alt Hacker NewsLayoffs at Block
Comments
well, I'd like to join smaller flatter teams...
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.
Come on now, it's not going to be the only round.
This guy really hates capital letters
I like how it's posted to a twitter URL.
Lack of caps really grinds on you by the end.
Anyway not unexpected.
Is this it? Is he trying to pop the AI bubble?
“Why is there no loyalty to the company anymore?!!”
Why is this statement in all lowercase? Is this a tech bro thing I'm unaware of?
What is it with tech execs and not using capital letters? It's bizarre. Especially in a letter about layoffs.
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.
Translation from a long diatribe: we see that devs using AI are way more productive so we can save some money here for shareholders, hence 40% of you are laid off.
Software developer in general are probably looking for some fucked up situation here.
Translation: we’re hemorrhaging money and need to cut costs. AI is just a smokescreen
why doesn't HN rewrite this to the canonical x.com hostname?
he is worse than musk ever been. hiding behind ai
Some choice Jack Dorsey quotes:
From New Yorker profile: “His goal… is… by making information freer, he hopes to make the world fairer, kinder, and nicer.”
Where he also writes, “I definitely feel the most fundamental issue is economic equality.”
But hey, the stock is up 25%!
Imagine being laid off by somebody who doesn't understand capital letters.
Imagine not being laid off in this situation.. I'd demand to be.
EDIT: I guess if it comes with 300% raise I'd pause for a bit to think about it, but otherwise absolutely not.
The headline numbers:
They're cutting 40% (edit: the post actually says "nearly half") of the workforce (4k out of 10k). That's huge.
The severance is 20 weeks of pay + 1 week per year of tenure, stock vesting through May, 6 months of healthcare, their corporate devices, and $5k cash.
Will Randian tech bros start calling for socialism soon? Inshallah.
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The framing of these layoffs as "AI-driven efficiency" is worth examining through the lens of Goodhart's Law. Once "AI productivity" becomes the stated metric, it stops being a useful measure.
Block's financials tell a more nuanced story: double-digit gross profit growth, strong forward guidance. This isn't a company in distress - it's a company that overhired during ZIRP and is now using the AI narrative as cover for normalization.
The real concern is the second-order effect: when profitable companies lay off 10%+ and frame it as AI, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where every company feels pressure to do the same regardless of whether AI actually changed their productivity. We're watching a coordination game play out in real time.
> 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.
So, what does Block actually do?