We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode".
Either way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. "Necessity is the mother of invention." They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.
Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.
Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
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.
it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear "we're staffing up aggressively" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear "we're moving workloads to AI" the companies fire.
it's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.
> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.
Partially.
The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.
The second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this because most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.
And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Add to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.
That said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.
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IMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean and save for a rainy day.
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.
> 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.
Most of those were minor, temporary problems that didn't have much impact on casual end users. The app mostly continued working and so to other CEOs this was proof that tech companies could run much leaner. Sure there was some chaos but the basic concept wasn't entirely wrong. And it had long been an open secret in the industry that the majority of Twitter employees were worthless, only there to collect fat salaries and get free massages without doing any productive work.
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
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".
> And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.
Cultural differences. Things like "saving face" / not being able to admit a lack of knowledge in Asian cultures, Americans that need to be coddled (the higher up, the more dumbed down execs want information because they insist on micromanaging - they try to have their cake and eat it at the same time), Germans being blunt and direct to the point it offends Americans, Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff... if you just say, you hire a bunch of bodies somewhere else and expect that to work out, you end up screwed - and many did end up screwed. In both ways, by the way.
Output is good enough - much of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Broadcom, and other tech companies backbone infra or core IP is already implemented and owned by product and engineering teams in Poland and India or by foreign nationals in the US on work visas (eg. PyTorch). And if middle managers cannot manage to maintain output when faced with those with cultural differences, we'll fire them and hire people who can.
This is why you see the trope of "Indian C-Suite means layoffs and offshoring" - it's not the C-Suite that makes this decision, it's boards that decided to do so and thus hired an Indian origin C-Suite to operationalize that strategy. It's the same reason why Taiwanese Americans were over-represented in Hardware Engineering C-Suite roles 10-20 years ago when "China Shock" began in hardware industries.
It became easier to hire Jans and Jagmeets after a large number of SWEs and middle-managers in tech who were on visas were given the option to either be laid off or relocate to the old country and open a GCC during the initial COVID recession. And I may as well hire Pawel and Param as Product or Engineering Directors in MTV or SF and have them fly out to the Prague, Warsaw, Bangalore, or Hyderabad office every couple weeks.
> Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff...
That's Western Europe (think Germany, France).
Central and Eastern Europe (think Czechia, Poland, Romania) roll out the red carpet for us, and we pay 75th-90th percentile salaries in those markets (which usually ends up being the median in Atlanta or Dallas) 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.
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
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.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.
I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.
I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.
I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.
I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).
I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.
We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.
But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?
And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.
I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.
Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.
[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.
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.
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.
> layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure,
Look I don’t like layoffs and I don’t want to come off as an apologist. I’ve been laid off from a wildly profitable company and I get that pain.
But I think at some point we do need to be honest that businesses want to give up on failed projects, and the lazy ones will do that through layoffs because tech has so much churn anyways. It’s in vogue to blame AI for these things. I doubt most of these CxOs think actually that AI will transform their business in the next few years, and I question how many even care about applying pressure to employees.
I don’t want to come off as an apologist for bad corporate behavior, because I think it’s bad, but sometimes I think they’re just taking the easy way out on corporate messaging for a not-crazy decision (of ending failed or bloated projects). As you alluded to, “maintenance mode” for a business just doesn’t need as many employees. 40% at once seems high, I’ll concede though.
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.
Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.
Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.
To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.
It is a healthy mentality. After staying at my second job for too long - 9 years until 2008, I was uncompetitive in the job market and I didn’t have a network. I was 34 then. I said never again.
I don’t get demoralized at all. I’ve had 10 jobs in 30 years. When a company decides or I decide that the deal of they give me money and I give them work doesn’t work for one of us - I move on.
And I found a job quickly with multiple offers after being Amazoned in 2023 and again in 2024
> To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
So exactly what will the magic of unionization do when any company can hire developers from LatAm (much easier to deal with in the same time zone) that are good enough enterprise devs for half the price?
Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]
Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.
Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
Absolutely, most of this is private corporate duct tape over a lack of Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), Instant SEPA (Europe), etc [1]. “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” [2] In a US financial services market, Venmo and CashApp are unnecessary assuming you procure a deposit account from a bank or credit union with instant payment rails access [3] [4]. Even Schwab has access to Zelle, for example. You need not extend credit and have credit risk exposure for paper checks anymore as well as an issuer of a deposit account.
Transfer limits are selected by each network participant [1], based on their risk tolerance. Four years ago Zelle was moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume [2]. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits. Zelle is baked into each financial institution’s app, there is no stand alone app anymore (as of March 2025) [3]. If you don’t like the UX, switch banks or credit unions, they’re mostly interchangeable. There are thousands to pick from.
I move thousands of dollars a month with Zelle, so I know it’s possible. My credit union allows me $3k/day, $8k/month. Chase Bank had similar limits before I left them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence
@grok
We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.
I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
I'm a senior in NYC, considering changing jobs but haven't pulled the trigger. I've got a good amount of reachouts from finance recruiters and small-to-medium sized startups but haven't heard anything from the established players (admittedly I haven't been looking).
I got a number of finance recruiters reaching out then too but nothing stuck. I got a few interviews (even got to meet a few interesting characters like Martin Shkreli) but nothing panned out until my friend gave me a referral to my current gig.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
No, that's just the reality of the market right now. Software engineers are an extremely hot field, likely because everybody is trying to add AI to their products.
I'm being very picky with what I look at, which doesn't help, but yeah, it doesn't seem great. Maybe they're all in person gigs? Or is there some ageism? (There has always been some ageism in software)
Easier to hire consultants to add AI to do your software engineering for you than temporarily hire humans with needs and benefit costs to add AI to do your software engineering for you.
Just the current reality in SFBA. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats.
Not being obtuse, I even googled it, but I have no idea what SFBA is in this context. I'm assuming it's not to do with windsurfing in the San Francisco Bay Area or some kind of insulation. Could you elaborate?
They're just saying the job market is hot in the location of the S (San) F (Francisco) B (Bay) A (Area) it's not cryptic, I'll assume you had a brain fart here it happens.
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
For what it's worth I actually took "SFBA" and Googled it because I wasn't sure either. I've always heard of it referred to as SF or SV. Learn new stuff every day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.
Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
Well - if "we" refers to the original selfish gene (à la Dawkins), then yes - modern capitalism has manifested as an emergent property of the core evolutionary principle. I suppose you could say that about virtually anything however...
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
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.
I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
I know we have to balance inefficiency and optimal allocation of resources... but I agree it doesn't seem optimal for social wellbeing to remove people from their access to health and risking their ability to house and feed themselves without a financial need to do so (like Block going bankrupt).
I think we Humans can be both cooperative species and violent,self-centered tribalists species and definitely all the grey area between the two at the same time as well.
And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?
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.
exactly - end consumers like you and me will end up having to pay for their jobs indirectly.
i personally want products i purchase to be cheaper and i don't want to be paying for products that are costly simply because they are hiring people for "human wellbeing".
i would rather people work in productive places than just exist in a company for some reason.
more money for doing nothing? i don't want to live in a world like that. what part of this is not clear?
two options
- the 4000 employees can still be employed in block - thats around $600,000,000 that goes into literally no value and this is price borne by us consumers
- or the 4000 employees get fired and work in different companies that actually require them so that we as consumers can actually buy more products
by choosing option 1, you not only accept that as consumers we pay more for the product, but also miss out on other valuable work the 4000 employees can do. no good economy runs this way.
> with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating.
I dispute that this is a fact. Maybe within a small group, but startups shouldn't be possible if masses of more cooperating people led to better outcomes. A large company should always win there and that does not happen.
> What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
We don't come anywhere close to this on a global scale. Most countries aren't this way on a national scale.
Startups generally _don't_ end up with better outcomes. Large companies stay stable, startups are volatile and often end in failure.
Stability means removal of volatility, which means to stay stable they end up becoming more generalised, rather than the laser focus a small team like a startup can have. That laser focus can work out when applied to the right problem at the right time, but is very much not a guarantee.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole "the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI."
> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.
Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.
There are, but there are also a number of companies (including not-particularly-AI ones like Netflix and Oracle) that are above their ZIRP peak. I think it's hard to definitively say that this story is inconsistent with one explanation or the other.
Oracle is definitely an AI stock, as much as that's silly. Between being a cloud provider with GPUs, and investments in OpenAI, it's certainly part of the AI meme in the stock market, and possibly even a reasonable way to get some AI exposure if that's what you want to invest in.
Anyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.
I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.
The recommendation algorithm they implement is a choice they make, it is not that if they had more engineers they would deploy a “better” one.
Every recommendation algorithm is, in the end, “bad” in some way.
The TikTok algorithm was considered the non plus ultra among recommendation algos; now you cannot watch a video of a cat on TikTok for more than 5 seconds that the next 50 videos they serve you are of cats.
The Netflix recommendation algorithm has not shown something to me that I considered hidden but interesting in years. They just show you whatever they want to push, mostly (I worked there).
You buy a pan to cook steaks on Amazon and, for some reason, the algorithm recommends to buy it along with stroboscopic lights.
I didn't say they were all working on the algorithm, there were a lot of people working in various content-related jobs: moderation, algorithm, partnership management with content creators, ad sales, and more
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
This is one way of making an all-in bet on AI.
>we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
Well that's interesting, wonder if we'll actually get a proper accounting of which departments take which cuts.
Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.
If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.
If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.
> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.
Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
I found this an interesting question and did some research out of curiosity
[Full credits to wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division (The company behind what's gonna be essentially StarOffice/Later OpenOffice/Libreoffice given Libreoffice is a fork of OpenOffice)
Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Their number of employees by the late 1997/1990's from the wiki article suggests
170. They/StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s
There seem to be 5 main members (I am not counting the Gitlab Admin and administrator)
Interestingly, If I remember correctly, I saw Alexandar Franke in here, I have actually talked to alexandar franke a long time ago on matrix back when I used to use fractal. It was definitely a fun surprise to see him in this project as well.
Aside from that, I think the problem with MS word to me feels like it tried to copy the features of previous word processors including quirks and now anything which wants to be MS word competitor is sometimes forced to copy these quirks as well which to me feels like the stressful cause for the reason why we don't see too many new approaches within this space (in my limited opinion)
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).
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.
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.
These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?
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.
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.
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.
This makes it make way more sense. That is a huge amount of growth really fast. I've worked in those companies, it's really hard on the work culture and organization when things grow that quickly.
I think the potential for productivity is there with AI, but this size of a cut based on speculation made no sense. This is actually reasonable in this light and is probably for the best. I'll be curious to see if any employees, former or otherwise talk about it
I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.
i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody
Yes absolutely. Text casing is part of communication, by skipping it an author is saying: "I'm going to prioritise my preferences and making a statement above your understanding and clarity". The bigger the audience the more negative impact it has, and the more entitled the author appears.
Along the same lines though, txt spk to friends is a) far lower impact with the smaller audience, and b) communicates other factors such as what device you're on or how close you are to someone, so this is not me just hating on bad grammar.
I don’t think we’ll ever return to the glory days (2007-2023). Software engineering in the next few years will become as cool as accounting or HR (as in not cool at all). Just a generic white collar profession like it was maybe in the 80s.
it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
>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”.
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
>If the business is not able to be profitable everyone is screwed.
Sure, we agree there. It’s not like needing profitability is a weird quirk of the American system. I am not criticizing the layoffs, but the layoffs while mentioning business is booming and they have no reasons forcing their hand.
I’m curious about your point of view, would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude? Firing half the workers while agreeing that there is no pressure to let anyone go looks good to you?
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.
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
But in your country (Spain), Telefónica de España laid off 3649 workers in Dec 2023 (about 40% of that unit) despite growing net income by 17% that year.
Nice googling, but that’s just an example that proves my point.
They had to go through a process extensively justifying losses (mostly that certain jobs were no longer relevant as they were pre-digital workforce), negotiate with unions and offer voluntary leaving conditions.
The resulting offer was good enough that more workers applied to be fired than were necesssary. For context, the deal was basically to pay them 70% of their current salary from the dismissal moment until their retirement at 63.
spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. maybe you are ignoring important tradeoffs and are a little too confident about your own opinion on what it means to "manage your company just fine"
Maybe, or maybe you’re about to find out what happens to the consumer side when a large percentage of companies decide they no longer need half their workforce judging on linkedin vibes.
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
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".
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.
Yeah I was thinking the same. Pretty generous severance but I'd be pissed if I was fired by someone who can't even be bothered to press shift. Probably thinks it makes him cool and edgy.
> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.
He did get rid of himself as Twitter’s CEO. He founded Block and Bluesky which employ thousands of people, instead of enjoying the fortune of an ex-CEO. Maybe you should be open minded a little bit?
That's called quiting for better opportunities. I doubt the thousands who contributed to block's success will all land on their feet. I'm open ended I'm not a CEO forced to make those contradictory decisions.
Everything I said was based off of jack's post, as I quoted it. If you take issue with the non-specificity ot think he was being less than honest - take it up with jack.
what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not
I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
Yeah, if this is going to be a nuclear bomb for software developers, imagine what it's going to be like for people in customer service, account managers, etc.
Sucks for the people to lose their jobs, but probably the most honest message you’ll ever see.
What I don’t understand is why. There’s a natural churn at each company. Of course it’s not 40%, but probably 4-5% per year, but I doubt the company freezes hiring and they are not pressured to do this.
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see
Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.
"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
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.
Why make others misfortune a platform for ego expression? Why not doing things elegant, quiet, keep it in-house? Because misery of others drives stock prices up! It's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
>Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount. The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.
And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.
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...
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.
> 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...
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.
What are the odds this is actually due to overhiring during the pandemic? From what I know, that was the principle reason for the Amazon layoffs. Would love to be corrected if I'm misremembering.
People keep saying it’s pandemic over hiring, but it should be called ZIRP hiring. With the cost of money almost 4x what it used to be, companies have to deliver now, not just coast on promises of growth and success that may never materialize. Have to sing for that supper.
I don't understand anyone who says layoffs are due to improvements in AI tooling.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free!
Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards?
Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "continuing to support more customers" and has "improving profitability"?
Now imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly an unbounded number of people appear on the job market who are ready to work for your company at a 5% the cost of your previous employees. Best of all, they become more competent and less expensive over time. You can't yet fire your entire original roster all at once since they need to teach the new hires the specifics of the job, but after that's done, what do you need them for?
A fundamental attribute of capitalism is that labor costs are a regrettable cost center, and any reduction in labor costs without a resulting loss in profit/perceived productivity is a big win. AI is a big win for capitalists, and not so much for anyone who is now suddenly "made redundant". And since we treat shareholder value as sacred and inviolate, too bad for workers who lose their job in this deal.
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad
this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.
If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.
LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
I agree if they weren’t simultaneously claiming to be a successful growing company.
> they should have had 12,000 to begin with
This is how successful growing companies work. They hire as many people as they can afford. Those people bring in more money to hire more people, and repeat.
A successful growing company has more opportunity than resources.
Reducing resources while also claiming to have un-captured opportunity makes no sense
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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
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.
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
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
I recognize that my experience may not be typical, but I spend the vast majority of my development time improving the quality of the systems I work on, in response to specific customer demands for it. The last time I had multiple consecutive weeks of greenfield development was in 2021.
>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.
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
If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?
Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?
Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.
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"?
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 ?
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. :/
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”.
"we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."
I wanted to come back to this to add that it's highly disrespectful to make a post/write a letter laying off 40% of your company and not bother to capitalize words properly.
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
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.
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?
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.
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business
then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Dorsey is in AI psychosis. He required every employee to send him an email weekly which then he had summarized by AI because of course he aint reading it himself.
Even in "AI psychosis" I don't see how firing people is a logical response to advances in AI.
If AI tools really are a significant multiplier to productivity, companies should be hiring more people to take advantage of that multiplier.
If you suddenly have the ability to get more output per dollar spent, a healthy business should respond by spending more dollars, not spending less to keep output the same.
because demand is weak and the product markets are saturated. there are dimishing returns to increasing investment. so these companies switch to managing their earnings ratio. if you cant grow revenue, then cut costs.
Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?
- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?
- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
It is hard to tell what this company does, but it seems to be involved in bitcoin. Coincidentally we have had a huge drop in bitcoin in the last months.
They own Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Jay Z's music streaming service Tidal. They make a decent amount of money from people buying and selling Bitcoin on Cash App but most of their revenue is not related to Bitcoin.
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.
Square point of sale payment processing for businesses, Afterpay BNPL, and then the consumer side CashApp business. And Tidal Music streaming for some reason.
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.
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.
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
That significantly more generous than the 12-16 week severance packages being doled out by big tech during the great layoffs of 2022-2023 if I remember correctly.
In 2023 Google gave 16 weeks plus 2 for every year of tenure, so not significantly less (and more if your tenure was >5 years), plus google also vested stock for entirety of the 16+ weeks.
Honestly the whole Silicon Valley shtick is becoming old. The fake positivity, the quirky writing style, the "I think the most important quality is sticktuitiveness" linkedin-esque bullshit. Not to mention the cargo-cult that is so obvious in every GPT-wrapper startup.
This was mostly born out of counter signalling the businesses that valued serious people over competent people in the 20th century.
But, like with all things, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. I believe the next wave of tech countersignalling will be people who actually do take themselves seriously, maybe even dress in suits, etc..
I noticed that as well and it oddly made me sit for a minute to think about it. I ended up deciding that it landed a bit more 'real' and unfiltered. Could be interpreted many ways. Nobody knows the actual why but (possibly) Jack.
> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.
I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.
>> * this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff*
> Given it’s an ambiguous term, sure. But I don’t think a better collaborative AI is what anyone imagined when we said AGI years ago.
He scare-quoted AGI. I think what he means is we won't experience AGI as some kind of utopia of abundance (which is how it is hyped to us), we will experience as massive and brutal layoffs.
Actual AGI will be worse. If Block had that, Dorsey wouldn't be laying off 40%, he'd probably lay off 80% or more.
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.
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.
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 and save for a rainy day.
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.
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.
If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one
That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.
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".
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 the median in Atlanta or Dallas) 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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
https://trueup.io/job-trend
this tracker shows continuous improvement since 2023
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”
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
Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.
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...
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
Or perhaps public doesn’t owe corporates bailouts when push comes to shove?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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"?
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
We're about to see a lot of public SAAS companies do the same and rebrand as "AI" first
I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.
did he suggest no difference in outcome in terms of profits?
Everything I said was based off of jack's post, as I quoted it. If you take issue with the non-specificity ot think he was being less than honest - take it up with jack.
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
>And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.
[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.
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!
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.
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...
https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Now some here are about to experience a repeat of the years 2000 and 2008 put together.
"Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad?"
There’s proof of tech firms engaging in explicit collusion back in the 00’s.
Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free!
Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards?
Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "continuing to support more customers" and has "improving profitability"?
It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
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
Nailed it
Um, no?
If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
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.
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.
Sounds like the perfect setup to start your own company!
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 wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of layoffs across the industry like we had in 2022.
I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?
I think this is pretty agreeable, spanning layoffs into a monthly/quarterly "Hunger Games" is very damaging to employee morale.
- 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
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...
I expect to start hearing about more big riffs soon. :/
The future rocks
2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?
holy moly
Might be a small thing (no pun intended), but it irks me.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
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?
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.
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
my mentor was on the chopping block too.
block btw now makes most of its money on bitcoin transactions not software
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
I don't buy anything this weirdo says.
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
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.
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.