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Layoffs at Block

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421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: Layoffs at Block

#421

Post by neya »

> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:

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

> i’m sorry to put you through this.

POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.

I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.

This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#422

Post by etimberg »

Rapzid wrote: post #408
shaftway wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Also getting lot's of direct recruiter and engineering leadership pings.

Eng leadership pings seems to be one of the few strategies that's been working on the hiring side for finding great talent the last few months

Re: Layoffs at Block

#423

Post by nusl »

geraneum wrote: post #419
nusl wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

Are you criticizing the folks championing AI while… effectively championing the AI? What do you think people should do?

I honestly have no idea. We're stuck either way. I don't know what to do. What do you do if all you know is code and you're helping yourself out of a job whether you like it or not?

If you don't use AI you'll fall behind. If you do, you're accelerating your own redundancy.

I wouldn't consider myself a champion for AI. If you read my comment history you'll see that. I don't preach its wonders or pretend that we're all happy-fluffy in this world of ours. I mostly write my own code, use AI for review and to handle the trivial boring bits. I do use AI to build random tools I'd never want to take time away from "real" work to build, like helper scripts, nice TUIs for manual processes, etc. I do recognise the irony though.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#424

Post by thfuran »

skepticATX wrote: post #377
VirusNewbie wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not paying attention? X has gotten waaaay worse. It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.

So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.

And it's all preposterously even when it's working.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#425

Post by singpolyma3 »

KittenInABox wrote: post #112
singpolyma3 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.

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 ha…

So you think companies should hire and pay employees they don't have any use for out of charity?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#426

Post by geraneum »

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…

> If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000?

Simple, 1000+ salaries > 10000 x100$/m Claude seats.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#427

Post by y1n0 »

neya wrote: post #421

> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: > i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. > i’m sorry to put you through this. POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place. I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs an…

How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!

Re: Layoffs at Block

#428

Post by shawkinaw »

paxys wrote: post #101

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."

Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#429

Post by svnt »

mixdup wrote: post #350
jcmontx wrote: post #312

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

Yeah but why is working for Netflix even sexy? At the end of the day it is almost a telecom.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#430

Post by borroka »

dimgl wrote: post #411
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)…

What do you do now?

Being rejected every day, thus subjecting myself to the humiliating ritual of modern times, by companies that I believe could make the most of my talent (my last title was Director of AI, before I was a Staff ML Scientist at a FAANG and an award-winning scientist).

They all seem rather disappointed, at least in the automated rejection emails (mailboxes not monitored, of course) they send me, that they have found other candidates more suited to the position. It seems we are both disappointed, after all.

Not all is lost, though. I am in the enviable position of having perfect health and decent savings.

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