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Layoffs at Block

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Re: Layoffs at Block

#571

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

He didn't even write it. There's one phrase where there is a curly apostrophe vs a straight apostrophe. He likely only wrote one single phrase in the entire thing and used AI for the rest of it.

"make me sound more sincere!"

Re: Layoffs at Block

#572
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.

As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.) And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then. https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...

I don't use that site much nowadays, but every time I do, I am shocked at just how many fucking bugs there are. This idea that they laid off whatever percentage of their workforce with no impact to the quality of the software is not based in reality whatsoever.

And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#573
We are an ai headhunting startup and ready to support all affected from the lay-off. Our team at clera is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee we can with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.

More information: getclera.com/block

Its 100% free

Re: Layoffs at Block

#574

>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. In my country, this action would be literally illegal. Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater…

what is the typical pay for SWEs in your country compared to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/block/salaries/software-eng...

?

Re: Layoffs at Block

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: over hiring I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people. I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.

wow which company was this?

Not op, but GitLab fits the form.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#576
Our team at getclera.com is working through the weekend to connect every affected employee with top founders who are hiring right now. Warm intros, no waiting.

More information: getclera.com/block It's 100% free for Talents. If you refer a talent we place into a new job, you get 1000 USD.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#577
post #398

> 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. Why are companies seeing it purely in terms of "we can work with a smaller team so we must" and not "my existing team can do so much more"?

This has nothing to do with AI or any of that shit.

Their stock price has been flat for like 4 years and they have no advantage in this new AI world that would change that. These layoffs would have happened AI or not.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#578
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…

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

This keeps coming up, but the numbers at these companies don't add up. Any given FAANG you can think of (outside of maybe Apple) has had at least 5 rounds of layoffs over the years. But can you point to any of them having a lower headcount? I doubt all those engineers are being redirected towards AI development.

And despite that similar hearcount, it seems all have decrease initiatives over the years too. Meta stepped back from the verse it re-branded under, for instance.

I'm fairly convinced that what's happening is outsourcing initiatives disguides as layoffs for AI efficiencies.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#579
post #372

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…

Yeah it’s pretty much over.

Re: Layoffs at Block

#580
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say. If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one

I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.

This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.
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