbing down themselves to look more... rebel? I dunno.
Not saying this is the case here by any means, but I've disabled all the assistive/autocorrecting technology on my phone's keyboard because ironically it make it more usable. So now I don't even get automatic capitalization.
Interestingly Jerry Yang's letter back in 2008 was also like this and someone pointed that out in HN : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339513
They really called their employees yahoos?
He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.
This type of thing is the one I look to see if it’s ai generated. Man didn’t even had the care to type.
"make me sound more sincere!"
i like it. it's how you show you didn't use ai to write the message.
Some sentences use "i’m" and others "i'm", he definitely used AI.
"ChatGPT, write a letter to my company about laying 40% of them off but don't capitalize anything"
All you need to do is just add "Write in Jack Dorsey's twitter style":
"don’t care. no grammar."
He 100% used AI to write it.
> 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.
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 AI was that much more productive, then Block would be able to take on much bigger challenges and expand their revenue even faster. The AI explanation doesn't add up.
Indeed. If you suddenly have a workforce that can be 2x as productive (or whatever multiple), why would you cut them? You already have these people under your control, direct them towards profitable ventures.
It suggests that there is no more innovation, no compliments to the business and the management have identified no areas for R&D. In the tech (or tech adjacent) space that should really be a death knell.
A quick check of the share price tells the story, they should really pivot back from blocks to squares.
As someone who comes from a country where it's very hard to fire people, don't make that mistake.
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.
As someone who comes from a country where it’s very hard to fire people: fuck the companies.
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.
> 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.
it's a business, why he should keep people if company doesn't need them? A business is not a charity
I am not saying that he should. He is pretending that his hand was forced. I am saying that it wasn't. He made a choice. You may say that it is the rational choice, but that is a different debate.
On shareholder money? No thank you. If 1 person can do the job, why keep 2?
If there are growth opportunities for the company, selectively choosing the top 90% YoY, minimizing backfills (in theory...) will result in a company full of high achievers that can execute on that growth vision.
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.
Sometimes I feel like “shareholder first” mentality has gone a bit too far. Most of the majority shareholders are a handful of people who have too much money, they don’t really put in any work, but are more than happy to put people out of work if it meant they’d get a bit more money.
Because in such adversarial environments, your best employees leave, and quickly. And those people worth way more than half of your workforce.
If you're a healthy company that is growing, you could do 2x as much stuff!
Shareholders didn’t complain when those workers inflated their obscene capitals.
I am just saying that the decision was not some kind of inevitable result of forces beyond their control. They just made a business decision to line their pockets better.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.
This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though. Being unable to lay off workers causes stagnation at companies where fast-development is paramount.
> This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though.
Nothing to do with biggest economy in the world for sure.
That helps, but there's a reason why the collective economy of the EU has produced only like 1/10 the number of unicorns over the past 30 years despite their GDP being around 2/3 the US's
Almost like producing unicorns is not the single most important thing in the world.
Well with respect to economic dynamism it ranks pretty highly.
Your country also pays less and has fewer jobs.
Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
> No need to turn it into a dick measuring context
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
>If the business is not able to be profitable everyone is screwed.
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 actually was laid off by Block, about eleven months ago. I got slightly less severance than these folks.
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.
> would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude?
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.
>I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me.
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.
Being upset would be because trust or expectations were violated. My expectation is I or my employer may end our business at any time.
Are you glad to have people spending their lives on jobs that don't contribute to society, just because the business is already profitable? Wouldn't it be better to have those people move into whatever job would contribute more to society? Have you considered that allowing people to remain in jobs that contribute less than they could in other jobs is the reason why your per-capita production lags the US?
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 am amazed to learn from you that usefulness and profit generation are interchangeable terms.
I’m guessing that by that logic, narcos and casino owners should be celebrated, and running a charity should be a crime.
Great point, thanks god we’re eliminating the majority of the creative arts industry with dogshit ai slop so people with actual talent can be redeployed to DoorDash or whatever (I guess until driverless cars can take that over?)
Can you point to the laws in your country that would make this illegal? I’m skeptical
I can, easily. Speaking for my country and assuming you are not on a fixed-term contract, you can only get fired for one of the three reasons:
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.
Wouldn't 2 be applicable to Block? Dorsey is pretty much saying AI's made these positions obsolete.
>Speaking for my country
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?
As an example, the comment you're replying to is true for The Netherlands
Great story
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2020/06/uber-cuts-amsterdam-workfor...
People don't want to leak their personal information, duh. The country they are from is another bit of information that you can't take back from the internet once published. Why would you do that?
It takes a couple of minutes to find a country with the same laws via Google. Takes a second for LLM.
> 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.
This is also why your countries social welfare systems are teetering on fiscal insolvency and deficits are ballooning.
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.
It's amazing how reflexively the taunts always start with welfare. The case for prioritizing people over corporations shouldn't ever need to be made.
I'll take teetering on fiscal insolvency over one trip to ER makes you bankrupt and in debt for life if you don't have insurance, thank you.
> bankrupt and in debt for life
Bankruptcy exists precisely so you are not in debt for life. It's a setback, but not irrecoverable.
This is America. Like it or not.
[dead]
what is the typical pay for SWEs in your country compared to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/block/salaries/software-eng...
?
What government makes it illegal for management to manage their company?
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
But in your country (Spain), Telefónica de España laid off 3649 workers in Dec 2023 (about 40% of that unit) despite growing net income by 17% that year.
Nice googling, but that’s just an example that proves my point.
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.
What was the average age of the worker that took that deal?
spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. maybe you are ignoring important tradeoffs and are a little too confident about your own opinion on what it means to "manage your company just fine"
Maybe, or maybe you’re about to find out what happens to the consumer side when a large percentage of companies decide they no longer need half their workforce judging on linkedin vibes.
Nope, that's Finland now. Spain is nr 2.
But the definition of economically active differs between the two: Finland includes people from ages 15-89, while in Spain you need to be 16 or older. And judging from what I read the rise in unemployment in Finland is attributed to more people entering the workforce.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is one way of making an all-in bet on AI.
>we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
Well that's interesting, wonder if we'll actually get a proper accounting of which departments take which cuts.
Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
I expect it's more that early in projects you move faster, and that normally involves fewer people.
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...
I found this an interesting question and did some research out of curiosity
[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)
Yeah what I really meant is imagine if you reduced the actual MS Word team to just 3 people. They would not move fast because by this point Word is an enormous mature project and they wouldn't even be able to touch 1% of it.
Also AbiWord is dead, sadly.
Star Office was really good in the 90s too
No it wasn't. Are you perhaps thinking of WordStar?
You're right, kind of. I was thinking of Star Office 5.3, which was the first Sun release
Brooks explains this in The Mythical Man Month when he discusses how adding people to a delayed project increases the delay. Communication complexity grows exponentially as team size increases. It quickly reaches the point where it has to be controlled by procedures, forms, approvals, etc.
Depends. Do those teams’ code interact with any other code from any other teams at the company?
They're still a megacorp, roughly, with like 6k people remaining. That's a huge company. Huge companies need hierarchy to function, the "flat" thing is a really dumb idea. There's no way to make it analogous to that <50ppl team that executes well and moves fast. To do that you actually need to have a small company.
Every business metrics needs people to safeguard. That's how you get the number of ppl.
Sure but it'll still be a 6000+ team - I doubt nimbleness will occur now.
First you take a 50 person org. Then (for scale) you hire highly motivated performers who, because they came up in big orgs, are used to using 50 people for three years to do a project six people can do in three to six months. Then you create incentives that make them compete for standing. And the standing also depends on their personal scope (ie headcount).
I question how much of this is really AI vs them just regrouping around their core products and shutting down a lot of ventures or tertiary projects. Either way, the messaging we're seeing is a real shift from the ZIRP ear. Tech companies used to use headcount as a metric of growth. They'd be hiring just to say they're hiring because it looks like growth. Now it's in vogue to boast about your AI adoption and how many fewer heads you need to operate. I think both are lot of blowing smoke, but now it's going to hurt a lot of people.
Their shareholder meeting is later today. Maybe we'll find out.
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.
These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?
They already understand the current system and status quo is going away. They understand, on some level, the consequences of the technocapitalist system they've built and perpetuated.
They're making their own accommodations, rather than trying to change the course: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
I think assuming human agency (building technocapitalism, correcting course) or the possibility to escape capitalism and its consequences (in bunkers), underestimates what capitalism is.
> but something has changed
i.e. we finally decided to audit head count from post covid-era.
> paired with smaller and flatter teams
i.e. management was axed
you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?
If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost?
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?
Because there isn't an unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Sure, a bowling ball factory in a world that demands unlimited bowling balls should take the productivity multiplier AND retain the employees, because they ought to make all the bowling balls they possibly can.
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.
That’s my point. The letter claims this is a decision made for the purpose of growth, which makes no sense.
This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best
> If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost?
Presumably, because some of these areas are cost centers versus profit generating.
He explains the rationale, smaller teams work faster.
we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is just rephrasing the same concept.
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.
Have you worked at a big company? It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a large group, even without AI. Throw in some AI help, and it could be much better.
> It makes sense to me that a small group would be much more productive than a 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.
I do see fewer Square terminals these days, more Toast (and other options too I think).
He’s been building tech companies for 20 years, he sure knew smaller teams move faster when he was hiring thousands of more people during covid
Demand inelasticity.
> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers
I would say the vast majority of people in this thread don't believe that this is related to AI at all, other than as a pretext. It's kind of incredible.
As in AI is a belief? This isn't a religion. IF things don't add up they don't.
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)
And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...
Just because you agree with the social politics the algorithm is throwing out now vs. before doesn't mean it's not political
Experience is usually a subjective thing. But it seems pretty clear to me. I’m was huge advocate of free speech and a political moderate but X made me question my priors on content moderation. There was genuinely heinous shit on my feed and i had no good way to filter it.
There was? It's full of nazi shit now? What was it before?
I used was because I no longer have an account
I don't use that site much nowadays, but every time I do, I am shocked at just how many fucking bugs there are. This idea that they laid off whatever percentage of their workforce with no impact to the quality of the software is not based in reality whatsoever.
And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.
It has 30 FT people working on the core product. That isn't counting infra/ai/ads/legal/ etc.
I logged into xitter recently after a long time, and my feed was cluttered with anti immigrant scare stories, western values under threat etc. that I got really scared thinking what the future holds if people are getting brain washed to this extent. It was things I never followed anywhere, so Elon is literally stuffing this crap down everyone's throat. Vibes of invention of radio and television powering the Holocaust.
yeah super great now that you can have gork put kids in bikinis
And twitter hasn't launched one single meaningful anything since.
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
> And twitter hasn't launched one single meaningful anything since.
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.
lol there’s no way you’re this delusional
Cry more.
Pre pandemic Block had ~4000 employees
They grew to 11000
Now they’re going to shrink to 6000
The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive
This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.
I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.
> 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.
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.
> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers
and the best part is that when others follow, ZIRP will be back.
this is going to be a proper mess.
They're back to 6,000 not 5,000.
Thank you. fixed.
> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
I'd encourage anyone wondering where this perspective comes from to read "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher.
Mark Fisher is excellent. It will be interesting to see if his claim that the human face is required for capitalism's functioning will hold (does not look like it).
yea but layoffs aren't usually very performance based. i agree in general though.
Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.
How magnanimous of him to let us all know of his magnanimity!
He could have been even more radical and get rid of himself, his lieutenants could ask gpt about the strategy.
He did get rid of himself as Twitter’s CEO. He founded Block and Bluesky which employ thousands of people, instead of enjoying the fortune of an ex-CEO. Maybe you should be open minded a little bit?
That's called quiting for better opportunities. I doubt the thousands who contributed to block's success will all land on their feet. I'm open ended I'm not a CEO forced to make those contradictory decisions.
i don't think this is true.
assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.
While destroying morale, and increasing the difficulty of successfully recruiting later
I directly quoted jack - take it up with him.
> The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome
did he suggest no difference in outcome in terms of profits?
You can check for yourself, if you RTFA.
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.
i don't think you understood what i'm saying nor what he's saying. you don't do a layoff without accepting a change in the outcome.
they are now estimating 18% instead of 17%
what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not
Couldn't even be bothered to type like an adult when he fired them.
The refusal to simply capitalize the first letter of a sentence is so obnoxious.
high impact executives like myself are too busy to use up our precious time with minutia like capitalization. every second counts when youre a high impact ceo and thats just one reason why our compensation is 1000X your own.
This was clearly a joke.
It feels incredibly performative. Same with sama.
Of course it's performative. They're all presumably on Apple devices. They literally went to their settings to disable auto-capitalization to make some kind of ridiculous point, i.e. "I'm too important too think about capital letters".
I think it’s worse actually, I think the point is “I’m too chill and down to earth, I’m just like you fellow kids”
No-capitals is 2000-2010s snarky highly-online millennial style, really
Clearly the AI is not as widely used within the company as he proclaimed :)
Yeah I was thinking the same. Pretty generous severance but I'd be pissed if I was fired by someone who can't even be bothered to press shift. Probably thinks it makes him cool and edgy.
the epstein style guide says all lowercase and no punctuation is how you signal dominance from the top of the pyramid
i'm just tool cool for this bro. its my style. im above your stupid grammar.
I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
>And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159008
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
Yeah, if this is going to be a nuclear bomb for software developers, imagine what it's going to be like for people in customer service, account managers, etc.
Yeah, I suppose I limited it to software devs since this is HN, but other industries will definitely be hit harder.
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?
don't worry! you can get a few insecure part-time jobs in the retail and/or services industries, and perhaps supplement your meager income with the gig economy TM
Are you criticizing the folks championing AI while… effectively championing the AI? What do you think people should do?
I honestly have no idea. We're stuck either way. I don't know what to do. What do you do if all you know is code and you're helping yourself out of a job whether you like it or not?
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.
I can sympathize. If you feel you’re in limbo, emotionally, and feel helpless, it’s natural. I’m in the same profession and what you’re experiencing is not unthinkable but sometimes depending on one’s life conditions, everything might seem more daunting than it should. I believe talking to a professional about this may help. I’d do the same.
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.
I wouldn’t call it limbo, and I don’t think I need therapy for this. It’s more like, the future is so uncertain but all signals are pointing in one direction.
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.
Yeah it’s pretty much over.
> I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism
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.
I don’t think we’ll ever return to the glory days (2007-2023). Software engineering in the next few years will become as cool as accounting or HR (as in not cool at all). Just a generic white collar profession like it was maybe in the 80s.
it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
There hasn’t been anything sexy about working in big tech in over a decade
Yeah but why is working for Netflix even sexy? At the end of the day it is almost a telecom.
$$$
It's also almost a movie studio.
I mean, maybe it's not, honestly it was the first FAANG that popped in my head as I typed the comment. But for most software engineers working at a place like that even as boring or not sexy as it may have become in SF, they won't ever even get close
ymmv of course, but 2023 was a low point for tech stocks that have exploded since then, and at companies with four-year grants it's going very well for people that got good refreshers, or even better an initial grant, in 2023. well, if they haven't been fired, but statistically most haven't.
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.
Imagine receiving this message and the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalise letters properly. How insulting. It's like being fired by a five year old child.
Jack Dorsey looks like a homeless person and he spends his time meditating and talking about Bitcoin. People knew what they were getting into.
> looks like a homeless person
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
The homeless person thing was a bit of a mean way to put it, but I don't think the parent commenter meant it critically or as an insult tbh, more an observation.
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.
Admittedly, Dorsey is nowhere near Ellison or Musk levels of evil. Maybe he's too stupid, maybe he's not ambitious enough. Who knows. But he is an unprincipled chud with a track record that makes his contemporaries look like Einstein by comparison.
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.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.
Why are companies seeing it purely in terms of "we can work with a smaller team so we must" and not "my existing team can do so much more"?
There is not always a lot more to do. If your business is making typewriters then what? Or you mine coal that nobody wants to use anymore?
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.
Depends on the company, but I think it's fair to say that not every company has a roadmap to infinite growth.
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
You can say yes to more of them, _but they still need to be worth it._ If you have an infinite well of ideas to grow your business, awesome. But there are a lot of companies that just don't have those ideas, where their growth is limited on some other factor related to the market they're in.
My experience is that "asking staff for ideas" does not lead to successful products. Sometimes, sure, but in general it does not.
I've never seen a roadmap planning process that didn't involve some component of asking departments and teams what needs to be done.
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.
This depends on your goals. If your goal is to drive efficiency into your processes, drive down tech debt, or fix pain points for customers of your existing products, sure. Most people at a your company with have thoughts, and lots of them will have good ideas.
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.
I didn't add a why. Here is why.
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.
This has nothing to do with AI or any of that shit.
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.
It's going to get really ugly, Jason Lemkin called this out as a possibility a few hours ago: https://youtu.be/mBE_9vGJBUM?si=WSyZXYgV48WfrNrv&t=2908
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
Why make others misfortune a platform for ego expression? Why not doing things elegant, quiet, keep it in-house? Because misery of others drives stock prices up! It's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
Because it will go out today anyway on the investor call or later via leak so might as well get ahead of it.
>Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount. The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
how do you layoff 40% quietly?
> everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
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
> Owning the decision
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?
Owning stock?
Took a quick look at their financials...
I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
> I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...
Yes though there is a corresponding cost line as well so that’s not 8.5 in profit. Sounds like they’re buying and selling coins effectively
nothing bizzare to invest into the area if some people pay 8.5b
The CEO's last visionary move was to go all in on crypto, even renaming the company. Now he's a visionary again, but firing half the company instead of himself.
What are the odds this is actually due to overhiring during the pandemic? From what I know, that was the principle reason for the Amazon layoffs. Would love to be corrected if I'm misremembering.
Except the concensus around the Amazon layoffs is that it's a shift in free cashflow to capex spent towards ram/gpus.
Could be also both...
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
I miss those days. It may have been economically silly but there was so much optimism, especially in the tech world.
Now we're just economically silly without optimism (except for one pocket of the tech world).
Optimism without the ZIRP bubble is the 1990s
That is called a bubble.
Now some here are about to experience a repeat of the years 2000 and 2008 put together.
Pre-paid optimism that we've been paying for now with high inflation due to overstimulated economy through printed money.
I don't understand anyone who says layoffs are due to improvements in AI tooling.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
It's simple: it's just a lie. We are seeing the goal of AI in action here, which is reducing payroll costs.
Since the rush for AGI isn’t panning out, I can see tech firms engaging in tacit collusion that aims to reduce the salaries of software engineers.
There’s proof of tech firms engaging in explicit collusion back in the 00’s.
I also don't understand that take.
Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free!
Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards?
Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "continuing to support more customers" and has "improving profitability"?
Now imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly an unbounded number of people appear on the job market who are ready to work for your company at a 5% the cost of your previous employees. Best of all, they become more competent and less expensive over time. You can't yet fire your entire original roster all at once since they need to teach the new hires the specifics of the job, but after that's done, what do you need them for?
No sane person is claiming AI can fully replace a human worker today.
It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
> No sane person is claiming AI can fully replace a human worker today.
You must be living under a rock..
How do you square (heh) this with Jack Dorsey axing nearly half of Block's headcount?
If you apply Pareto to productivity, you can fire a lot of people and still manage
A fundamental attribute of capitalism is that labor costs are a regrettable cost center, and any reduction in labor costs without a resulting loss in profit/perceived productivity is a big win. AI is a big win for capitalists, and not so much for anyone who is now suddenly "made redundant". And since we treat shareholder value as sacred and inviolate, too bad for workers who lose their job in this deal.
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad
this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.
LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
I agree if they weren’t simultaneously claiming to be a successful growing company.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
> If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000?
Simple, 1000+ salaries > 10000 x100$/m Claude seats.
"they should not have had 12,000 to begin with"
Nailed it
it does not work like that except in a berkeley mba mind
> The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
Um, no?
[dead]
A parallel but not too different situation is happening in the hospital space. Corps fire experienced nurses and hire newbies at half the price. Then they realize the newbies aren't performing so they downsize staff. Then a flu or other seasonal event drives up need for staff so they turn to temp agencies (per diem nurses or 'travelers'). These travelers get 150% to 200% of what staff nurses get. The remaining staff nurses start to leave and become per diem. hospital costs double, quality of care declines.
We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.
For real. Very worried about when other CEOs follow suit and there is a flood of people into unemployment.
As someone that is only five years into their career at this point, I feel so helpless.
Same. Plus I have kids and a mortgage. My company just had a 5% layoff and I survived. Seems like it will be the first of many rounds. It's a really stressful time.
To be clear, I'm confident the impact of AI is going to be massive, and that massive impact is already underway rather than years away. But, separate from that, having seen it up close Block was bloated as hell
Yeah. We are coping. Just today, I had a simple bug where the data received was throwing undefined because it was in 2 alternate formats.
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.
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
> Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality
I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?
I recognize that my experience may not be typical, but I spend the vast majority of my development time improving the quality of the systems I work on, in response to specific customer demands for it. The last time I had multiple consecutive weeks of greenfield development was in 2021.
Eh, it can get a lot worse. The horrendous quality of government IT in much of Asia for example.
Sucks for the people to lose their jobs, but probably the most honest message you’ll ever see.
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.
How messed up is the world that when a leader basically comes clean and says this is being done for efficiency reasons (and by extension the market's reward for bottom line impact) it starts to come across as "honest and brave"?
I think the AI angle is a fig leaf for perpetual mismanagement. Managers at Block privately complained there were a lot of people doing almost no work. Recently, teams have lost people one at a time, sometimes laid off the day after each other.
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
Quite a few people on X mentioned Block went on a top-of-market acquisition spree (Weebly, Afterpay, Tidal) and tripled headcount during Covid.
All this is is evidence that Jack Dorsey had no idea what half the employees at Block were doing before he decided to do layoffs. May he know no peace, wherever he goes.
The year is 2030, tech companies provide the exact same value proposition to the consumer that they did in 2024, except it is buggier, full of sparkle buttons you can’t get rid of, and isn’t a source of high-paying employment. The front page of HN still has 5 posts from Blog Guys titled “Programming is Fun Again”.
The future rocks
Wishing the best for all those affected and excited to see many of you start new companies and continue to innovate.
Temporal had a far greater impact on dev velocity than AI ever did. It's not even close. It saves not only coding, but design, planning, coordination, maintenance, etc that AI doesn't even touch. But that's not very buzzy, is it.
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).
This is the first time I've ever heard of Temporal.
If you’re doing any heavy asynchronous work you should look into it. It’s truly game changing.
Having spent years in fintech partnerships (Kabbage-Amex, Lendio), the pattern Block is going through is familiar — the post-ZIRP reckoning where sprawling product bets get consolidated back to core revenue drivers. I'll also be interested to see whether their Bitcoin/decentralized payments thesis survives the cost-cutting or gets put on the "block" as well (bad Dad jokes). Tpypicall, from what I've seen, the companies that come out stronger from these cycles are the ones that cut to focus/customer value, not just cut to save.
So... XYZ stock hits an all time low and they decide to layoff half the staff and see if that raises the share price (it did).
This has nothing to do with AI. It is just a desperate move from a badly run company.
They really changed the stock ticker to XYZ during the web3 hype years, just because lot of the scammy crypto startups used the .xyz TLD? Sheesh...
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!
This feels similar to March 2020 when COVID was in Seattle. “It’s in the US but maybe it’s just a one-off.” We’ll see, I guess.
Agreed. Now that one more company has announced a big (40%!) headcount cut, other CEOs will feel like it is ok to do so now too (someone else stuck their neck out first, safe to pile on, "every one else is doing it", etc).
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
Does anyone know what teams are affected?
I wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of layoffs across the industry like we had in 2022.
This is how I see this and most other "AI layoffs".
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.
Jack couldn't be bothered to use capital letters in his last layoff email either.
I've defended the style of writing previously, but I agree. This felt a little disrespectful.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
Everybody is on the edge, with the fear of a big layoff wave happening.
We see more and more people claiming they are so much more productive thanks to coding agents, big tech CEOs driving the use of AI like crazy, pundits anticipating rise of unemployment. Personally, I feel that productivity gains are overrated, but still, I'm pretty worried to lose my job in the near future. I'm saving aggressively.
Investors and share holders want to hear that you're an "AI" company now. That implies some kind of transformation so a ritual needs to be performed. Transformations and rituals are right up "jack"'s alley, so in this case, and unfortunately for employees, it dovetails perfectly.
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.
Isn't "Block" the company with a bunch of half-baked crypto investments?
Methinks "AI" is only a figleaf here.
A few thoughts about Block as I've worked there before:
- the company thrives on long term projects that seem to fizzle out as engineers get frustrated and leave
- there are way too many MBAs and finance people now compared to the early years where building was prioritized.
- jack is only doing part time at Block, early days he was around to chat and work with varying levels of hands on
- they've overhired and over-committed to losing projects, worst of all they've de-prioritized projects that were pretty innovative because traction wasn't there quick enough for them to justify them, e.g. terminal, POS specifically for restaurants, localization for EU
- they operate on docs and in the time of AI, the workforce is inundated with slop
- also, I hate that jack can't be bothered to capitalize anything like it's cool. come on man, you're firing 4000 people, not tweeting memes
Block really did not come down from it's COVID/ZIRP era high # of employees as much as many other companies, and it's COVID era headcount growth was extremely rapid by any standard.
In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
>repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust [...] i'd rather take a hard, clear action now [...] than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
"l00k at all my AI!"
Or how about your revenue lines are in retail and peer-to-peer finances, primarily for small-to-medium sized businesses and low-to-mid income individuals, primarily in the US market, all of which are struggling from tariffs and economic slowdown in their brackets.
Nah...definitely the AI.
> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.
> i’m sorry to put you through this.
POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.
I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.
My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.
Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
> Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory.
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.
Yes, unfortunately. Each headcount, properly trained and reskilled, is now worth a whole team by themselves! I blame capitalism and the inability to look past the next quarterly earnings statement for what's happening instead.
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.
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.
Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents.
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?
> why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges,
This is a very interesting perspective, I haven't thought of it like that.
Your theory is wrong.
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.
Agreed, and the AI wranglers will be the equivalent of architects and staff+ engineers today, and they will be paid handsomely. BUT! They are a pretty small fraction of the current developer workforce. The remaining junior-to-mid level engineers will have to uplevel themselves while having no opportunity for hands-on experience to do so as they get laid off in bulk.
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.
> Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available
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”
>>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.
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.
> such useless language in their posts
"Your call is very important to us."
"We take security very seriously."
PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
It's for the people who still work there.
It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..
Do they make sure new employees all remove the shift key from their company laptop or is that limited by band?
At that level, pressing shift probably affects efficiency. /s
A lot of employees are really stupid, and will believe (or close their eyes to) all sorts of bullshit.
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
Share
To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.
I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.
Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
… then keep cutting.
Yep, he hasn't changed. F*ck that guy.
I mean, sky is blue, water is wet, etc.
> 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 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.
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
> he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
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.
First, I posted the numbers below, it's not ZIRP overhiring in this case.
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).
I'm generally anti-corpo and capitalism but I agree with you. The guy could've done better but so far he's on a good trajectory and much much better than most. Doesn't mean that he isn't going to make mistakes nor that this might turn out badly but that's the point of leading - making bets.
It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.
> and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming
You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP.
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.
The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.
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...
I just posted the hard evidence (the actual numbers). 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.
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 future is not evidence? I don’t understand what you’re saying.
> 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.
> What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
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.
How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!
That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say.
While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people
I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board.
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.
It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap.
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
To me what you're upset about basically sounds like, "People who have more money/power/etc have it easier than those who don't."
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.
Potentially, universal human rights is what's wrong with it. Much depends on what "get away with" and "leeway" actually mean. There's a difference between owning a jacuzzi and owning a high court judge. Between these there's a gray area of things people vaguely disapprove of, and sometimes it turns out that they're decided to be illegal.
Sure, we're all in agreement that one should not be able to buy a judge, or violate human rights. But that's not what we're talking about.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
> If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board.
Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions.
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.
>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.
I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate
When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check.
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.
Stock goes up in expectation of ... CEOs doing share buybacks to increase their bonus checks.
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> ThE sToCk Is UnDeRvAlUeD
Please don't post sneering comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Block was incredibly bloated. This guy is correct: https://x.com/BamaBonds/status/2027142091596288314?s=20
> first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
> Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.
I’ll take jobs moving to India for 1000, Alex.
AI: Affordable Indian.
10,000 employees for what? I never thought of Block to be that big. If Elon came in, he would probably fire 80% meaning 8000. Like he did with Twitter/X and Twitter ran fine this whole time.
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.
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus
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 agree. I experienced both setups and the drag was awful for people's morale and internal politics and made the company do really shady things like letting people go before bonus milestones are reached eventhough they were key contributors.
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
Whoever is that "jack", he should go back to school to learn how to use capital letters, commas, periods and all other difficult stuff. Or, just ask Chat GPT to write this kind of letters to the people. Maybe, after comparing "jack" writing with AI's writing company stakeholders would figure out, that maybe it is "jack", who should be replaced by some Open AI et. al. tools...
AI increases productivityvastly, but it cuts down buyers also vastly, through removal of jobs etc. So deflation could result, exposeing the disparities even more.
I strongly look forward to it being 5 years from now and having "what the software industry looks like with AI factored in" question settled. I'm tired of the uncertainty in our industry.
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.
For a lot of high value per employee businesses it usually makes more sense to hire local. Offshoring is usually for jobs that don’t directly generate profits and more of a necessity. If you’re a programmer you shouldn’t work for a company where coding isn’t a profit center
I had never heard of Block before, but I visited their website and downloaded one of their open-source projects, Goose (an OpenCode alternative). I ran a very simple prompt on one of the projects I’m working on to implement a small feature. It ended up going into what seemed like an infinite loop and consumed three-quarters of my monthly Poe subscription on a single prompt. I uninstalled it immediately.
Never heard of them either. But the link in the title is to Jack Dorsey's tweet. Now him I have heard of. Didn't know he was involved in that company too.
It is hard to tell what this company does, but it seems to be involved in bitcoin. Coincidentally we have had a huge drop in bitcoin in the last months.
I don't buy anything this weirdo says.
They own Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Jay Z's music streaming service Tidal. They make a decent amount of money from people buying and selling Bitcoin on Cash App but most of their revenue is not related to Bitcoin.
Try again. As another commenter noted:
>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...
Errr, do you not understand what "most" means?
Square payments, CashApp, Tidal (hi-fi music streaming), and some blockchain experiments
Square payment processing?
Block runs Square and Cash App among other payments tech.
If AI really was the cause, why would a company eliminate people who could use it to multiply output and widen the gap between them and their competitors?
Beyond that, why would you just eliminate half of your staff overnight? That causes massive disruption. You would phase the employees out over some number of months to ensure a smooth transition.
This is akin to the is-ought fallacy. Just because a company had layoffs and cited AI, doesn't mean other companies should follow suit or that it will happen. As others have noted in the comments, BTC dropped heavily which Block was invested in, and a lot of their bets went south. Block managers complained at times about certain people not working privately. They also acquired a few companies at peak valuations post COVID.
for once the CNBC sound-bite does a great job of telling you all you need to know - and without reading past the top 2 bullet points:
* 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.
Feel like I tried to get a job here before/did some online test, had to find hidden code in HTML (some broken message scattered across CSS classes) and yeah it took me a bit to do it, didn't hear anything or was denied ahh well. That wasn't the full test, that was the start of it.
Block owns Square and Tidal. Let's show Jack how efficient we can be by canceling those sh...ervices. Claude can use them.
The $2M+ gross profit per person target is the number that actually explains this. That's 4x their pre-covid baseline. Every company that over-hired during ZIRP is running this same math correction. The AI framing helps the stock. The underlying correction was always coming.
Their revenue is literally down over FY25. But it takes less than an hour for VC influencers to come out and and say we all need to work nights and weekends before getting displaced. https://x.com/balajis/status/2027146933136150867?s=46
1. Is this a one off event due to Block's unique business environment?
2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?
If you use any Block products (including Tidal), make sure to do as much as you can to cost the company more than you pay.
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).
If only David Graeber were alive to see that Boards have finally started to appreciate his 2018 Book, Bullshit Jobs.
I still don't get it.
If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?
Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.
Let's say AI increases productivity per capita by 50%
That means 50% of current headcount now has the same productivity as 100%
Now we calculate:
A = OPEX costs cuts by firing 50% of personal
B = Profit increase by the AI 50% productivity increase while not firing anyone
if A>B, reduce headcount
if B>A, reduce headcount and then increase workload on remaining employees until profits increase
> instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...
It may be just bullshit, it probably is. But it also can be that the market demand for software is not as infinite as we thought it is in SaaS era.
> 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.
Making it seem like there's only going to be one mass layoff round. There will be another one, you can be certain.
This will bite back. People being out of jobs means less spending by the public which affects all businesses, which then offsets the productivity gains given by AI.
In some cases, you have vast ability to produce and serve, but the buyers are gone.
The wording is all nice, and at surface level it reads well. It still makes me feel super icky. Kill 4k jobs because people are more productive with AI. Fuck the people, push the profits. Make investors happy.
No, fuck the investors. Fuck the entities causing these decisions to be more common. Extra-fuck the ever-more-obvious push for profit over literally anything else, including ethics, morals, and humanity. If you're an investor causing this shit to happen, fuck you.
Somehow this makes me feel that this org is already dead, and that this is just gonna accelerate it.
you can tell he is a cracked out based tech ceo because he doesn't use capital letters
i agree
Yes 10k? Insane we have companies larger than counties. This all depends on how many they needed to hire in the first place. Also, I don't this reflects the AI transition at all.
Which functions? which projects? If you have 10,000 talented engineers and you're choosing to reduce headcount it's because you don't know how to attack the business and drive revenue in a significant way.
In this market it is probably smarter to fire a large block of people. Chances are good that you can rehire some where you went too aggressive. Sucks for the people that got laid off though.
If the cuts were not due to AI, what benefit does it provide to claim that it was?
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?
herd effect (doesn't stand out, everyone's using it), 'forward-thinking' i.e. preventing ostensible future problem rather than admitting fault of overhiring or bad mgmt/initiatives, juices stocks, keeps wages down and employees in line, if no ability or opportunity to expand (market saturated or bad biz outlook ahead) it gives cover to scale down labor force
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183660
How do they work out that intelligence tools can fill the gap made by 4,000 out of 10,000 and how long did it take to do that calculation? Or are we entering a phase of layoffs under the guise of ?
"we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."
holy moly
I wanted to come back to this to add that it's highly disrespectful to make a post/write a letter laying off 40% of your company and not bother to capitalize words properly.
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
I totally agree. In this strange era we're all in, it seems that not using proper capitalization is a sign of "importance". Other high ranking people/CEOs/technologists don't use the correct rules, especially for important announcements like laying off 4000 people. O tempora, o mores!
> we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here,
This part really fustrated me
Wtf is Block an why are they 10000 in the first place?
To those who stayed behind... won't you feel like you're potentially going to be next? With such a massive cut, I'd start making plans.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble
Oh boy, I've heard that one before. They're in trouble.
Looking at Block's Twitter bio, I see half their companies seem worthwhile, the other half is crypto stuff, and they should either sell it off, or sunset it.
There has to be a good word to describe people like Jack Dorsey.
World class software tinkerer, but no business running a public company.
Is this because of goose (developed by block), the ai agent framework stripe forked and created minions ??
What does “entering into consultation” mean?
My guess: they keep you around on contract for 1-6 months because laying you off immediately would be very disruptive.
One company I worked for did this. It felt weird to everyone. But they did give a slightly better severance to those that stuck out their contracts so it worked out slightly better for them.
That's a UK legal thing: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation
I think "entering into consultation" means HR calls you into a small conference room.
What is it with tech execs and not using capital letters? It's bizarre. Especially in a letter about layoffs.
This freed capital is going into AI agent budgets. Expect lower quotas and higher prices
Chopping block
Nearly half of their employees. And yet economists tell us, AI isn't going to affect jobs.
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Why would you ever choose the first?
Dorsey is in AI psychosis. He required every employee to send him an email weekly which then he had summarized by AI because of course he aint reading it himself.
Even in "AI psychosis" I don't see how firing people is a logical response to advances in AI.
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
because demand is weak and the product markets are saturated. there are dimishing returns to increasing investment. so these companies switch to managing their earnings ratio. if you cant grow revenue, then cut costs.
But that’s not what they are claiming.
> 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
at every productivity point there's an optimal number of employees needed.
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?
Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?
- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?
- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
I have decided you will work twice as hard because I’m not as rich as Elon.
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
I understand pausing completely ; can you explain how stopping the transfer of existing temporary workers will help?
Lots of people laid off by Block are on H1B Visas. With transfer they have 60 days to find new role. If they could not find new job in 60 days, they "fake" transfer to "bodyshop" company while they are looking for real work so status does not lapse.
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.
Even if you consider 50% of them are H1Bs, and out of them even majority don’t find jobs in 60 days (it’s actually more since they are keeping them on payroll for 5 months) that’s still a low number. Couple with the fact that not all would like to join body shops. I understand your frustration but I don’t think stopping H1B transfers is the solution.
Won't companies just offshore?
Not really. I expect with AI and increased productivity allure of outsourcing will diminish. You want super productive engineers to be close to product and customers.
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.
So, what does Block actually do?
Square point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
They hire people, and then they fire them!
CashApp
Square is still a much, much bigger portion of the business than CashApp.
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Vibe management at its finest
Our team at getclera.com is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47057908&goto=item%3Fi...
Called it. This will be for every single software company. Maybe all companies.
I like how it's posted to a twitter URL.
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
We are an ai headhunting startup and ready to support all affected from the lay-off. Our team at clera is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee we can with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.
More information: getclera.com/block
Its 100% free
> but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using
For some reason he deliberately avoids using the word 'artificial' here.
Bets on how long it takes to get back to 10k employees?
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...
Just cancelled my CashApp account. This dude’s an idiot.
I wonder what folks on 2009 Hacker News would have said if a company announced layoffs.
Would the top comments have been questioning it, telling the CEO what he should have done instead, worrying about how hard it would be for those people in today's economy?
Lord, here comes the flood. I'm sure there will still be lots of denial, and ofc it isn't just 'ai takin our jobs', but my gut and personal experience is saying this is just the first wave.
AI is a transformative technology that will reshape how companies are run. More layoffs may be coming unfortunately. But on the other end, more companies and more products will be created. More competition overall, including for Block.
The overarching risk, imo, is America turning against tech and its leaders / billionaires. I think this is slowly happening. And why not, if the People decide that tech is not bringing good things to our modern society anymore, that should be respected.
FFS. What is it with these weirdo "leader" types and the all lower case writing? Are they trying to come off as "cool" in the "hello fellow children" way or are they just implying they are so important, they don´t even have to observe the rules of writing and grammar?
He cant write in proper case to lay off $4k people?
Some choice Jack Dorsey quotes:
From New Yorker profile: “His goal… is… by making information freer, he hopes to make the world fairer, kinder, and nicer.”
Where he also writes, “I definitely feel the most fundamental issue is economic equality.”
But hey, the stock is up 25%!
this is brutal. :(
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
Seems like if AI is such an accelerator, leveraging 4,000 more people using AI will generate that much more shareholder value.
Any layoff that blames AI and doesn't address the fact that the company is saying it would prefer to make less, they are lying.
Rational actors should be pushing to grow when others are fearful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Do you think (great) ideas for projects fall out of thin air?
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.
Imagine not being laid off in this situation.. I'd demand to be.
EDIT: I guess if it comes with 300% raise I'd pause for a bit to think about it, but otherwise absolutely not.
Block owns Tidal? who knew
why doesn't HN rewrite this to the canonical x.com hostname?
> They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
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.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.
Come on now, it's not going to be the only round.
recently there has been a consistent drip of layoffs each day. they kind of chose all of the options
well, I'd like to join smaller flatter teams...
he is worse than musk ever been. hiding behind ai
Translation from a long diatribe: we see that devs using AI are way more productive so we can save some money here for shareholders, hence 40% of you are laid off.
Software developer in general are probably looking for some fucked up situation here.
Imagine being laid off by somebody who doesn't understand capital letters.
Ah, no, come on, man: at least make it y2k. I need to be able to play UT99 and Q3A at (at least) 1024 x 768 and 24-bit colour with no frame drops.
But, otherwise, I'm onboard with the principle.
The subtext is peak tech-founder theology:
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.
Oh man, I'm so entirely sick of this.
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.
Why is this statement in all lowercase? Is this a tech bro thing I'm unaware of?
Because he's a humble guy just like you and me. Big letters mean big man and he's just a little everyman guy, relatable and cool.
Just a Jack Dorsey thing. He writes all of his communications like that.
Translation: we’re hemorrhaging money and need to cut costs. AI is just a smokescreen
“Why is there no loyalty to the company anymore?!!”
Test
Is this it? Is he trying to pop the AI bubble?
This guy really hates capital letters
The headline numbers:
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
That significantly more generous than the 12-16 week severance packages being doled out by big tech during the great layoffs of 2022-2023 if I remember correctly.
In 2023 Google gave 16 weeks plus 2 for every year of tenure, so not significantly less (and more if your tenure was >5 years), plus google also vested stock for entirety of the 16+ weeks.
They're going from over 10k employees to just under 6k. So more than 40%.
Ah yeah, that's fair. The post itself says "nearly half".
Will Randian tech bros start calling for socialism soon? Inshallah.
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Yeah, im a chronic uncapitilizer in our work slack and HN, but if I put out a 'communication' then I always shift to 'regular' grammar.
Its an extremely annoying trend among a subset of the tech industry who think it makes them cool
Is there some reason your lack of apostrophe and period is supposed to be less annoying than their lack of capitalization?
Honestly the whole Silicon Valley shtick is becoming old. The fake positivity, the quirky writing style, the "I think the most important quality is sticktuitiveness" linkedin-esque bullshit. Not to mention the cargo-cult that is so obvious in every GPT-wrapper startup.
This was mostly born out of counter signalling the businesses that valued serious people over competent people in the 20th century.
But, like with all things, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. I believe the next wave of tech countersignalling will be people who actually do take themselves seriously, maybe even dress in suits, etc..
I noticed that as well and it oddly made me sit for a minute to think about it. I ended up deciding that it landed a bit more 'real' and unfiltered. Could be interpreted many ways. Nobody knows the actual why but (possibly) Jack.
uwu i'm a smol bean
also you're fired
It was a 100% intentional act. These people simply don't care and they want that be known. It's in their ego.
There is no good way to announce layoffs.
No matter what he wrote, it was going to be insulting.
I found it completely unreadable, similar to reading code without syntax highlighting.
Maybe he should have had AI fix up the grammar/spelling for him...
Yeah I'm with you.
I write most of my emails purposely misspelling words / lacking proper capitalization so the recipient knows it wasn't written with ai. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Vibe CEOing.
Dorsey practically invented it.
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AI comment
Obviously so, yeah. Astroturfing? Or is there any other reason why this is becoming so common in HN?
I'm not a native speaker. Besides dash, what is the sign that it's AI?
I can’t point the exact signs because the message got removed, but a common sign is labeled paragraphs:
“My take: so and so.”
“The key idea: so and so.”
There are also some common sentence structures, like the format “it’s not A, it’s B”. For example, “this is not important; it is essential”.
Some words also tend to appear very frequently, like the verb pretend: “this is John no longer pretending he’s dumb”.
Any of those examples could appear in legitimate human text, but when you see many of those signs in a short text it’s very obvious.
Karma farming to frontpage more AI news and startups?
Claw and people who haven't realized ns;nt
Massaging sentiment
> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.
I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307549
It's AGI if it works. Didn't Salesforce lay off support people to replace them with AI but then the AI didn't work?
> this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff
Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
>> * this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff*
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.