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In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.
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How magnanimous of him to let us all know of his magnanimity!
He could have been even more radical and get rid of himself, his lieutenants could ask gpt about the strategy.
We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.
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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…
fundamentally you see jobs as more important than the end product. this is a tension i keep finding in many minds.
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you don't think LLM impacts on productivity were a factor at all?
If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost? I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool. How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?
Presumably, because some of these areas are cost centers versus profit generating.
Pre pandemic Block had ~4000 employees They grew to 11000 Now they’re going to shrink to 6000 The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive
> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.
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fundamentally you see jobs as more important than the end product. this is a tension i keep finding in many minds.
I see fundamentally human wellbeing as more important. Jobs are just the structure society has built as a gateway for this.
i personally want products i purchase to be cheaper and i don't want to be paying for products that are costly simply because they are hiring people for "human wellbeing".
i would rather people work in productive places than just exist in a company for some reason.
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Seconded. My experience has been that -- even while still complying with lots of overhead (e.g. government regulations and compliance) -- smaller teams of 1-3 devs move waaaaay faster than teams of 4-10. Could definitely speak to the overall codebase quality or some other factor, but yeah.
I expect it's more that early in projects you move faster, and that normally involves fewer people. Once projects get bigger they need more devs and also move slower. Put a team of 1-3 devs on MS Word and see how fast they move...
[Full credits to wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division (The company behind what's gonna be essentially StarOffice/Later OpenOffice/Libreoffice given Libreoffice is a fork of OpenOffice)
Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Their number of employees by the late 1997/1990's from the wiki article suggests 170. They/StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s
There aren't many true MSword alternatives for what its worth but I found a gnome project which is interesting from alternativeto https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/AbiWord/-/project_members
There seem to be 5 main members (I am not counting the Gitlab Admin and administrator)
Interestingly, If I remember correctly, I saw Alexandar Franke in here, I have actually talked to alexandar franke a long time ago on matrix back when I used to use fractal. It was definitely a fun surprise to see him in this project as well.
Aside from that, I think the problem with MS word to me feels like it tried to copy the features of previous word processors including quirks and now anything which wants to be MS word competitor is sometimes forced to copy these quirks as well which to me feels like the stressful cause for the reason why we don't see too many new approaches within this space (in my limited opinion)