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Layoffs at Block

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Re: Layoffs at Block

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say. While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions

If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs. There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you…

[deleted]

Re: Layoffs at Block

#512
post #452
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…

> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist. Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care. My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have…

> Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory.

The people decreasing headcount are already behind the curve. They're thinking about how many people they need to run things instead of how many people they need to reinvent an industry.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place

If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP. Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic. They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels. If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheap…

The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.

I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.

Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.

The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.

> While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.

IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...

Re: Layoffs at Block

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say. While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions

If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs. There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you…

It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap.

Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on.

Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportionate negative affects compared to what executives face for making terrible decisions in the first place. Jack still keeps his aspen home and whatever wealth he’s extracted out of the company. So he faces no real downside here. He could run block into the ground and still have more money than he would know what to do with.

You’re arguing about shares of paper entitling people to do things to other people’s lives without facing much actual consequence in their personal lives.

Not to mention professional, I’ve watched executives jump from company to company doing terrible things and they still keep getting hired.

Where as the average person is often advised to reduce or obfuscate the fact they were laid off less there be discrimination.

Now you can argue that executives shouldn’t face higher consequences in exchange for wielding such immense power over the lives of those which they employ, I ask that you say it plain, don’t hide behind feigned guise of people who live in a world where they don’t have a choice but to work for corporations or not have a roof over their head and basic needs met.

It’s fine if you want to defend that, but don’t act like people are just making a deliberate choice. This is a choice society has made for them and the wealthiest perpetuate

Re: Layoffs at Block

#515

Seems 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

Do you think (great) ideas for projects fall out of thin air?

All this paradox stuff is irrelevant if the constraint on human's ability to progress is imagination. LLMs wont help with that - the human still needs to have foresight and vision. Which frankly most lack.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#516
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did. That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place. Literally on their homepage: "Block builds technology for economic empowerment" How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend…

First, I posted the numbers below, it's not ZIRP overhiring in this case.

But even if it was...I'm struggling to understand how "overhiring" is a bad thing for the actual workers who were overhired.

So too many people got paid massive big tech salaries for the last 5 years. How horrible for them? They were robbed of...the opportunity to be paid half as much money working in a non-tech job?

It's bad for inflation in the economy broadly since it's money not being efficiently allocated, but for these 'overhired' people it was literally a life changing amount of money they're better off having had even if it ends now (with an extremely cushy 6 month severance I should add).

Re: Layoffs at Block

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say. While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions

>I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.

I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate

Re: Layoffs at Block

#518
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.

It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.

Toast has already caught up in market share, and dominates the restaurant industry. Square's numbers have been stagnant for many years.

And more importantly, the entire premise when Square launched was that app-based "cloud" PoS systems would replace all traditional cash registers. Except now 15 years later that simply hasn't happened. Existing players in the space all caught up and shipped chip and NFC readers to their retailers, and that's all that was needed.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#519

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…

> If the profits are still up and growing

Block has never really made a real profit. These layoffs are basically saying the company is no longer in moonshot mode and it’s now in the extraction phase of whatever it has, which means increase prices for whatever it sells and decrease expenses, i.e. payroll.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XYZ/block/net-inco...

Re: Layoffs at Block

#520
post #195

Imagine receiving this message and the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalise letters properly. How insulting. It's like being fired by a five year old child.

Jack Dorsey looks like a homeless person and he spends his time meditating and talking about Bitcoin. People knew what they were getting into.

> looks like a homeless person

I have heard this once in a while.. really it refers to a hair grooming aesthetic that is disallowed somehow, perhaps.

> he spends his time meditating

said like it is a bad thing. Of course yes, this is a bad thing to many people, I agree.. but among very smart people in California, if he really does that well, it is a plus actually..

> talking about Bitcoin

very polarizing, with grandstanding on both sides of the aisle, agree. However, isn't Bitcoin legal now? as in, a large scale political change in most places where readers of this page might be reading?

overall, the combination of things to point out to launch big criticisms, is more interesting than the fact of criticisms at all, at the moment

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