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Layoffs at Block

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Re: Layoffs at Block

#391

Post by tombert »

garbawarb wrote: post #348
tombert wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#392

Post by kelvinjps10 »

daxfohl wrote: post #48

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 t…

Jack Dorsey likes to do side quests it seems, I see him in many things

Re: Layoffs at Block

#393

Post by atomicnumber3 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #385
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specul…

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 m…

The value in SaaS was never the code, it was the focus on the problem space, the execution, and the ops-included side.

AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".

Re: Layoffs at Block

#394

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

simianwords wrote: post #163
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #102

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?"

> 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 an…

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

Re: Layoffs at Block

#395

Post by torben-friis »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #374
torben-friis wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc). No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own. Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.

> No need to turn it into a dick measuring context Yes, which is why it’s not helpful to bring up a completely different economic system with an unfamiliar culture. Why are you saying this in the next sentence: > yet we live longer and with higher quality of life

>If the business is not able to be profitable everyone is screwed.

Sure, we agree there. It’s not like needing profitability is a weird quirk of the American system. I am not criticizing the layoffs, but the layoffs while mentioning business is booming and they have no reasons forcing their hand.

I’m curious about your point of view, would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude? Firing half the workers while agreeing that there is no pressure to let anyone go looks good to you?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#396

Post by throwyawayyyy »

willio58 wrote: post #272
htrp wrote: post #5

>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 an…

> 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 the…

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?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#398

Post by abeppu »

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.

Why are companies seeing it purely in terms of "we can work with a smaller team so we must" and not "my existing team can do so much more"?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#399

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

sealeck wrote: post #214
borroka wrote: post #156

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)…

> 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 - especial…

> Is X profitable?

The value in X is political favor for pushing propaganda.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#400

Post by pants2 »

borroka wrote: post #156

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)…

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.

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