> 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.
> i’m sorry to put you through this.
POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.
I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.
This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.
Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.
My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.
Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
The people decreasing headcount are already behind the curve. They're thinking about how many people they need to run things instead of how many people they need to reinvent an industry.
I think in the (very) long run it will end up being for the best. This will force us lowly serfs to grow beyond our wage-labor mindset and leverage this force multiplier for ourselves.
AI lets those with capital get rid of labor, but by the same token(s ;-)) labor can now achieve outsize results without capital!
It is going to be very uncomfortable, but evolution always is.
I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages.
About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?
Someone will inevitably have to prompt AIs, CEOs and other executives are NOT going to be doing it themselves. The people driving those AI will have greater leverage as less and less people choose a career in tech.
Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available.
What I see more likely is a future where software engineers do even less work but frustratingly you still need them around to fix problems whenever they come up. Kind of like firefighters.
And note, this pattern is going to repeat across the entire white collar workforce, because the same pyramid scheme holds everywhere in knowledge work.
A new equilibrium will be found, but that will be years, maybe a decade+ away? That's the period of turmoil I am concerned about.
Actually its more “when an AI fucks up in a way AI that you need a human to take the blame, the human must be available”
This is a very interesting perspective, I haven't thought of it like that.
Jesus.. why do CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts....! Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.
Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.
"Your call is very important to us."
"We take security very seriously."
PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
i love that he casts it as:
a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty.
b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an "honest" decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?
...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.
> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision
I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.
I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place.
Literally on their homepage:
"Block builds technology for economic empowerment"
How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend started like 4-5 years ago.
But even if it was...I'm struggling to understand how "overhiring" is a bad thing for the actual workers who were overhired.
So too many people got paid massive big tech salaries for the last 5 years. How horrible for them? They were robbed of...the opportunity to be paid half as much money working in a non-tech job?
It's bad for inflation in the economy broadly since it's money not being efficiently allocated, but for these 'overhired' people it was literally a life changing amount of money they're better off having had even if it ends now (with an extremely cushy 6 month severance I should add).
It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.
You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic.
They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels.
If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
A lot of smart and talented people could do this if given the opportunity. Jack was at the right place at the right time and had enough talent. Same with Elon and others. That’s kind of what happens when you have a population of hundreds of millions, a few get lucky and have enough talent to not screw it up.
It’s best to avoid being delusional and acting like billionaires are 5000 IQ geniuses. They’re regular people too, albeit, yes they are smarter than the average person you pull out of Walmart.
There are also plenty of smart people who simply do not care to run or start businesses.
While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people
I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs.
There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you prefer it to going out and trying to grow your own company from scratch.
I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.
And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.)
Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.
