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Layoffs at Block

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Re: Layoffs at Block

#371

Post by superfrank »

alephnerd wrote: post #306
tombert wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever. No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries u…

> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever. Partially. The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter…

I fully agree with everything you've said and think the Twitter one is a really good point that I haven't heard before.

That said, I think you've left out the impact of interest rates and the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) on this. So much of the "growth above all else", "revenue and user count matters more than profit" mindset companies had over the last 10 years was because ZIRP incentivizes them to invest in riskier assets. If safe investments pay 1% a year that's only a 10.4% return 10 years later. If safe investments pay 5% a year that's a 62.8% return 10 years later.

When rates are low, investors are more willing to focus on a company's potential because their money isn't making a lot while sitting in the bank. When rates went up (in addition to everything you said) investors all of a sudden wanted to see profit, not revenue or user base numbers which means a lot of these companies had to pivot their strategy fast. All the perks and crazy moonshot projects get cut and only things that are profitable or have a clear path to profitability are kept.

If you look back, that's exactly why we saw things like companies throwing crazy money at things like the metaverse and crypto and then practically over night pull the plug on them.

The charts below are the fed funds rate and the number of SWE jobs from Indeed, both from the fed and you can see how they align.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

Re: Layoffs at Block

#372

Post by nusl »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #261

I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism: >>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things. >I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You pu…

The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.

AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.

Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.

How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.

This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#373

Post by t-writescode »

jtokoph wrote: post #358
slantedview wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"owning" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.

One day there will be a CEO who actually pays the severances out of their own compensation.

So, like Nintendo and other Japanese and Chinese companies where the CEO of a company treats the company like their child and takes the hit when they make errors?

Or maybe like the US employer that gave everyone at the company a flat wage?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#374

Post by groundzeros2015 »

torben-friis wrote: post #366
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your country also pays less and has fewer jobs. Increasing the cost to fire, increases the cost to hire.

And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc). No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own. Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.

> No need to turn it into a dick measuring context

Yes, which is why it’s not helpful to bring up a completely different economic system with an unfamiliar culture.

Why are you saying this in the next sentence:

> yet we live longer and with higher quality of life

Re: Layoffs at Block

#375

Post by paradox460 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #229
IshKebab wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I found this an interesting question and did some research out of curiosity [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 198…

Star Office was really good in the 90s too

Re: Layoffs at Block

#376

Post by rappatic »

rottencupcakes wrote: post #341
rappatic wrote: post #13

i'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.

"ChatGPT, write a letter to my company about laying 40% of them off but don't capitalize anything"

Re: Layoffs at Block

#377

Post by skepticATX »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #355
borroka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise. I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the…

Are you not paying attention? X has gotten waaaay worse. It regularly doesn't load, notifications break, and more.

So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#378

Post by mixdup »

borroka wrote: post #362
mixdup wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the people laid off from X were working on content on things like moderation, and yes, the algorithm Is the site functional? Sure, I guess. I think the amount of traffic shrinking also has something to do with the viability with fewer engineers

I don’t think it is true at all. The recommendation algorithm they implement is a choice they make, it is not that if they had more engineers they would deploy a “better” one. Every recommendation algorithm is, in the end, “bad” in some way. The TikTok algorithm was considered the non plus ultra among recommendation algos; now you cannot watch a video of a cat on TikTok for more than 5 seconds that the next 50 videos…

I didn't say they were all working on the algorithm, there were a lot of people working in various content-related jobs: moderation, algorithm, partnership management with content creators, ad sales, and more

Re: Layoffs at Block

#379

Post by GeoAtreides »

nusl wrote: post #372
GeoAtreides wrote: post #261

I wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism: >>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things. >I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You pu…

The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete. AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, an…

I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#380

Post by anukin »

daxfohl wrote: post #48

We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. 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, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in "maintenance mode". Either way, I t…

This is a very interesting take unlike the usual doom and gloom narrative or jevons paradox optimists. Are there any data points which made you reach these conclusions?
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