201–210 of 1001 posts
Took a quick look at their financials... I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's simple: it's just a lie. We are seeing the goal of AI in action here, which is reducing payroll costs.
I also don't understand that take. Imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly 2 more people volunteer to mow yard for your company for free! Is your reaction to fire two of the paid employees and keep mowing the same number of yards (with reduced payroll costs), or to expand the business to mow more yards? Which of those responses feels more in line with a "strong and growing" business that is "conti…
What does “entering into consultation” mean?
Jack couldn't be bothered to use capital letters in his last layoff email either.
I wonder if he writes his legal letters and letters to clients/investors like this, or does he have more respect for them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?
If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost? I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool. How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 tec…
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.
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.
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 Mitsubis…
because that doesn't increase shareholder value, at least in the short term, which is all anyone cares about now.
- 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