Rendered at 07:54:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Netlify.
daxfohl 10 hours ago [-]
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.
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
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.
salviati 1 hours ago [-]
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.
fortzi 54 minutes ago [-]
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
fhd2 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
georgeecollins 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
TeMPOraL 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
unsupp0rted 10 minutes ago [-]
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?
notatoad 7 hours ago [-]
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.
SanjayMehta 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dayone1 4 hours ago [-]
wow which company was this?
no-dr-onboard 3 hours ago [-]
Not op, but GitLab fits the form.
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
alephnerd 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
---
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.
hirsin 7 hours ago [-]
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
com2kid 5 hours ago [-]
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.
smileysteve 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jacobsenscott 1 hours ago [-]
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.
techpression 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
creativeSlumber 48 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
hirsin 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
mike_d 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ulfw 4 hours ago [-]
He's a VC now. That's how they think
Raidion 7 hours ago [-]
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.
abirch 7 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that Twitters revenue was
5 billion in 2021
4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company)
3.4 billion in 2023
2.6 billion in 2024
2.9 billion in 2025
joker666 5 hours ago [-]
What's the operational cost now? 10K to 2K employees. 30 Engineers.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
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.
YokoZar 7 hours ago [-]
Elon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.
hirsin 7 hours ago [-]
That would be the good argument, yes.
DoesntMatter22 5 hours ago [-]
Mo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine
jeremyjh 4 hours ago [-]
The company lost about $12 billion in enterprise value between the last two transactions.
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.
sreekanth67 3 hours ago [-]
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.
viraptor 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bufordsharkley 6 hours ago [-]
The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now
mandevil 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AdieuToLogic 4 hours ago [-]
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.
consp 1 hours ago [-]
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.
alephnerd 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
keeda 5 hours ago [-]
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.
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
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.
_heimdall 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
aiisjustanif 2 hours ago [-]
Network higher up the stack and be extremely likable
superfrank 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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".
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
johnnyanmac 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
alephnerd 52 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Bluescreenbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
aaa_aaa 2 hours ago [-]
It is a misinformation machine. Funny thing is, it always was. People just want their misinformation reign supreme.
Forgeties79 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
alephnerd 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dakolli 4 hours ago [-]
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!
dakolli 4 hours ago [-]
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).
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
mjevans 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dakolli 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dakolli 2 hours ago [-]
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.
johnnyanmac 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
dakolli 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
malfist 6 hours ago [-]
That might have been true three years ago. But not now
rco8786 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
paxys 8 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 7 hours ago [-]
And before people like my barber would have had a square reader. With NFC in modern phones, they just use that
mattmaroon 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ryukoposting 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Marsymars 5 hours ago [-]
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.
simonw 7 hours ago [-]
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?
Scoundreller 17 seconds ago [-]
The bought $170m of bitcoin at $30k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $50k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.
ursuscamp 7 hours ago [-]
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.
daxfohl 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rco8786 5 hours ago [-]
The only thing it served was to distract Jack from building real products.
vineyardmike 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mathattack 9 hours ago [-]
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.
hellojesus 9 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 7 hours ago [-]
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
hellojesus 5 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 5 hours ago [-]
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.
hellojesus 2 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 57 minutes ago [-]
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
MattGaiser 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
project2501a 8 hours ago [-]
> but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
Unionize.
raw_anon_1111 7 hours ago [-]
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?
dfadsadsf 7 hours ago [-]
If we unionize, will I still be paid $500k with four years of experience?
shimman 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
raw_anon_1111 7 hours ago [-]
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.
SR2Z 7 hours ago [-]
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.
hn_throwaway_99 7 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
atomicnumber3 6 hours ago [-]
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".
matwood 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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…
strange_quark 4 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
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?”
marcus_holmes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hn_throwaway_99 5 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 4 hours ago [-]
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
heathrow83829 6 hours ago [-]
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!
Marsymars 5 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 5 hours ago [-]
Started seeing even B2C folks just get the LLM to do it, or code up a quick solution that does most of it.
nradov 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hn_throwaway_99 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nradov 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hn_throwaway_99 50 minutes ago [-]
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... .
johnny_canuck 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hibikir 5 hours ago [-]
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.
pllbnk 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 8 hours ago [-]
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?
morelandjs 6 hours ago [-]
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.
SecretDreams 4 hours ago [-]
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.
n2d4 9 hours ago [-]
In what sense did CashApp not pan out? $16b revenue. Too early to say whether Afterpay will work out but looking good so far
daxfohl 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
> $16b revenue
I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
toomuchtodo 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tempest_ 9 hours ago [-]
It also solves an exclusively American problem. In my country anyone can send money bank to bank, no need for a separate service.
toomuchtodo 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Schwab's accounts are backed by Chase. Zelle comes along for the ride.
linkregister 8 hours ago [-]
Zelle has a transfer limit of $1000 per day and has a bad user interface.
toomuchtodo 8 hours ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
linkregister 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks! I will request my bank to increase my limit.
leoqa 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rlt 1 hours ago [-]
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Xeronate 4 hours ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
anukin 6 hours ago [-]
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?
daxfohl 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jagged-chisel 8 hours ago [-]
> … 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.”
compiler-guy 8 hours ago [-]
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.
brightball 6 hours ago [-]
I hear about CashApp but I don’t know anybody who uses it. What’s the selling point?
Jack Dorsey likes to do side quests it seems, I see him in many things
tootie 7 hours ago [-]
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.
hedora 6 hours ago [-]
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.
senko 8 hours ago [-]
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.
grey-area 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
yellow_lead 2 minutes ago [-]
Its getting a bit repetitive to see this type of comment on every tech layoff letter
shaftway 6 hours ago [-]
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."
Bayko 5 hours ago [-]
Ye at this point the dude is just copy pasting. Gotta go do the cocaine parties with JayZ
danpalmer 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
vessenes 5 hours ago [-]
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.
danpalmer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ezfe 4 hours ago [-]
Voluntary severance/ERO is possible without a bad culture. I’ve seen it done, people love it.
croisillon 2 hours ago [-]
a donut costs way more than a dollar so losing your bet makes you win?
belval 6 hours ago [-]
> 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".
danpalmer 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fastball 4 hours ago [-]
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.
danpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
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.
slantedview 7 hours ago [-]
"owning" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.
jtokoph 7 hours ago [-]
One day there will be a CEO who actually pays the severances out of their own compensation.
t-writescode 6 hours ago [-]
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?
trvthnvke-1 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
medi8r 4 hours ago [-]
Even better they fire themself, the exec team can replace them with AI
teyopi 7 hours ago [-]
Agree materially no consequences but still better than many deflection strategies we have seen from others during layoffs.
rustystump 7 hours ago [-]
It is but those words could be long flowery corpo speak or short.
“Yall gonna get money and most yall fired. My bad woops”
arzke 3 hours ago [-]
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.
matsemann 1 hours ago [-]
Why does he write i’m at some sentences but i'm at others (different ')?
daegloe 3 hours ago [-]
That’s how Jack writes to everyone (and comms drafts his announcements true to his style)
meerab 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Trufa 7 hours ago [-]
@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?
agnishom 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.".
joelthelion 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
PunchTornado 2 hours ago [-]
On shareholder money? No thank you. If 1 person can do the job, why keep 2?
itake 2 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelatedindex 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
agnishom 1 hours ago [-]
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.
t-writescode 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Swizec 10 hours ago [-]
> 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 :)
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
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.
eitally 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lucas_the_human 2 hours ago [-]
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
garbawarb 7 hours ago [-]
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).
tombert 6 hours ago [-]
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.
vedaba 7 hours ago [-]
Blink once if the bank rhymed with face
tombert 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mwigdahl 9 hours ago [-]
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.
thepasswordis 9 hours ago [-]
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 an software engineer with 17 years experience and I can't even get an interview at most places I put my resume in to.
davidw 9 hours ago [-]
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)
_delirium 6 hours ago [-]
Largely in-person gigs in the SF Bay Area, yeah. One reason the rents are up so much.
7 hours ago [-]
ph4rsikal 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iAMkenough 9 hours ago [-]
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.
operatingthetan 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah that would make me consider finding a different recruiter. Real estate agent mentality means their interests are not aligned properly.
davidw 9 hours ago [-]
Is this hiring people to dig ditches for data center infrastructure or something? Because it doesn't sound like software.
Swizec 9 hours ago [-]
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.
VBprogrammer 9 hours ago [-]
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?
ianbutler 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ericmay 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jahlove 4 hours ago [-]
This guy used the expanded acronym in his question though!
jahlove 9 hours ago [-]
you're so close!
nick32661123 8 hours ago [-]
So, onsite work in an area with no available housing?
davidw 8 hours ago [-]
Probably a bunch of performative 9-9-6 BS too.
WatchDog 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tabemonooo 12 minutes ago [-]
Sucks to suck, I guess. I'm at ~10 YoE and have seen a notable uptick in cold outreach emails from Meta etc as well as OpenAI, Airbnb, a few others. Have you considered learning woodworking?
garbawarb 9 hours ago [-]
To anyone who's been looking for SWE jobs lately, has this been your experience?
shaftway 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Rapzid 6 hours ago [-]
Also getting lot's of direct recruiter and engineering leadership pings.
etimberg 6 hours ago [-]
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
sickcodebruh 6 hours ago [-]
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.
yogorenapan 8 hours ago [-]
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.
wavemode 8 hours ago [-]
What differentiates your resume from your friend's?
malfist 6 hours ago [-]
Just left amazon for Stripe. Not part of a layoff. It wasn't too bad for me. Remote middle of the country too
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.
this tracker shows continuous improvement since 2023
yesb 6 hours ago [-]
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
jcims 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
camdenreslink 8 hours ago [-]
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.
coffeebeqn 2 hours ago [-]
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
jwilber 8 hours ago [-]
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”
hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
missedthecue 8 hours ago [-]
"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.
unreal6 10 hours ago [-]
> 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
ssnistfajen 9 hours ago [-]
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.
semitones 8 hours ago [-]
> 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...
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gwbas1c 4 hours ago [-]
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."
TheJoeMan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
reactordev 10 hours ago [-]
No, the job market is dead outside of implementing workflows for AI.
akshshha 10 hours ago [-]
Most C levels adhere to the “cattle, not pets” idea too.
toast0 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Ancalagon 9 hours ago [-]
Just wondering, have you been unemployed for 6+ mos before?
toast0 9 hours ago [-]
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.
darth_avocado 8 hours ago [-]
Everyone is an atheist until the plane starts crashing.
mekael 7 hours ago [-]
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.
untwerp 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
veryemartguy 7 hours ago [-]
replace tech industry with hn and you’ll be spot on.
Ancalagon 6 hours ago [-]
why not both?
darth_avocado 6 hours ago [-]
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.
akoboldfrying 9 hours ago [-]
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.
veryemartguy 7 hours ago [-]
great analogy dude. Totally relevant.
akoboldfrying 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tabemonooo 1 minutes ago [-]
They have pills for autism now, you know. You don't have to subject the rest of the internet to your little spergfits.
singpolyma3 9 hours ago [-]
Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.
missedthecue 8 hours ago [-]
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.
rytill 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
geraneum 9 hours ago [-]
But something something trickle down!
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
umanwizard 6 hours ago [-]
Block has never been bailed out.
geraneum 6 hours ago [-]
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?
KittenInABox 9 hours ago [-]
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).
ahepp 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bananamogul 9 hours ago [-]
"humans are a cooperative species"
Humans are violent, self-centered tribalists. What species are you referring to? Not homo sapiens.
zimza 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago [-]
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.
hackable_sand 2 hours ago [-]
Telling on yourself
KittenInABox 8 hours ago [-]
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.
edgyquant 5 hours ago [-]
Tribalism implies cooperation
johnnienaked 8 hours ago [-]
And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?
retinaros 9 hours ago [-]
outside of the west yes.
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
fundamentally you see jobs as more important than the end product. this is a tension i keep finding in many minds.
KittenInABox 8 hours ago [-]
I see fundamentally human wellbeing as more important. Jobs are just the structure society has built as a gateway for this.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
Alternatively, instead of things being cheaper, you could receive that amount more money.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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
veryemartguy 7 hours ago [-]
I too spend my life ensuring that my only purpose in life is creating shareholder value
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
you are literally complaining about the idea of having more money
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Verlyn139 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
singpolyma3 6 hours ago [-]
Then I suggest fixing society or finding a better one
singpolyma3 6 hours ago [-]
So you think companies should hire and pay employees they don't have any use for out of charity?
4 hours ago [-]
MattGaiser 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
loktarogar 9 hours ago [-]
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.
zimza 6 hours ago [-]
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)
ej88 9 hours ago [-]
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
onlyrealcuzzo 6 hours ago [-]
Is this actual five months severance? Or five months base pay with no vesting?
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
umanwizard 6 hours ago [-]
The answer to this is in the post.
brap 9 hours ago [-]
Because they’re not running a charity
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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."
gdilla 10 hours ago [-]
because that doesn't increase shareholder value, at least in the short term, which is all anyone cares about now.
charcircuit 9 hours ago [-]
Have you not noticed the massive datacenter build out consuming tons of capital right now?
taurath 4 hours ago [-]
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.
lr4444lr 4 hours ago [-]
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.
taurath 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
NicuCalcea 3 hours ago [-]
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".
HDThoreaun 3 hours ago [-]
He's also giving out massive severance packages
NicuCalcea 3 hours ago [-]
Is four and a half month's pay considered massive in the US? What do you normally get when you're made redundant?
HDThoreaun 3 hours ago [-]
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
NicuCalcea 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nothrabannosir 2 hours ago [-]
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.
NicuCalcea 2 hours ago [-]
What's fair is what I, my union, and my employer believe is fair. Why should it be symmetrical?
nothrabannosir 1 hours ago [-]
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.
NicuCalcea 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
tock 3 hours ago [-]
Block is up 25%.
HDThoreaun 3 hours ago [-]
Down 15% yoy. Down 75% over last 5 years
tock 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Lammy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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."
QGQBGdeZREunxLe 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dmboyd 8 hours ago [-]
Yea, look over there!!! AI.
(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)
dehrmann 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hirako2000 9 hours ago [-]
AI is the logical, counter proof reason, I feel it serves as a scapegoat so perfectly they pretend it replaces people.
shawkinaw 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Sparkle-san 8 hours ago [-]
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.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
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.
danpalmer 7 hours ago [-]
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.
coffeebeqn 2 hours ago [-]
Owning SP500 gives me too much AI exposure by default
creativeSlumber 42 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
borroka 9 hours ago [-]
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.
pants2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
coffeebeqn 2 hours ago [-]
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
sealeck 8 hours ago [-]
> 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!
borroka 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mixdup 7 hours ago [-]
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
borroka 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mixdup 6 hours ago [-]
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
borroka 6 hours ago [-]
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.
VirusNewbie 7 hours ago [-]
Are you not paying attention? X has gotten waaaay worse.
It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.
borroka 7 hours ago [-]
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.
eBombzor 7 hours ago [-]
Social media has just gotten way worse across the board. X is just a reflection of trend.
skepticATX 6 hours ago [-]
So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.
thfuran 6 hours ago [-]
And it's all preposterously even when it's working.
8 hours ago [-]
bdangubic 6 hours ago [-]
X is the most valuable company on the planet 100x over. it buys elections which is worth more than Mag7 combined
onlyrealcuzzo 6 hours ago [-]
> Is X profitable?
The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.
mempko 8 hours ago [-]
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?
borroka 8 hours ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dimgl 6 hours ago [-]
What do you do now?
borroka 6 hours ago [-]
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.
adithyassekhar 5 hours ago [-]
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.
borroka 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ewgdfv 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sgt 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
rappatic 10 hours ago [-]
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
Does the lowercase convey authenticity or lack of care?
danpalmer 7 hours ago [-]
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.
BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jbxntuehineoh 3 hours ago [-]
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
Rapzid 13 minutes ago [-]
bro, dO yOu eVEN cARe?
kevinfiol 8 hours ago [-]
Ha glad to see I'm not the only one irked by that.
bigtex88 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mgambati 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rubberband 3 hours ago [-]
"make me sound more sincere!"
rottencupcakes 7 hours ago [-]
i like it. it's how you show you didn't use ai to write the message.
rappatic 6 hours ago [-]
"ChatGPT, write a letter to my company about laying 40% of them off but don't capitalize anything"
bigtex88 5 hours ago [-]
He 100% used AI to write it.
htrp 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
mattbillenstein 10 hours ago [-]
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.
michaelt 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
iaaan 10 hours ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
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...
Imustaskforhelp 8 hours ago [-]
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)
IshKebab 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
paradox460 6 hours ago [-]
Star Office was really good in the 90s too
liuliu 9 hours ago [-]
Every business metrics needs people to safeguard. That's how you get the number of ppl.
gedy 9 hours ago [-]
Sure but it'll still be a 6000+ team - I doubt nimbleness will occur now.
jcgrillo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
svnt 6 hours ago [-]
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).
chilipepperhott 10 hours ago [-]
Their shareholder meeting is later today. Maybe we'll find out.
willio58 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throwyawayyyy 6 hours ago [-]
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?
tootie 9 hours ago [-]
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.
re-thc 10 hours ago [-]
> 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
gusmally 9 hours ago [-]
you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
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?
missedthecue 5 hours ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 2 hours ago [-]
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
jpdb 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jibe 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jibe 5 hours ago [-]
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.
throwyawayyyy 6 hours ago [-]
I do see fewer Square terminals these days, more Toast (and other options too I think).
themgt 9 hours ago [-]
Demand inelasticity.
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
> our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers
prescriptivist 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kace91 9 hours ago [-]
>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”.
atleastoptimal 8 hours ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
Your country also pays less and has fewer jobs.
Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.
kace91 7 hours ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 6 hours ago [-]
> 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
kace91 6 hours ago [-]
>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?
groundzeros2015 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
senordevnyc 3 hours ago [-]
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.
acchow 8 hours ago [-]
Can you point to the laws in your country that would make this illegal? I’m skeptical
input_sh 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
iddan 9 hours ago [-]
This is America. Like it or not.
pembrook 4 hours ago [-]
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.
What government makes it illegal for management to manage their company?
kace91 8 hours ago [-]
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.
acchow 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kace91 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Klonoar 6 hours ago [-]
What was the average age of the worker that took that deal?
121789 8 hours ago [-]
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"
kace91 7 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 10 hours ago [-]
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
TSiege 9 hours ago [-]
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
arctic-true 8 hours ago [-]
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.
baq 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
b8 9 hours ago [-]
They're back to 6,000 not 5,000.
softwaredoug 9 hours ago [-]
Thank you. fixed.
jscheel 9 hours ago [-]
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.
interestpiqued 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jdross 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Just because you agree with the social politics the algorithm is throwing out now vs. before doesn't mean it's not political
interestpiqued 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dntrkv 3 hours ago [-]
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.
VirusNewbie 7 hours ago [-]
It has 30 FT people working on the core product. That isn't counting infra/ai/ads/legal/ etc.
veryemartguy 7 hours ago [-]
yeah super great now that you can have gork put kids in bikinis
ulfw 4 hours ago [-]
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
rcakebread 9 hours ago [-]
Couldn't even be bothered to type like an adult when he fired them.
uoflcards22 9 hours ago [-]
The refusal to simply capitalize the first letter of a sentence is so obnoxious.
brap 9 hours ago [-]
It feels incredibly performative. Same with sama.
uoflcards22 8 hours ago [-]
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".
khazhoux 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Revanche1367 8 hours ago [-]
This was clearly a joke.
monomyth 9 hours ago [-]
Clearly the AI is not as widely used within the company as he proclaimed :)
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tortilla 8 hours ago [-]
the epstein style guide says all lowercase and no punctuation is how you signal dominance from the top of the pyramid
overfeed 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mgfist 9 hours ago [-]
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.
zmjone2992 8 hours ago [-]
yea but layoffs aren't usually very performance based. i agree in general though.
hiddencost 1 hours ago [-]
I'd encourage anyone wondering where this perspective comes from to read "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher.
hirako2000 9 hours ago [-]
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.
r-w 9 hours ago [-]
How magnanimous of him to let us all know of his magnanimity!
hirako2000 9 hours ago [-]
He could have been even more radical and get rid of himself, his lieutenants could ask gpt about the strategy.
signatoremo 8 hours ago [-]
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?
hirako2000 8 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
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%.
boredatoms 9 hours ago [-]
While destroying morale, and increasing the difficulty of successfully recruiting later
overfeed 9 hours ago [-]
I directly quoted jack - take it up with him.
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
> 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?
overfeed 8 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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.
just-the-wrk 9 hours ago [-]
they are now estimating 18% instead of 17%
121789 8 hours ago [-]
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
jcmontx 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mixdup 7 hours ago [-]
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
coffeebeqn 1 hours ago [-]
There hasn’t been anything sexy about working in big tech in over a decade
svnt 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah but why is working for Netflix even sexy? At the end of the day it is almost a telecom.
DarkTree 5 hours ago [-]
$$$
triceratops 4 hours ago [-]
It's also almost a movie studio.
mixdup 2 hours ago [-]
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
mh2266 3 hours ago [-]
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.
GeoAtreides 8 hours ago [-]
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.
GeoAtreides 6 hours ago [-]
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?
prescriptivist 6 hours ago [-]
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.
nusl 6 hours ago [-]
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?
jbxntuehineoh 3 hours ago [-]
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
geraneum 6 hours ago [-]
Are you criticizing the folks championing AI while… effectively championing the AI? What do you think people should do?
nusl 6 hours ago [-]
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.
geraneum 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nusl 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nemo44x 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah it’s pretty much over.
abeppu 6 hours ago [-]
> 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"?
Nifty3929 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dntrkv 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mkozlows 6 hours ago [-]
Depends on the company, but I think it's fair to say that not every company has a roadmap to infinite growth.
abeppu 5 hours ago [-]
... 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?
mkozlows 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
Skunkleton 4 hours ago [-]
My experience is that "asking staff for ideas" does not lead to successful products. Sometimes, sure, but in general it does not.
abeppu 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
cft 3 minutes ago [-]
This freed capital is going into AI agent budgets. Expect lower quotas and higher prices
flumpcakes 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wmf 9 hours ago [-]
Jack Dorsey looks like a homeless person and he spends his time meditating and talking about Bitcoin. People knew what they were getting into.
mistrial9 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
itmitica 10 hours ago [-]
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.
aforty 10 hours ago [-]
Because it will go out today anyway on the investor call or later via leak so might as well get ahead of it.
lp4v4n 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
how do you layoff 40% quietly?
temp8830 44 minutes ago [-]
Block owns Square and Tidal. Let's show Jack how efficient we can be by canceling those sh...ervices. Claude can use them.
chilipepperhott 10 hours ago [-]
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.
busterarm 10 hours ago [-]
Except the concensus around the Amazon layoffs is that it's a shift in free cashflow to capex spent towards ram/gpus.
Bombthecat 10 hours ago [-]
Could be also both...
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
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 miss those days. It may have been economically silly but there was so much optimism, especially in the tech world.
AbstractH24 10 hours ago [-]
Now we're just economically silly without optimism (except for one pocket of the tech world).
SilverElfin 10 hours ago [-]
Optimism without the ZIRP bubble is the 1990s
nxm 10 hours ago [-]
Pre-paid optimism that we've been paying for now with high inflation due to overstimulated economy through printed money.
rvz 10 hours ago [-]
That is called a bubble.
Now some here are about to experience a repeat of the years 2000 and 2008 put together.
Havoc 9 hours ago [-]
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...
sealeck 8 hours ago [-]
> 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...
nothing bizzare to invest into the area if some people pay 8.5b
slantedview 9 hours ago [-]
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.
suralind 9 hours ago [-]
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.
sealeck 9 hours ago [-]
> 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!
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
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?"
Refreeze5224 9 hours ago [-]
It's simple: it's just a lie. We are seeing the goal of AI in action here, which is reducing payroll costs.
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
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"?
xeckr 9 hours ago [-]
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?
MeetingsBrowser 6 hours ago [-]
No sane person is claiming AI can fully replace a human worker today.
It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
xeckr 3 hours ago [-]
How do you square (heh) this with Jack Dorsey axing nearly half of Block's headcount?
d0100 7 hours ago [-]
If you apply Pareto to productivity, you can fire a lot of people and still manage
Refreeze5224 8 hours ago [-]
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.
djeekle 9 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
MeetingsBrowser 6 hours ago [-]
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
geraneum 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
johnnienaked 8 hours ago [-]
"they should not have had 12,000 to begin with"
Nailed it
sealeck 8 hours ago [-]
> The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
Um, no?
retinaros 9 hours ago [-]
it does not work like that except in a berkeley mba mind
boxingdog 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
just-the-wrk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
nailer 9 hours ago [-]
Quite a few people on X mentioned Block went on a top-of-market acquisition spree (Weebly, Afterpay, Tidal) and tripled headcount during Covid.
ppeetteerr 9 hours ago [-]
Wishing the best for all those affected and excited to see many of you start new companies and continue to innovate.
skwirl 10 hours ago [-]
We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.
gusmally 9 hours ago [-]
For real. Very worried about when other CEOs follow suit and there is a flood of people into unemployment.
LostMyLogin 8 hours ago [-]
As someone that is only five years into their career at this point, I feel so helpless.
tech_jabroni 7 hours ago [-]
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
MattGaiser 8 hours ago [-]
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.
anonnon 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rgovostes 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ivanech 9 hours ago [-]
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.
stock_toaster 8 hours ago [-]
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. :/
garbawarb 10 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
manbash 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
yodsanklai 8 hours ago [-]
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.
neya 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
keeda 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
neya 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
gopher_space 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
keeda 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rezonant 5 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
deadbabe 5 hours ago [-]
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.
keeda 4 hours ago [-]
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.
darth_avocado 5 hours ago [-]
> 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”
princevegeta89 6 hours ago [-]
>>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.
SanjayMehta 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
operatingthetan 6 hours ago [-]
It's for the people who still work there.
princevegeta89 5 hours ago [-]
It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..
tempest_ 5 hours ago [-]
Do they make sure new employees all remove the shift key from their company laptop or is that limited by band?
chanux 5 hours ago [-]
At that level, pressing shift probably affects efficiency. /s
vkou 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of employees are really stupid, and will believe (or close their eyes to) all sorts of bullshit.
_heimdall 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rubyfan 5 hours ago [-]
Share
anitil 5 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
Skidaddle 5 hours ago [-]
I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep
ojbyrne 5 hours ago [-]
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.
pembrook 5 hours ago [-]
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?
neya 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pembrook 5 hours 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).
dr_kretyn 5 hours ago [-]
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.
akutlay 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
pembrook 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Kina 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Kina 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jackblemming 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
y1n0 6 hours ago [-]
How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!
no_wizard 6 hours ago [-]
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
csallen 5 hours ago [-]
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.
no_wizard 5 hours ago [-]
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
ytoawwhra92 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
5 hours ago [-]
snihalani 5 hours ago [-]
>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.
no_wizard 5 hours ago [-]
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
neya 5 hours ago [-]
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.
swingboy 4 hours ago [-]
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?
IAmGraydon 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tlhunter 9 hours ago [-]
Jack couldn't be bothered to use capital letters in his last layoff email either.
kypro 9 hours ago [-]
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?
kbos87 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jmacd 8 hours ago [-]
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.
harsha_photon 2 hours ago [-]
Is this because of goose (developed by block), the ai agent framework stripe forked and created minions ??
mcast 9 hours ago [-]
>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.
maerF0x0 8 hours ago [-]
> 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!
bayarearefugee 6 hours ago [-]
> Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.
freshtake 4 hours ago [-]
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.
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
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"?
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.
interestpiqued 8 hours ago [-]
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
nusl 7 hours ago [-]
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.
punee94 4 hours ago [-]
There has to be a good word to describe people like Jack Dorsey.
World class software tinkerer, but no business running a public company.
siliconc0w 7 hours ago [-]
you can tell he is a cracked out based tech ceo because he doesn't use capital letters
2001zhaozhao 6 hours ago [-]
i agree
gombosg 9 hours ago [-]
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?"
joshhart 8 hours ago [-]
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.
GeoAtreides 8 hours ago [-]
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
Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...
testfoobar 10 hours ago [-]
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?
justonepost2 9 hours ago [-]
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
dasistrobert 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dasistrobert 3 hours ago [-]
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
itmitica 22 minutes ago [-]
Is this it? Is he trying to pop the AI bubble?
giancarlostoro 7 hours ago [-]
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.
stelliosk 8 hours ago [-]
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 ?
bartread 1 hours ago [-]
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.
christoff12 8 hours ago [-]
"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
christoff12 8 hours ago [-]
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.
akshshha 10 hours ago [-]
I’ll take jobs moving to India for 1000, Alex.
xtracto 10 hours ago [-]
AI: Affordable Indian.
9 hours ago [-]
numbers 9 hours ago [-]
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
trashface 8 hours ago [-]
Nearly half of their employees. And yet economists tell us, AI isn't going to affect jobs.
crustyrusty 9 hours ago [-]
"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.
wiseowise 48 minutes ago [-]
“Why is there no loyalty to the company anymore?!!”
8 hours ago [-]
duncangh 10 hours ago [-]
Chopping block
tqi 4 hours ago [-]
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...
hokumguru 10 hours ago [-]
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?
rxyz 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
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.
33MHz-i486 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 6 hours ago [-]
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
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
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?
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
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?
ej88 9 hours ago [-]
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
dfadsadsf 10 hours ago [-]
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.
runtheway94 7 hours ago [-]
I understand pausing completely ; can you explain how stopping the transfer of existing temporary workers will help?
dfadsadsf 2 hours ago [-]
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.
650 7 hours ago [-]
Won't companies just offshore?
dfadsadsf 2 hours ago [-]
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.
gip 8 hours ago [-]
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.
getnormality 8 hours ago [-]
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?
eviks 5 hours ago [-]
Vibe management at its finest
cyanydeez 10 hours ago [-]
Stock goes up in expectation of ... CEOs doing share buybacks to increase their bonus checks.
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.
cm2012 8 hours ago [-]
He cant write in proper case to lay off $4k people?
krzaG 10 hours ago [-]
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.
peanuty1 9 hours ago [-]
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.
IAmGraydon 4 hours ago [-]
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
Square payments, CashApp, Tidal (hi-fi music streaming), and some blockchain experiments
gusmally 10 hours ago [-]
Square payment processing?
wffurr 9 hours ago [-]
Block runs Square and Cash App among other payments tech.
dzonga 8 hours ago [-]
this is brutal. :(
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
What does “entering into consultation” mean?
moregrist 9 hours ago [-]
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 think "entering into consultation" means HR calls you into a small conference room.
enmyj 7 hours ago [-]
Block owns Tidal? who knew
tonymet 7 hours ago [-]
If only David Graeber were alive to see that Boards have finally started to appreciate his 2018 Book, Bullshit Jobs.
pmdr 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kledru 8 hours ago [-]
well, I'd like to join smaller flatter teams...
noelsusman 3 hours ago [-]
Why is this statement in all lowercase? Is this a tech bro thing I'm unaware of?
cardy31 3 hours ago [-]
Just a Jack Dorsey thing. He writes all of his communications like that.
raverbashing 10 hours ago [-]
So, what does Block actually do?
missedthecue 9 hours ago [-]
Square point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
jcgrillo 10 hours ago [-]
They hire people, and then they fire them!
wmf 10 hours ago [-]
CashApp
mmcclure 9 hours ago [-]
Square is still a much, much bigger portion of the business than CashApp.
Square’s ecosystem is expected to contribute $1.77 billion, while Cash App is expected to provide $58.3 million to transaction revenues.
i_love_cookies 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
varjag 10 hours ago [-]
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.
just-the-wrk 9 hours ago [-]
recently there has been a consistent drip of layoffs each day. they kind of chose all of the options
redwood 7 hours ago [-]
I like how it's posted to a twitter URL.
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
Bluescreenbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
Translation: we’re hemorrhaging money and need to cut costs. AI is just a smokescreen
Trasmatta 8 hours ago [-]
What is it with tech execs and not using capital letters? It's bizarre. Especially in a letter about layoffs.
mempko 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jiveturkey 7 hours ago [-]
why doesn't HN rewrite this to the canonical x.com hostname?
retinaros 9 hours ago [-]
he is worse than musk ever been. hiding behind ai
jwilber 8 hours ago [-]
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%!
jlarocco 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine being laid off by somebody who doesn't understand capital letters.
jcgrillo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
triceratops 10 hours ago [-]
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.
peanuty1 10 hours ago [-]
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.
happyopossum 9 hours ago [-]
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.
peanuty1 10 hours ago [-]
They're going from over 10k employees to just under 6k. So more than 40%.
triceratops 10 hours ago [-]
Ah yeah, that's fair. The post itself says "nearly half".
citbl 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JamesSwift 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jcdavis 10 hours ago [-]
Its an extremely annoying trend among a subset of the tech industry who think it makes them cool
zzrrt 9 hours ago [-]
Is there some reason your lack of apostrophe and period is supposed to be less annoying than their lack of capitalization?
jaccola 9 hours ago [-]
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..
jcims 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mlsu 10 hours ago [-]
uwu i'm a smol bean
also you're fired
ssnistfajen 10 hours ago [-]
It was a 100% intentional act. These people simply don't care and they want that be known. It's in their ego.
Legend2440 10 hours ago [-]
There is no good way to announce layoffs.
No matter what he wrote, it was going to be insulting.
koyote 9 hours ago [-]
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...
beachtaxidriver 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'm with you.
chasebank 9 hours ago [-]
I write most of my emails purposely misspelling words / lacking proper capitalization so the recipient knows it wasn't written with ai. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
objektif 6 hours ago [-]
Will Randian tech bros start calling for socialism soon? Inshallah.
daxfohl 10 hours ago [-]
Vibe CEOing.
operatingthetan 9 hours ago [-]
Dorsey practically invented it.
irenetusuq 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cboyardee 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zombiwoof 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throwback_dev 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
simianwords 9 hours ago [-]
AI comment
kace91 9 hours ago [-]
Obviously so, yeah. Astroturfing? Or is there any other reason why this is becoming so common in HN?
galkk 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not a native speaker. Besides dash, what is the sign that it's AI?
kace91 8 hours ago [-]
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.
gnatman 9 hours ago [-]
Karma farming to frontpage more AI news and startups?
aoyama1chome 9 hours ago [-]
Massaging sentiment
verdverm 9 hours ago [-]
Claw and people who haven't realized ns;nt
9 hours ago [-]
rvz 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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?
JumpCrisscross 10 hours 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.
palmotea 10 hours 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.
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.
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.
If you look at the numbers, this doesn’t resemble a company cutting because it’s in trouble. Block is profitable, gross profit has been growing double-digits year over year, and they’re guiding roughly ~18% gross profit growth into 2026 with strong expected expansion in adjusted operating income and EPS. That’s not a balance-sheet emergency.
You can argue they overhired in 2020–2022 and are normalizing. That’s plausible. But the financials don’t suggest a company scrambling to survive. Cutting that aggressively while guiding strong forward growth is unusual if the only goal were short-term margin repair.
So while “it’s AI” can sound like PR, the numbers at least make it credible that this is a structural efficiency move rather than a distress signal.
I'm not 100% convinced it means they gave up and are trying to cash out. It could also be that they just struggled to integrate all the people in a meaningful way, even if they're all really good. Having grown a company from a hand full of people to 250, I more than once fantasized about going back down to ~100. Scaling companies well is hard. 10k, I can't even imagine.
And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.
The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.
Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.
That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.
Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.
If you want to be a profit center, be one.
When the body is in danger of dying should it stop healing the fingernails or the brain?
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.
I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.
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.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
---
IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
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
It didn't.
Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.
I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.
Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.
Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.
Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.
It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.
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.
Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.
If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.
I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.
It 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.
That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.
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.
Twitter at the same time removed features to have fewer things to support. And didn't implement anything new (or really fix much) for ages. It's not the same service that was standing afterwards. And the "still standing" ignores the part where they started serving empty timelines, repeated messages from broken paging, broke 2fa for days, messed up whole continent access, etc. etc. They survived (and still had fewer problems than I expected), but it wasn't smooth at all - hardly a success too.
Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant 1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against 2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers 3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship 4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies
That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.
Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.
Most customers that matter to a business don't churn due to subpar user experience - discounting, roadmap, and dedicating a subset of engineering staff to handle bugs originating from a handful of the most important accounts is enough to prevent churn.
That said, this advice only really holds in the US (and that too in the major tech hubs). If you work in Western Europe you're shit out of luck as a SWE - management culture there just doesn't give a shit about software, because for most Western European businesses software is a cost center, not a revenue generator.
I 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.
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.
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
> 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 agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a large cut that can happen, but Musk explicitly mentions how his plan was always to "over fire" and rehire later. Clearly 60% was too far, and he overestimated his charisma to get people back.
It'd be a stretch to call Twitter a "well oiled machine", but clearly these moves proceeded to chug the gears down to a near halt. It hasn't seen a major collapse only because Musk is playing Hollywood accounting with all his businesses these days.
>1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.
>We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
Waiting to hear on job apps gives plenty of time to vent, though.
I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
I'm not agreeing with Musk - his personal brand is toxic and destroyed X/Twitter's fairly healthy ad revenue machine. That said he was right to highlight that X/Twitter was extremely overstaffed, and it was his mass layoff that showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
> I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.
Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media (the M in TMT), especially given the overlap with VFX.
As such, being close to where much of the business of media/entertainment exists is the best for your career - LA, NYC, ATL, SeaTac, and ATX, but not the Bay.
> I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
Yep. But if you are in the gaming industry, it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
"maintain" is a strong word here. You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.
Too bad the executives figured out that secret and decided they wanted to tread for a while.
>Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media
Fair enough. I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money. It's a weird overlap because the specialization and rigor needed here is still above a lot of more traditional tech domains. But ultimately the boom/bust cycle reflects much closer to Hollywood than Silicon Valley.
>it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
Not this time around, sadly. But that's my new 5 year plan when things stabilize. Use time after work to lay the groundwork for my own game. Whenever the next slump/crash is after this, I want to have something independent of these coporations to stand on.
The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.
Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.
If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.
> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money
Somewhat.
A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).
The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.
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.
Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!
It doesn't matter if AI is effective at reducing head count, it only matters that decision makers believe it will! If they go on twitter and see "SWE is dead" "4th industrial revolution is here" ect ect, they will eventually fall for the psyop and give half of their payroll to an AI company (or someone claiming they can do this)..
It will all backfire, probably, but in the meantime 400k SWEs have been laid off in the last 16 months while profits and equities are at all time highs. You can try to say its not AI, but I really think that's cope.
Go have lunch with a C-suite / decision maker in tech, they won't shut up about how all the jobs are going to be bots in the near future (and how rich it will make them). They are sincerly stupid but until then lives/families are going to get crushed and Dalio and Altman or similar people are going to continue to convince these people to give your salary to them..
Props to block for letting people keep their devices, and helping people out, its more than most companies but this absolutely has to do with AI BS. They've been itching to cut human labor out of the equation since slavery was crushed. They yearn for labor that doesn't demand a paycheck (slaves).
It's not cope. The math just isn't mathing. the efficiencies advertiesed don't match the layoff proportions. The earning call employment counts don't match with the idea that they are "downsizing" as a company (meanwhile, what semblence of truth we have left in the job numbers DO suggest that we lost a lot of white collar jobs in 2024/5). The output error of deployed products don't match the sentiment that AI is leading to equal/higher quality software. The volume of litigation doesn't match this sentiment that "AI is here to stay".
This is less about whatever I personally think of AI (and especially its future) and more acknowledging that this is simply an irrational market. Yes, the market can indeed remain irrational longer than I can stay solvent. But that irrationality also has a time limit. I'm sure people in 1928 can point to how high its stocks were too.
This buys them time psyop everyone into believing that AI actually does make things easier, this includes convincing labor also. So when they go to hire everyone back in 18 months, or at least a percentage of them they can say well [insert job that required computer i/o] actually doesn't require as much skill as before (whether it does or not) so your salary is going to be 3/5ths of what it used to be, and if you don't accept there's a huge supply of desperate people. Its literally the exact same targeted operation that was pulled on factory workers in the mid to late 20th century.
The efficiencies will be gained in lower labor costs going forward, not actual productivity gains or better software.. They care about the quality of the work produced as long as they have houses in Vail/Aspen and a spot in the Bahamas..
Certain industries where quality matters, may survive on merit like medical equipment manufacturers or aviation... but will it, look at Boeing..
The ruling class is our enemy and we better start acting like that. We are going to need our generations French Revolution soon.
If we don't take this seriously, and see it for what it is, they are going to give us their own version of a war to fight, but it will be to accumulate resources for them overseas. Just like in the 20s young men and women will be so poor they'll do anything, they'll beg for a war. We need to make sure they don't channel that energy away from them, because they're going to get us to try the working class to go fight on their behalf in EU, MENA, and the Pacific again. It's the same playbook. I'll bet my last dollar on it.
On the bright(?) side: traditional propaganda is absolutely abysmal for the youth these days. If they try to pull off this kind of recruitment, I see many Gen Z/Alpha deserting or outright choosing arrest. You can't screw over a man their entire life and expect them to want to fight and die for their country.
They've basically developed mind control algorithms that live on Instagram, its not that hard to steer culture in a certain direction.
While I agree with you for the most part about the youth. I hope so. I also see a decent amount of Gen Z that glorify things like looxsmaxxing, christain nationalism, eugenics. They are actually being programmed to like Nazism/fascism aesthetics but discarding the label at the same time. You'll see them behave like racial/national supremacists while at the same time they'd be extremely offended if you called fascist or racist.
I predict we will have a false flag attack, probably with drones who's origins are impossible to track, but only after everyone has had a decent period of financial instability. Obama produced a movie about this very kind of attack lol.
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.
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.
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.
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.
I don’t get demoralized at all. I’ve had 10 jobs in 30 years. When a company decides or I decide that the deal of they give me money and I give them work doesn’t work for one of us - I move on.
And I found a job quickly with multiple offers after being Amazoned in 2023 and again in 2024
But the good news is the mentality helps me keep costs under control. I'm nowhere near real earners in tech at only 200k, but I have two littles so haven't considered moving until they get a bit older because I'm fully remote and the flexibility with daycare sickness is helpful.
In my niche - customer facing + strategy + implementations hands on keyboard cloud/app dev consulting and every project I’ve had over the past year and half has involved integrating with LLM - my resume never gets ignored by companies looking for full time consultants not bragging I am old and experienced.
But my niche is just that a niche. “Cloud architects” who spend time doing migrations and infrastructure babysitting are far more in demand since AWS throws money at 3rd party partners for it than software developers who know AWS and can lead consulting projects
I’m very concerned about not being able to find a job in this market. It wasn’t this bad in 2000 in second tier cities as an enterprise dev working for profitable companies
And to your other point, I’m also just over $200k. But our kids (my step sons ) are “taxpayers” and fully launched and my wife and I moved to a condo 1/3 the size of our old house in state tax free Florida in 2022. Our fixed expenses are 35% of my gross. My wife has been retired since 2020 since she was 44. Push comes to shove, I could take a job making $135K (only a little less than I was making in Atlanta before 2020 and my pivot to consulting) and be fine - just wouldn’t be saving much.
I'm hoping the same for myself, but hopefully at some point in the future I at least try to go for something new. I'm torn between the status quo of the cushy role I have now and the feeling that I've never accomplished anything noteworthy. But until the kids grow a bit more I think I'll remain stationary but try to enhance my skills when possible. I'm also just starting llm integration on a project where we'll be implementing mcp for agents with google-adk. Between that, vertex ai services, etc. it seems mostly like gluing things together more than actual innovation.
But times are different now. The market isn’t what it was and it’s even worse when you want to stay remote. I live in a tourist area (central Florida), there are very few even enterprise dev jobs in the area. I’m hoping I can stay at my current job long term. I’ve never craved longevity at a job like I do now. I actually like this company. The only other two I liked as much were startups - one went out of business and I left the other when a remote job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020
Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.
Unionize.
Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.
Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
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.
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.
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.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".
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…
And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.
There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.
It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.
The US healthcare system is well and truly f'd, but I think 98% of these issue are government and society policy issues. If anything, I see so many companies trying to take advantage of the complete dysfunction in the US healthcare system to be yet another middlemen siphoning money from systemwide inefficiencies.
My primary point is that poor health outcomes in the US (fully admit my views are US-centric given my experience and knowledge) have nothing to do with a lack of technology and everything to do with structural systems issues rooted in government policies.
I'm a big fan of Dr. Jessica Knurick, who publishes at length about many of the systems that cause and contribute to population-wide poor health in the US. Here's one article taking about food systems and nutrition: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/the-food-sy... .
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.
We can all read stock market charts - the business isn't doing well.
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.
I can make a lot of revenue selling $100 bills for $10. I'm not sure it'd "pan out".
[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...
Schwab's accounts are backed by Chase. Zelle comes along for the ride.
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
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.
No data points yet, except now this one.
These are not mutually exclusive. How does making my “own [work life] easier” not translate into “work more efficiently.”
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.
* 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.
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.
That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.
There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?
> Owning the decision
Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.
> respecting the people that got you there
There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.
> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.
And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
But my point was that what was presented was a false dichotomy and that framing it as such is disingenuous to employees receiving those comms.
Or maybe like the US employer that gave everyone at the company a flat wage?
“Yall gonna get money and most yall fired. My bad woops”
@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?
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.".
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.
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.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
This seems … wrong.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
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.
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.
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 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.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
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.
Need to tell more recruiters.
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.
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
https://x.com/perborgen/status/2025890393166917857
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
https://trueup.io/job-trend
this tracker shows continuous improvement since 2023
What's not shown in a graph of job postings is the demand side. With all the layoffs, out of work college grads, people staying put in jobs they are unhappy with, etc., I'd wager that demand per job is still at a historically high level compared to what we have been accustomed to
To avoid laying them off in next year's job market.
Dripping a 10% cut every year for the next four years when you *know* that you're going to do it is cowardice.
For all Block knows, AI for coding kind of plateaus where it is now and there is a huge boom in software engineer hiring taking advantage of the new tech to produce even more/better features.
“General and administrative expenses increased by $68.1m ... The increase was primarily driven by … an in-person company event held in Q3 2025”
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.
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.
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
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...
Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."
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.
/s
Maybe it’s just my background, but I’m starting to feel that a lot of people in the tech industry have never learned empathy.
I see you haven't visited the absolute delight that is team blind or you would have figured this out already.
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.
The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.
Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.
These are not incompatible realities.
I would be willing to accept the statement that corporate revenues increasing and consumer spending decreasing are incompatible realities.
But it’s feasible to think the following occurs:
- labor income falls
- consumer spending drops
- corporate revenues drop
- corporate profits moderately increase because profit margins get much higher
- government deficit continues (which, from an accounting perspective, means other accounts are in surplus, potentially US corporations)
I’m not saying I strongly predict the above, necessarily! I just don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a conceivable reality.
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
Edit P.S. Should the individuals who don’t receive a job from a bailed out company get proportional tax refund?
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).
Humans are violent, self-centered tribalists. What species are you referring to? Not homo sapiens.
i personally want products i purchase to be cheaper and i don't want to be paying for products that are costly simply because they are hiring people for "human wellbeing".
i would rather people work in productive places than just exist in a company for some reason.
two options
- the 4000 employees can still be employed in block - thats around $600,000,000 that goes into literally no value and this is price borne by us consumers
- or the 4000 employees get fired and work in different companies that actually require them so that we as consumers can actually buy more products
by choosing option 1, you not only accept that as consumers we pay more for the product, but also miss out on other valuable work the 4000 employees can do. no good economy runs this way.
I dispute that this is a fact. Maybe within a small group, but startups shouldn't be possible if masses of more cooperating people led to better outcomes. A large company should always win there and that does not happen.
> What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
We don't come anywhere close to this on a global scale. Most countries aren't this way on a national scale.
Stability means removal of volatility, which means to stay stable they end up becoming more generalised, rather than the laser focus a small team like a startup can have. That laser focus can work out when applied to the right problem at the right time, but is very much not a guarantee.
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
Block has never really made a real profit. These layoffs are basically saying the company is no longer in moonshot mode and it’s now in the extraction phase of whatever it has, which means increase prices for whatever it sells and decrease expenses, i.e. payroll.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XYZ/block/net-inco...
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.
Its funny how for him, he is enriched by this option as the stock price rises, and its couched in words like responsibility. I was taught when I failed at something that responsibility meant making amends to the people wronged. His reputation taking a hit doesn't come even close to the loss of 4000 people's livelihoods - he will not lose one of his presumably many houses.
> tacit mea culpa
This is the opposite of a mea culpa, this is saying there is no choice and the decision is inevitable, and he is only allowed (by the very framework he constructed) to do it fast or slow.
Put another way: if both parties agree on a shorter or longer notice period, I wouldn't expect that to affect any potential severance package. It's just the notice period.
We're talking about worker's comp here. In this thread specifically, the UK is brought up as having generally "better" severance packages. But that's only half the story if you count things which the workers pay the companies when they're the ones quitting.
I worked in the UK, I've had to "pay" for that notice period by hanging around where I didn't want to. It's the other side of the coin which somehow doesn't get mentioned when people bring up Europe as somehow having better employee protections. They might, but notice periods ain't that.
If I had to put as much money into a company's retirement as they put in mine, I wouldn't turn around when I retire and say, wow, great comp package. No: this was a symmetrical deal we made, this time it's working out for me--in a parallel universe it's working out for you; it's a wash.
Severance packages are comp. Notice periods are just properties of the contract. They're not a severance package.
I find this an important distinction because it lets companies pull the wool over your eyes by pretending they're being generous, when really they're just paying you the exact same thing you'd have to pay them were you the one quitting. That's not a package, that's just salary.
Working my notice period has never be even an issue for me. It gives me an opportunity to wrap up projects, say goodbye to colleagues, etc. It's usually fairly light work as well, you're not taking on new responsibilities. I didn't even realise it could be otherwise.
The reason I'm saying it's part of the redundancy package is because (some?) companies will pay off your notice period without you having to actually work it. I've taken voluntary redundancy only once, and I was told that I would stop working at the end of the month, but I was still paid my full 3 months of notice (in addition to the tax-free redundancy payout). That was not part of the initial contract.
Jack should fire himself if performance was the criteria. Like you said he has lead his company to 75% down over the last 5 years.
He owns 1 million Class A shares and 79.7%(!!!) of Block's Class B shares: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/0cb664c...
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)
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?
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.
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.
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
Is the site functional? Sure, I guess. I think the amount of traffic shrinking also has something to do with the viability with fewer engineers
The recommendation algorithm they implement is a choice they make, it is not that if they had more engineers they would deploy a “better” one.
Every recommendation algorithm is, in the end, “bad” in some way.
The TikTok algorithm was considered the non plus ultra among recommendation algos; now you cannot watch a video of a cat on TikTok for more than 5 seconds that the next 50 videos they serve you are of cats.
The Netflix recommendation algorithm has not shown something to me that I considered hidden but interesting in years. They just show you whatever they want to push, mostly (I worked there).
You buy a pan to cook steaks on Amazon and, for some reason, the algorithm recommends to buy it along with stroboscopic lights.
If that were the case, it would also be easy to hire hundreds more. With the confusing mix of X.ai, Grok, and SpaceX, I don't think anyone would notice.
X seems to be much more relevant to social and political debate than any other social media platform, which, despite a declining user base, makes it an extremely valuable tool for Musk and his circle.
It may seem like I'm defending or supporting Musk, but that's not my point. What I can say is that Musk made a huge bet when he substantially, even dramatically, reduced X's workforce, and I think he won that particular bet.
It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.
I remember that for years people complained about DMs in Twitter being “broken” and without any search function.
The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
Do you have a portfolio or something you can share?
Someone can have negative character traits and we don’t have to pretend they are no longer skilled.
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.
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.
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.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
100% lower case is 100% a choice.
Thanks jack dorsey, for letting us know you're that sort of person. At least he refers to himself that way too, although he should sign off with: jack off.
Someone needs to have this conversation with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM
It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.
Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.
I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.
This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.
Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.
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.
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.
Once projects get bigger they need more devs and also move slower.
Put a team of 1-3 devs on MS Word and see how fast they move...
[Full credits to wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division (The company behind what's gonna be essentially StarOffice/Later OpenOffice/Libreoffice given Libreoffice is a fork of OpenOffice)
Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Their number of employees by the late 1997/1990's from the wiki article suggests 170. They/StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s
There aren't many true MSword alternatives for what its worth but I found a gnome project which is interesting from alternativeto https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/AbiWord/-/project_members
There seem to be 5 main members (I am not counting the Gitlab Admin and administrator)
Interestingly, If I remember correctly, I saw Alexandar Franke in here, I have actually talked to alexandar franke a long time ago on matrix back when I used to use fractal. It was definitely a fun surprise to see him in this project as well.
Aside from that, I think the problem with MS word to me feels like it tried to copy the features of previous word processors including quirks and now anything which wants to be MS word competitor is sometimes forced to copy these quirks as well which to me feels like the stressful cause for the reason why we don't see too many new approaches within this space (in my limited opinion)
Also AbiWord is dead, sadly.
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.e. we finally decided to audit head count from post covid-era.
> paired with smaller and flatter teams
i.e. management was axed
I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool.
How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?
But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just paying people to sit around, or even worse, pretend they're busy.
This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best
Presumably, because some of these areas are cost centers versus profit generating.
we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Claiming than a small group with AI can accomplish more than a large group with AI doesn’t make sense.
More likely the company doesn’t have enough work for the large group.
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”.
Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
Yes, which is why it’s not helpful to bring up a completely different economic system with an unfamiliar culture.
Why are you saying this in the next sentence:
> yet we live longer and with higher quality of life
Sure, we agree there. It’s not like needing profitability is a weird quirk of the American system. I am not criticizing the layoffs, but the layoffs while mentioning business is booming and they have no reasons forcing their hand.
I’m curious about your point of view, would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude? Firing half the workers while agreeing that there is no pressure to let anyone go looks good to you?
I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me. I think we are in business relationship where both sides win. If circumstances change I understand I may need to find a new job.
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.
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.
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.
?
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
They had to go through a process extensively justifying losses (mostly that certain jobs were no longer relevant as they were pre-digital workforce), negotiate with unions and offer voluntary leaving conditions.
The resulting offer was good enough that more workers applied to be fired than were necesssary. For context, the deal was basically to pay them 70% of their current salary from the dismissal moment until their retirement at 63.
They grew to 11000
Now they’re going to shrink to 6000
The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive
I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
and the best part is that when others follow, ZIRP will be back.
this is going to be a proper mess.
And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...
And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.
If your definition of success is 'let's keep the codebase running and make sure servers don't go bust' then yes twitter is doing great with fewer people
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.
did he suggest no difference in outcome in terms of profits?
Everything I said was based off of jack's post, as I quoted it. If you take issue with the non-specificity ot think he was being less than honest - take it up with jack.
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.
>>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
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I guess factory workers felt it when robots started appearing, and there are many other similar examples of tech eating entire classes of worker. Except we're so deep in this coding rabbit hole that I dunno where else we end up.
If all you know is code, where do you go?
If you don't use AI you'll fall behind. If you do, you're accelerating your own redundancy.
I wouldn't consider myself a champion for AI. If you read my comment history you'll see that. I don't preach its wonders or pretend that we're all happy-fluffy in this world of ours. I mostly write my own code, use AI for review and to handle the trivial boring bits. I do use AI to build random tools I'd never want to take time away from "real" work to build, like helper scripts, nice TUIs for manual processes, etc. I do recognise the irony though.
One thing I can say is that if we, as a collective of white collar workers gonna lose our jobs fast, then I wouldn’t fret much because it won’t be on me alone to fix it, it’ll be a large chunk of humanity’s problem. Revolutions and uprisings have ensued far less dire situations.
Sure, you can say that you won’t fret much but if you’re in a place without much social security, you’re not going to have a safety net. The revolution might not be in your benefit either, if there is one, which would only come when more people have their AI bubble popped.
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"?
These companies could spin up entirely new lines of business, but why? It's much better for someone else to start that business and hire the best people for it.
There is no reason why businesses must continue growing, or even existing - even if they are run well and profitably. The universe changes, and business come and go to align with that.
Their stock price has been flat for like 4 years and they have no advantage in this new AI world that would change that. These layoffs would have happened AI or not.
"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).
And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.
But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
To the extent you have successful products, it's because you have product managers and engineers and data scientists and depending on the product, integration/forward deployed staff. These should be the people with a view to how the product needs to meet the needs of future customers, the challenges faced by existing customers, and the technical components needed to get there. I'm not saying you encourage them to just spitball ideas from ignorance, I'm saying you solicit their expertise on the limits and needs of your products, systems, tools, processes, messaging etc.
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
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Now some here are about to experience a repeat of the years 2000 and 2008 put together.
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...
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
"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"?
It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
There’s proof of tech firms engaging in explicit collusion back in the 00’s.
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.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
Simple, 1000+ salaries > 10000 x100$/m Claude seats.
Nailed it
Um, no?
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
I wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of layoffs across the industry like we had in 2022.
Making it seem like there's only going to be one mass layoff round. There will be another one, you can be certain.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is a very interesting perspective, I haven't thought of it like that.
The people decreasing headcount are already behind the curve. They're thinking about how many people they need to run things instead of how many people they need to reinvent an industry.
I think in the (very) long run it will end up being for the best. This will force us lowly serfs to grow beyond our wage-labor mindset and leverage this force multiplier for ourselves.
AI lets those with capital get rid of labor, but by the same token(s ;-)) labor can now achieve outsize results without capital!
It is going to be very uncomfortable, but evolution always is.
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.
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.
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”
Jesus.. why do CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts....! Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.
Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.
"Your call is very important to us."
"We take security very seriously."
PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
i love that he casts it as:
a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty.
b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an "honest" decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?
...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.
> 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?
That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place.
Literally on their homepage:
"Block builds technology for economic empowerment"
How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend started like 4-5 years ago.
But even if it was...I'm struggling to understand how "overhiring" is a bad thing for the actual workers who were overhired.
So too many people got paid massive big tech salaries for the last 5 years. How horrible for them? They were robbed of...the opportunity to be paid half as much money working in a non-tech job?
It's bad for inflation in the economy broadly since it's money not being efficiently allocated, but for these 'overhired' people it was literally a life changing amount of money they're better off having had even if it ends now (with an extremely cushy 6 month severance I should add).
It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.
You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic.
They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels.
If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.
Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.
The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.
> While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.
IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...
But I guess we'll just have to defer to the AI experts at...the Financial Times...and their emotional vibes of the situation instead.
> The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.
That’s not evidence. That’s a belief. I’m not disagreeing they overhired, but this statement contains no evidence that reducing the size of the company like this is going to yield the same or greater profits.
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.
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
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.
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
Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.
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.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
Coming soon - 4000 new vibe coded agentic AI harnesses.
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.
World class software tinkerer, but no business running a public company.
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?"
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
Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...
2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?
The future rocks
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.
More information: getclera.com/block
Its 100% free
But, otherwise, I'm onboard with the principle.
holy moly
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
- 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
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.
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...
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Why would you ever choose the first?
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
> 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 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?
- 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?
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
With transfer you have 4k people looking and eligible for new role. With no H1B transfer, less people are looking for work and citizens and green card holders have higher chance to land roles in a few companies still hiring.
Besides if you are looking for work there is very little difference between foreigner on H1B taking the role and role being outsourced to India. Either way you do not have the job.
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.
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?
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
Any layoff that blames AI and doesn't address the fact that the company is saying it would prefer to make less, they are lying.
Rational actors should be pushing to grow when others are fearful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
All this paradox stuff is irrelevant if the constraint on human's ability to progress is imagination. LLMs wont help with that - the human still needs to have foresight and vision. Which frankly most lack.
I don't buy anything this weirdo says.
>in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
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.
For some reason he deliberately avoids using the word 'artificial' here.
Come on now, it's not going to be the only round.
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
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%!
EDIT: I guess if it comes with 300% raise I'd pause for a bit to think about it, but otherwise absolutely not.
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.
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..
also you're fired
No matter what he wrote, it was going to be insulting.
Maybe he should have had AI fix up the grammar/spelling for him...
“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.
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
Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.