721–730 of 1001 posts
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
Is it actually AI-related cost restructuring, or did they simply hire too many people? They will obviously prefer to tell a story about AI rather than bad management.
I still don't get it. If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness? Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause? Why is it that us employees are gaslig…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters. You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. maybe you are ignoring important tradeoffs and are a little too confident about your own opinion on what it means to "manage your company just fine"
> 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. Sounds like a false dichotomy. The third option is that he could have kept them around. It would be financially feasible given that "our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.".
On shareholder money? No thank you. If 1 person can do the job, why keep 2?
This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective). * Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first. * Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding. * Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands…
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…
More to your point, to get from 6,000 back up to 10,000 requires a 67% increase in productivity on the remaining 6,000!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs. It didn't. Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt. I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices. Even within large compani…
I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive. If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to exp…
It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them. It’s just that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon.
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.
Honestly, If I was one of those being asked to stay, I'll be more worried and stressed because, as one commented on the tweet: to those staying...what I'm asking of you is to build with me and help me replace you too