Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's also giving out massive severance packages
Is four and a half month's pay considered massive in the US? What do you normally get when you're made redundant?
its certainly not "massive"
Layoffs at Block
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Layoffs at Block
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot attrite 40% of the company in 5 months, without creating an incredibly toxic environment. Dorsey knows this; ultimately he lost Twitter over his inability to right size it. I would bet dollars to donuts he promised himself he wouldn't do it again - under no circumstances is 40% cut over six months preferable to a clean fast cut.
a donut costs way more than a dollar so losing your bet makes you win?
I like donuts too so..checkmate
Re: Layoffs at Block
#853for once the CNBC sound-bite does a great job of telling you all you need to know - and without reading past the top 2 bullet points:
* Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count.
* Shares of the payment company skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading. It was last seen up nearly 18% in Friday’s premarket.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers. > 5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence. All you have to…
The median SWE TC in the Bay Area is $272k [0]. After tax and a fully loaded Roth 401K that is around $143,000. And that's just for 1 person. Your spouse (if you have one) is most likely also working in a white collar job as well which we'll impute with the median income in they Bay which is $75k [1], but in reality is an underestimate as your spouse is likely to work in a tech, biotech, medicine, finance, accounting…
you're doing the honorable by offering solutions
Re: Layoffs at Block
#855i'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
It is a stupid trend happening between kids in the Internet. Dumbing down themselves to look more... rebel? I dunno.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#856Nice 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…
Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.
You can believe that only if you don't care about getting a revolution in your country or extreme populist movements gaining traction. When large numbers of people feel economically disposable, the issue stops being about an individual firm’s right to hire and fire and starts becoming a systemic stability problem.
But if you are okay with getting some heads chopped off with a guillotine from time to time, feel free to believe that.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#857I strongly look forward to it being 5 years from now and having "what the software industry looks like with AI factored in" question settled. I'm tired of the uncertainty in our industry.
With the changes to the H1B in the US, it seems it's trending to offshoring and a smaller market in general, which is a bummer for US-based people, but even then I'd just like this all settled.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#858I strongly look forward to it being 5 years from now and having "what the software industry looks like with AI factored in" question settled. I'm tired of the uncertainty in our industry. With the changes to the H1B in the US, it seems it's trending to offshoring and a smaller market in general, which is a bummer for US-based people, but even then I'd just like this all settled.
For a lot of high value per employee businesses it usually makes more sense to hire local. Offshoring is usually for jobs that don’t directly generate profits and more of a necessity. If you’re a programmer you shouldn’t work for a company where coding isn’t a profit center
Re: Layoffs at Block
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions.
Also, there are plenty of regular employees who suck at their jobs and yet manage to hold onto them, get promoted, get new and lucrative job offers, etc.
Re: Layoffs at Block
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct. They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the t…
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.
Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:
- the e-commerce integration (Weebly?) is very limited and the resulting sites are dog slow
- the POS itself and the backend don't work when you have hundreds of SKUs and many variants
- there's very little customization or support
My business wasn't huge but we were doing ~300k revenue annually online and in-store. We started on Square, tried Lightspeed (also garbage) and finally ended up on Shopify (best of a bad lot).
Despite making noise about "supporting small business" Shopify makes most of their money from e-commerce for giant brands. They've tried to juice returns from small customers with merchant cash advances but my sense is they make more doing professional services for big e-commerce brands