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Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

businessinsider.com

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Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#41

Post by torben-friis »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #32

I listened to his podcast episode on the Sequoia podcast a few days ago. Interestingly, his argument was "we don't need middle managers" and he plans to have all 6000 employees eventually report to him. In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.

I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".

See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.

To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#43

Post by fredgrott »

I have to speak up....

Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become...

BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews!

Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#44

Post by anonymars »

cassianoleal wrote: post #27
kangraemin wrote: post #16

[flagged]

I went to a meeting with a prototype once. It was a single happy path with stubbed data, coded in the most naïve way possible. It was, after all, a prototype just to give a feel for what the interactions would be like. It put enormous pressure on delivery, since leadership had "already seen it working, how hard could it be to make it to production?" Never again.

It's funny (tragicomic) to watch the industry learn the same lessons over and over again (such as "'cheap' overseas outsourcing requires unrealistically precise specs otherwise what would take minutes will take days")

This one sounds like "...and this is precisely why we started using wireframes"

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#45

Post by throw-the-towel »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #29
buildbot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA at least sure. This was in a country with lightly better employment protections so it’s quite uncommon.

In Germany we have pretty good employment protections (I think at least!), but this would be legal too. You have a 3 month grace period where the employer can terminate the contract without giving much reason - you gotta survive this period then the protections kick in and they can’t just terminate the contract without a justification and notice period. It sucks but I think in this case even the best protections won’…

Only 3 months? I had 7 months in France.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#47

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

puttycat wrote: post #28

"CEO said a thing" journalism, discussed on HN very recently: https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577735

In this case, a CEO is reaffirming their decision to layoff thousands because of AI was the correct decision.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#48

Post by Ozzie_osman »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #40
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, I actually worked there at the time, my manager had 140 directs. It obviously didn't work. But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.

Wow, holy smokes… 140 directs. Kind of curious: what did the differences look like on a day to day in that sort of org structure?

I met my manager when I joined once, then every 6 or 12 months for performance review (which was aggregated feedback from my peers that he took 2 minutes to talk through: "looks like you're doing fine, if you need anything, my EA can schedule more time").

PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.

If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.

Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).

Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#49

Post by blehn »

FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #10
pwarner wrote: post #3

I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira. They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful. The net result is we're building better features faster.

How can you be less innovative than Block? Their products are 100% ripoffs of better products

Eh, Square and Cash App were pretty innovative when they came out. The industry is mature enough now that all the products are ripping each other off

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#50

Post by alephnerd »

pwarner wrote: post #3

I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira. They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful. The net result is we're building better features faster.

Can confirm this in my portco's and a couple other peers (one of whom previously founded a major threat intel platform).

If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs.

A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also know of one F10 that's building it's own entire security platform from scratch with a team of security engineers working directly with one of the foundation model vendors.

Too many people on HN are divorced or too OOTL from some of these initiatives and then get blindsided during layoffs.

What matters now is DOMAIN EXPERIENCE. Do you understand good development principles and the problem your ICP is trying to solve and how pricing, packaging, and procurement is structured? I don't need a code monkey, process sloths, and queens of the calendar. I need domain experts who can actually execute.

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