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Layoffs at Block
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Layoffs at Block
#472i'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
He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#473Seems like if AI is such an accelerator, leveraging 4,000 more people using AI will generate that much more shareholder value.
Any layoff that blames AI and doesn't address the fact that the company is saying it would prefer to make less, they are lying.
Rational actors should be pushing to grow when others are fearful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Re: Layoffs at Block
#474i'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
i like it. it's how you show you didn't use ai to write the message.
He 100% used AI to write it.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#475[deleted]
Re: Layoffs at Block
#476> 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…
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
The trick to applying these days is to have a contact on the inside that can tell you what the hiring manager is actually looking for, vs what's in the public JD, and then to refer you.
That doesn't scale to 10 jobs/day for very long because almost nobody has a network that big. If you don't land something through referral to the hiring manager, it's mostly a crap shoot these days.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#478> 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…
I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep
… then keep cutting.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#480> 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…
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?