CNBC:
Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or
about half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24%
in extended trading.“Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack
Dorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to
shareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from
over 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over
4,000 people are being asked to leave or entering into
consultation.” […]Other companies like Pinterest, CrowdStrike and Chegg have
recently announced job cuts and directly attributed the
layoffs to AI reshaping their workforces.In an X post, Dorsey said he was faced with the choice of
laying off staffers over several months or years “as this shift
plays out,” or to “act on it now.”
Dorsey’s letter to shareholders was properly upper-and-lowercased; his memo to employees, which he posted on Twitter/X, was entirely lowercase. That’s a telling sign about who he respects. Dorsey, in that memo to employees:
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. but
something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence
tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter
teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally
changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s
accelerating rapidly.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. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive
to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and
shareholders place in our ability to lead. 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.
AI is going to obviate a lot of jobs, in a lot of industries. So it goes. But in the case of these tech companies — exemplified by Block — it’s just a convenient cover story to excuse absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he was absolutely correct that Twitter was carrying a ton of needless employees. This reckoning was coming, and “AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.
