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Remaining employees take over the jobs of another person
Instead of doing 200% of a job, employees use AI for 75% of their work (i.e. 1.5 jobs) just relying on raw AI output coupled with their own intuition, and 25% of their work properly.
It will take a few months for things to start actually going wrong, but when it does everything will be blamed on the AI tools - because even if you fuck up why take the blame when you can blame the AI.
Company will have to bring back a big chunk of staff and between hiring and the damage done in step 4 the whole exercise will be a noted example of failed change management. AI tools will be used, but they'll be integrated slowly, into niche roles, as appropriate, letting workers do more without compromising the quality of work.
My favorite is them replacing tech support with AI
Having worked with it most of my life knowing how dumb and hostile users are there is zeeeeroooo chance it will work, they think it does because tickets are closed, the companies will die...and they deserve to die.
you can probably force bot/chat hell support on low lvl employees but as someone who's been a break/fix tech monkey for better part of 2 decades. the reality is. there's always some top salesman, or entire tier of VPs that don't know shit about computers. love their exec assistant, who's also incompetent, and those people require white glove treatment.
and in my own personal bias, i doubt AI will ever be as fast as someone with deep institutional knowledge. knowing your systems, knowing the users, means issues get fixed faster, and people are happier.
shunting people into a chat bot hell where they have to explain what's wrong when they're not equipped to know what's wrong. isn't going to increase productivity.
My recent experience is that chat it's are suddenly very accurate and useful. I recently asked an LLM a question about settings in lightroom and it didn't just answer the question but wrote me a plugin to import those settings all in about 60 seconds.
If your organisation employees 1000 help desk people, then it's likely they can automate 900+ of those jobs.
I asked one to summarise a piece of legislation. Did a great job. Then asked for a specific reference to add to my document. It admitted it had no useful reference and had used the wrong version of the legislation.
I maintain that AI is largely misleading junk. It has its uses, mainly as an aggregation search engine, but it's not the fundamental change people think it is.
Just because it is confident and deferential, it sounds useful. A lot of damage will be done before people realise.
"AI" summarized a meeting I had on a project that said I was going to do something (a pretty consequential something I might add) when I said I would do the exact opposite.
But anytime someone looks back at the notes of that meeting they will think I said the opposite of what I said, which is bonkers.
> I maintain that AI is largely misleading junk. It has its uses, mainly as an aggregation search engine, but it's not the fundamental change people think it is.
Largely misleading junk might suggest that it's 5% right but 95% wrong. In reality it's the opposite.
Is a search engine always right? If you relied 100% on Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button how reliable would a search engine be.
Is a person always right. Does a person always understand you or get what you are saying first time?
> Just because it is confident and deferential, it sounds useful. A lot of damage will be done before people realise
People do this all the time. Doctors, Mechanics, the police all of these people have lied to your face or misled you at some point. If there was a "truth detector" you could rely on to understand the absolute truth of a statement then people would score worse than LLMs.
That wasn't tech support, techsupport is when shit has gone wrong stuff ain't working you don't know why and you don't have time to learn because it's not your job you paid for the service and you can't do your job and you don't have time.... That's when you think being stuck with an Ai chat will work?
Good luck with that..clearly you can ignore my lifetime of working in support I have no clue.
...even if that's true. rephrase that AI interaction if instead of asking for settings a user asks AI. lightroom isn't working....i can't do my work. "my computer is slow"
AI makes suggestions that a user may or may not know how to do, or even actually execute. ---it's hard enough being a live human, to get a user to even restart a machine. (it's why remoting into a system and doing it for them is often faster)
and at what point does an AI have to do something to the machine that requires an admin bypass? what level of system control does the user have to make edits...even purge temp files or clear cache folders. run a script. launch a program in safe/admin mode to test other issues.
maaaybe an AI can be trained on the ticket data base to know common issues. maybe not. maybe it doesn't know the nuance that kathy on the 4th floor routinely does the same stupid mistake... an no matter how many times you explain the process. you're not her manager so... you just fix the issue.
and again...maybe kathy, who's a low lvl person you can waste 30-45min of her time troubleshooting but jeff who's the lead acct person. he's better served bringing him a known good loaner laptop so he can do his work. fixing his shit on your time, and bringing a A tier user a working machine with as minimal disruption to their day as possible
The job you're describing is some kind of IT repair man. Offices used to be like that 15 years ago. I dont think anyone came into this conversation seriously expecting AI to swap motherboards or memory sticks on computers.
However - None of this happens anymore. I and most people I work with have been 100% remote for 6 years, no-one is traveling 16 miles from then office to bring me a "known good machine". I know America is quite backwards in respect of IT but you seem to be working in either The Office or The IT Crowd.
The vast majority of businesses are using Virtual Machines nowadays , I've worked in banks, government offices and oil companies. The actual kit people use , in proper corporate environments, is as basic as it gets and needs minimal maintenance or repair.
ETA - all Jeff or Kathy need to do is log onto any other machine in the building. They will log straight back into their VM and all the work they were doing will be in the same state as it was when their dodgy laptops failed. That's how corporate IT works in the 21st century.
I’m trying to imagine any of our corporate executive people using a plug-in given by AI to fix anything on their computer when most still need hand held instructions just to fix a simple issue or expect someone to remote in onto their computer to fix it for them. Maybe to another tech savvy person but aren’t those the people they are getting rid of? Good luck with that. I can imagine the people getting “helped” would be very frustrated trying to explain their issue to a chat bot when they don’t even necessarily know what the issue is.
They were under pressure to cut staffing to about 70,000 because that was about the average headcount average for banks
Since then a number of new "challenger banks" have emerged many of who started, and achieved reasonable market share with less than 200 employees (revolut, starling, metro)
They have the same issue, and have had to start customer service departments. Running the customer service/help desk for a bank in the UK seems to need around 4,000 staff.
Those 4,000 jobs are the first target of bots. Those small challenger banks want to get back to 200 staff.
The banks that employ 140,000 people to do the same thing as a bank that employs 200 people will eventually fail.
A bank with senior managers/CEOs who can't work Bluetooth or print documents will ultimately fail. Every manager at a bank with 200 staff is a capable coder
What you are effectively arguing is that you are a chimney sweep support provider, and that chimney sweeps could never survive without you so.... As long as the world still needs chimney sweeps you have a job for life.
You can swap chimney sweep for any out of date job you like. The famous example from "All quiet on the western front" is the soldier who has a job for life because his family owns a horse whip factory.... In the decade the Model T Ford was booming.
Recently context windows have expanded, which allows for more specific data related to a particular query to be included in the modeling. For example instead of a 10k character limit you now have a 50k character limit on top of a 25MB file upload limit for supporting documents.
This doesn't reduce hallucination rates, but it does make it so that responses are better structured and supported when they're right.
i’ve been trying to get accesss to this table i need for my job. we jsut replaced our IT and i just opened up my 27th ticket this morning for the same issue. they will close it again without resolving it but i dont know what to do.
my bosses bosses boss is about to become aware of this. but until then i just document it all, tell my boss im trying to get access, and then i open a new ticket.
it’s become kind of fun. once they close it even tho its not resolved i just open a new one.
it’s funny cuz i bet their metrics are off the roof cuz technically they’re 27/27 for me
The CEOs and management will never blame AI for anything. Everything will be the remaining employees' fault. The employees will be working overtime to correct the mistakes made by AI. The management will credit AI for the overwork of the employees. #4 will not be an option. Employees may try to blame AI, but the bosses love it and will ask "Even if the AI fucks up, why blame it when you can blame the employees?"
There was a whole article on Wired seven days ago that talked about how the company is already coming apart at the seams before today's news literally buried it from search results. It's already at your stage #4 with things going very wrong, but apparently $24B in revenue with only 11k staff isn't good enough for greedy fuckers like Jack.
I worked for Block for a while, the rolling layoffs led to a burnout for me, so I can imagine they had a very bad effect on everyone there. There was a lot of talk about “psychological safety”, but that doesn’t exist when there’s a very real chance your head is on the block within 6 months. Funny that the article starts with “performance anxiety” as I was googling that phrase for a long time. It took me months of unemployment before I learned to relax again.
Now we know that the rolling layoffs were the “easy” option rather than today’s culling, considering Jack wanted 40% gone. He is all in on AI, but you know he was also all in on crypto.
You should be waiting for AI to evolve, which is much more likely. How we use it and interact with it, anyway.
Using the internet as a touchstone, consider the origins of the internet and the infrastructure we all
Used at the time (desktops, modems who’s output was measured in units of baud) vs how different our interactions with the technology is today.
AI won’t fail any more than the first room-sized
Computer “failed” which doesn’t exist today.
AI will, seemingly all at once, shift into a new role or use-case that is likely very close to how it’s used today, but applied in a manner that makes it infinitely more useful than it is.
We can’t see it clearly yet, because that’s how time works.
Today’s “AI” is just laying the groundwork for what is coming next. When it arrives, AI won’t have “failed”, it will simply be another discarded obsolete tool that’s been replaced by the tech it’s preceded.
I think the right comparison is the early dot Com bubble. Vast overinvestment, many really dumb ideas... but on the other side, some parts of the tech absolutely did work, and became universal. The current bs with llm stuff everywhere is eclipsing really amazing things going on with narrow, powerful, human-directed tools.
Yeah, like AI is definitely useful at my job - I'm a software dev and it allows much faster velocity, but I also have to be on the lookout for mistakes it makes now. In a way it's nice - it means that rigorously testing software is even MORE important, so well done you can have a well constructed code base.
It has also enabled a lot of vibe coded "slop" as much as I hate the term too
So many consultants have already been caught using AI by clients which is why said industry is especially vulnerable to layoffs too. Why pay some consultant 4x the amount when AI can do that work for you? I don't think anyone is gonna feel bad for the people that work at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
The downvotes on Reddit won't change reality, which you have seen. The AI tools have gotten so much better in two months. A comparison to ChatGPT from 2025 isn't even relevant anymore. Imagine what it'll be by the end of 2026.
Look, it's important that some billionaires, who already have enough money to support 100 generations, get to keep even more.
4,000 people losing their livelihood is a small price to pay so that Jack Dorsey can increase his wealth front $3.8 billion to $10, $20, even $100 billion.
I mean, $3.8 billion is barely a billionaire. Have a heart.
And block was just doing fine financially, they were not even under stress. They could have also gradually reduced their workforce instead of such a big slash.
I know he mentioned they pressure tested this but who knows.
You do know they those 1000 people aren’t entitled to work at block right? Just like block is not entitled to the forever servitude if these 1000 had quit and worked for another company…they were handsomely paid during their time working there and on the way out.
Found a "free market" Kool aid drinker. The job market is shit. Coders are getting automated left and right. And only ONE person is gaining profit from all that slashed overhead. While every CEO in their sector is doing the same thing.
I will side with you where people need to live below their means. If you lose your job and you are in immediate shit then they aren't financially educated.
But this economy today is nothing like it used to be. This isn't the industrial revolution by a long shot. This shit is not producing as much jobs as it's taking. And the people who are left prompting continue to make shit salaries.
People shouldn't have to make "side hustles" to make ends meet. They should work more to get luxury items. Overtime used to mean money towards vacation, a new TV, home renovation. Not a small savings surplus
Woah no need for name calling..let’s be civil. My point was whether you employ 10 or 100 people, you shouldn’t be villainized if you as the owner decide you no longer need as much employee. Hiring and firing is not personal.
Just like when jack initially hired these thousands of employees, do you think he deserved praise? Hell no.
We really need to care more about morality. Replacing people with AI is bullshit. Companies not only exist to make money for their owners. They are also need to provide jobs. That's the social contract: the owners make a lot of money but provide decent jobs for many people. Once that's off the table the revolution will start.
Have you ever paid somebody to do something? Did you continue paying them on a regular basis when you no longer needed them to do it? No, that would be silly. How is this any different?
These people entered into an agreement to work for block. Just like block can't force them to keep working there if they don't want to work there anymore, block isn't forced to keep employing them if they don't need them.
Sure our system sucks right know. I hope you see the societal implications if every company start doing this? Companies need to understand economics. Without consumers with money to spend most businesses will go bancrupt pretty fast.
What exactly sucks to you about two people freely deciding to exchange things (work for money)?
There is a reason why pretty much every country that was previously Marxist/Leninist has adopted free market capitalism. It has lifted billions out of poverty. What has socialism done? Resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people over the past century.
That being said, yeah, we're entering uncharted territory. I'm not sure what the best solution is tbh. Probably some sort of a UBI or something like that. The solution isn't to force Block to employ people for no reason though. What would be the point if they aren't providing value to the company? Might as well just have them stay at home and send them a check.
Well yes that'll be the outcome. Companies replacing people with AI or robots should be heavily taxed so a UBI is possible. The money has to come from somewhere.
Is that not entitlement though? AI can bang out a design or presentation 2x faster than me. Why force the owner to use an inferior resource and pay for something he no longer wants to use aka me?
You’re injecting morality into this because you are concluding that without these jobs, then the people may suffer. While that may be true, that’s not the responsibility of the owner.
Is it just because you once worked for a company that you should be guaranteed employment as long as you want?
Employers/companies - definitely not. They hire and fire as needed regardless of profit. If they find ways to automate and scale making more money with less people, kudos to them. No obligation to hire extra people to do nothing.
Employees themselves - to an extent, we each have our own responsibility. Who wants to hire you if you bring no skills or a poor attitude? The exception is if there’s literally not enough jobs out there.
Government - probably the most responsibility? Ensure a prosperous nation. But even then that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone has a job. The desired outcome is different than the execution.
Well I'm afraid this isn't solvable without taxing the businesses who use AI or robotics instead of human workers. You want to use AI instead of hiring people? Great: you're going to have to pay extra tax so the government can pay those people a UBI.
I just don't see a workable future where over half the jobs are gone and people are told to go fuck themselves.
This I don’t necessarily disagree with! That’s why I was saying if the shared outcome we want is for everyone to have a financially secure future, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to have a job. UBI is def an interesting option.
Not anymore. I tried but when we had to fire someone who was exposing something I literally lost sleep that night. I am in no way saying HR is all that. But I wouldn't want to be in that situation again
Companies that lay-off people because of AI lacked the good ideas to take advantage of more productivity. They are essentially saying that they don’t need better innovation, which is nuts in this timeline. It’s the equivalent of saying that “since offensive linemen are heavier than they used to be, we don’t need as many of them.”
If AI is so good, why not take those productivity gains and leverage them to produce more output? Why not grow faster, take on useful but more complex features? Use the human capital you have to out grow and out compete the competition? Instead companies just lay folks off? So confusing.
It's sort of weird that a leader in AI research, Google, has recovered to the same size workforce it had at its pandemic high. Same with Amazon and Apple. Microsoft is bigger and Meta would be except for the people laid off as part of the metaverse lol
So yeah the real companies aren't doing this. They all just did some trimming after the pandemic hiring binge (that probably got out of control). Nothing like this.
Google has a massive customer support base and many businesses to establish and grow simultaneously.
This payments company just went from 11k to 6k employees. Seems like they’re making a statement that they will have razor-thin margins and stiff competition moving forward- so I don’t know why the market rewards this behavior. To me it signals they’re not going to grow unless the people they kept are stellar.
First few earnings reports should tell investors if it was a good move or not.
This is rebalancing from a "startup growth in blockchain/crypto" that failed to a "long-term profitability" in Square's main business.
They don't need 40% of their engineers because those engineers were working on poorly conceived products that failed.
This is nothing new. Has absolutely nothing to do with AI (except that Square has no reasonable way to jump in on the AI fad). Investors always reward layoffs. But it's not unreasonable, they're rewarding the fact that Square has stopped pouring money into failing products.
according to trueup, job postings are surging, up 60% from their post-pandemic lows
Some companies might still be rebalancing, but overall the industry is seeing demand for software engineers continue to rise, and recently (in the last month or so) surge even higher.
So healthy companies (maybe the ones that aren't trying to spin a massive bad bet in blockchain) are hiring, not shedding 40% of their workforce.
Makes sense cause anyone who has used AI coding tools knows that when it works it's cool, and it's great for searching a codebase, but the hit rate for successful changes is still terrible. We're still hovering in the high 20%, maybe hitting 30% for accepted changes.
Technological advancements that increase worker productivity never benefit workers in a capitalist system.
Imagine how differently companies would be handling AI if the workers were discussing it amongst each other and voting for what to do. I bet they wouldn’t vote to fire themselves!
P.s. workers owning the means of production and using workplace democracy to make major decisions like this is what socialists call socialism.
Back in my day, a CEO would get a bad earning's report and announce layoffs to get his stock value back up. He didn't get to declare it the fault of "AI". He just had people fire a bunch of folks. But without AI, how did the diminished staff maintain productivity? They worked harder. Their jobs/lives sucked more. But often the company already had a market share and so being more efficient at automatically charging a client didn't really matter so loosing some of the staff hardly mattered.
Perhaps Block really is embracing the AI business model and it will be interesting to see how this pans out. If not for AI, however, this would feel an awful lot like a typical story of a company down-sizing during a sluggish economy.
So they have a "visionary" CEO that looks like he sells Extacy at concerts and is obviously a deep thinker who is original but went in on the block chain because it is the next big thing. Yeah, he laid off half his company because he is brilliant and has adapted AI so innovatively that he created a new dimension in business efficiency.
If WeWork had started up now, they would have claimed to use AI innovatively to rent work from home office space.
I agree with you. I met someone who has automated their own job. I am in the middle of doing this myself (telling absolutely no one). This guy still works 30 hours a week. There is no magic "run a business" button.
What I do think this generation should start doing is accepting hourly pay and not salary. Salaries are the biggest crock of shit. If you get paid a flat rate than your time should also be flat.
Yeah, I’m good on that- you’re arguing for zero stability? You really don’t think an hourly wage model wouldn’t be even more levered against workers/non-owners?
You do know the only reason the 40-hour workweek exists is because most people were worked to the bone beforehand…because they didn’t have an alternative. Capital growth consistently demanded unpaid over-time.
What we really want is everyone to be skilled and incentivized to maximize the productivity of their hours- and have a reliable income stream while doing it.
Is it more likely AI is giving 200% increased productivity, or the company is in trouble and using AI as a shareholder friendly way to coverup company or management failures. At this point if any company has to layoff employees, why not just say AI?
So I decided to check, and the company has indeed missed 3 of it's last 4 earnings estimates. And has a P/E ratio of 27.42 which is much higher then their industry average. This is 100% the real reason behind the layoffs.
Also if a company could cut half it's labor costs for only a 10% drop in output, they all would do it. It's more complex then layoffs equal better margins. Not the least of which, it's not always clear who the top 20 and bottom 80 are.
Sure, I misspoke when I said "200% increased productivity" instead of "200% productivity"
If you think your amazing "UmMm AcTuAlLy" to a relatively minor and common error is some gotcha. I don't think it is, nor do I think it holds any rebuttal to the core criticisms I've raised.
This is the excuse of someone whose business was failing, needed some way to cut costs dramatically while not losing investors with a convenient excuse to tell them.
Any company who uses AI tools wouldn’t fire a single soul over it. It’s a tool.
If Block is anything like Dorsey’s other company Twitter, they probably just figured out that 40% of the staff don’t really do anything productive. AI layoffs may just be an excuse for poor management and overhiring.
The 40% that is actually working, trying to improve, addressing issues that need to be solved and are mostly not cheap to do. Those are sacked asap as they are annoying for companies. I have seen it in real life, 'improvement' leading to 60% reduction in work done and nobody cared because shareholders were happy. CEO/company logic is fun.
In my 25+ year career I've seen many periods of layoffs in companies I've worked at and I've never seen it impact the top performers. I see no reason why this AI world will be very different. The top workers will use AI to 10x their own output, and the ones who were just sitting back waiting to be told what to do won't be needed anymore.
People who work hard, improve things and address issues don't have to worry about layoffs. They'll find another job in no time. Companies are always looking for people like that.
How is twitter as a product in any worse shape today than pre firings? Like it or not grok is also one of the top 4 SOTA AI models and they’ve also done a good job of integrating that into their product. There are a buncha reasons to hate on Elon but don’t let your biases get in the way of rational thought.
What? X is completely run down, it's a dumpster fire. Network effect is really the only thing that keeps this thing alive at this point. Before the firing, when it was still Twitter, it was a very usable and fun portal to be on.
Bots. The bot problem has exploded since Elon took over. The algorithm is heavily politically skewed to the point that it's extremely noticeable. Content moderation is gone now too which makes the bot problem even worse - the website is a cesspool more than ever before.
1.) are you of the opinion that all the staff laid off were involved in technical functionality? They were not.
2.) technical functionality issues of something that was originally functioning take time, considerable time, to become apparent. Like how losing half the bolts from a car might take a long time to produce an accident, but still be ultimately responsible.
Twitter as a product has become worse due to terrible executive decisions, not a reduced workforce. It has been 3.5 years.
If there was one thing which Musk was vindicated about in this whole deal with Twitter (and it may literally be only one thing), it was that their staff was extremely bloated.
pay-to-win reply ranking: premium/boosted accounts shoved to the top, threads get worse. Ai slop if Trump dodging bullets in the matrix getting too engagement
algorithm feels steered: boosts Elon + boosts right-wing voices, tilts what people see (see Trump ai slop)
more culture-war/misinfo churn because engagement gets rewarded and guardrails are thinner (buy ivermectin via crypto!!!!)
recurring safety complaints: doxxing, non-consensual content, child-safety risk perception is awful (see tns team getting cut; no more public policy team)
reliability regressions: outages/rate limits/broken features kill retention. Constant downtime. Mobile web broken
API/tool ecosystem wrecked: third-party clients/tools priced out or broken, less stickiness and innovation
money pressure: $5.08B revenue (2021) → ~ $2.5B (2024), ads still most of it (~$1.6–$1.8B), plus ~$13B debt. Elon put in ~$20B cash to make it his right wing fever dream to jerk off too. Lack of high quality ads and user growth necessitates him getting high on his own supply. constant squeeze = worse UX + slower growth
corporate reshuffles to make it “work”: $44B buy, later xAI absorbs X with $33B equity value ($45B incl debt), then xAI gets pulled under SpaceX. lots of financial gymnastics just to keep it standing.
Twitter doesn't process billions of dollars in transactions every quarter. i recently left the company, there's a lot of manual work around refunds, known product issues that require engineers to change data in production, etc. there will be very quick product degradation and more customers will leave their products.
No one who actually knew what they were talking about thought it would collapse immediately, and there were a few close calls that made me wonder if I was wrong and things really were that unstable.
For a mature product like Twitter, so long as you leave it alone, it could probably run for years with a skeleton staff to work random edge cases that pop up. Making changes is when things break. And indeed, a bunch of components and subsystems that they were actively working on had very public breakages.
With fewer developers, you need fewer devops, fewer QAs, fewer SREs. If you cut too many people, you have less ability to fix a problem, and less ability to create a problem.
That doesn't mean problems aren't accumulating, nor that they haven't already shown up. They have.
They've also fallen far short of where Musk said they'd be years ago. Like he was talking about people having their "whole financial life" on Twitter by the end of '24. Musk has a known problem with over promising, but he made it worse by cutting so many people.
All of these companies that are "cutting so many jobs because of AI" are just downsizing because their business not viable or they are just downsizing. I work for a 500 billion plus market cap company and everyone is talking about AI but its not even close to taking people's jobs yet besides maybe technical writers or things like that. Everyone is just pretending AI is doing shit for them.
Don't get me wrong AI is gonna change everything eventually but I am so tired of reading so many of these bullshit statements on how 50% of white collar workers are out of a job within a year... give me a break... people dont understand how slow and terrible corporations are at changing things in their business
It's hilarious that it worked. It's a failing company in a downward spiral for years. He comes out saying oh trust us were doing great, those layoffs show how great we do and market and people online buy this lol. Even here people discuss it like it's anything else then a nicely wrapped PR spin.
I hate to be the nay sayer, but I think a lot of ppl are coping in this comment section or just saying things to make themselves feel better. I have more of a negative outlook. I think these companies will fire 50-60% of their staff, the AI will do their jobs perfectly "fine" not great, there will be a fuck ton of errors, but like we just saw with Paramount, they don't care about the money anymore. They have an agenda and it's full steam ahead. I just want to know how these businesses survive in 10+ years when all of their consumers work at grocery stores or construction sites and can't afford any of their products. It amazes me how shortsighted some of the "smartest people in the world" are.
>>how these businesses survive in 10+ years when all of their consumer work at grocery stores or construction sites
They’ll sell to other businesses. The world economy will essentially regress to Ancient Rome - the middle class will end, leaving two broad segments of society. Varying degrees of poor, and a small elite controlling nearly all of the capital.
Man I’ve been saying this in several threads lately, everyone seems to be in total denial. But as someone at a large tech company that has adopted many of these enterprise AI tools, it’s the real deal. Once you know how to use them to build internal apps, dashboards, and automations, it absolutely causes redundancies. These kinds of decisions aren’t on a whim.
In fairness, I understand why. Denial is an easier reaction than accepting the high probability in ten years- and probably less- humans will not be doing “white collar” work anymore.
That’s a future with a lot of question marks. What will society look like in an economy where human labor has no value in the knowledge economy? What future will everyone’s kids have to look forward to? Even the experts can’t build consensus on what generative AI means for the future.
Meanwhile, Sally Smith in Des Moines Iowa can barely keep up with day to day life as it is. So it’s easier to pretend AI is a scam bubble. Scams come and go, and are much easier to understand than seismic economic shifts.
If it wasn’t for investors sentiment and the share price, they’d have just done it quietly. Some companies refuse to open new reqs and shrink through attrition silently
This whole AI excuse is just a cover up for the toxic cultures and bloat that has built up in many of these companies. There is personal testimony out there from former employees that saw the writing on the wall and got out but look not further than just the revenue per employee graphed over time to see how they easily are no longer valuable.
It’s so that he can have more money for himself to support his philanthropic endeavours like sex assignment hormone drugs for African albino transgender babies.
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Not_Legal_Advice_Pod | 18 hours ago
Make this announcement;
Remaining employees take over the jobs of another person
Instead of doing 200% of a job, employees use AI for 75% of their work (i.e. 1.5 jobs) just relying on raw AI output coupled with their own intuition, and 25% of their work properly.
It will take a few months for things to start actually going wrong, but when it does everything will be blamed on the AI tools - because even if you fuck up why take the blame when you can blame the AI.
Company will have to bring back a big chunk of staff and between hiring and the damage done in step 4 the whole exercise will be a noted example of failed change management. AI tools will be used, but they'll be integrated slowly, into niche roles, as appropriate, letting workers do more without compromising the quality of work.
octahexxer | 17 hours ago
My favorite is them replacing tech support with AI Having worked with it most of my life knowing how dumb and hostile users are there is zeeeeroooo chance it will work, they think it does because tickets are closed, the companies will die...and they deserve to die.
oneWeek2024 | 17 hours ago
you can probably force bot/chat hell support on low lvl employees but as someone who's been a break/fix tech monkey for better part of 2 decades. the reality is. there's always some top salesman, or entire tier of VPs that don't know shit about computers. love their exec assistant, who's also incompetent, and those people require white glove treatment.
and in my own personal bias, i doubt AI will ever be as fast as someone with deep institutional knowledge. knowing your systems, knowing the users, means issues get fixed faster, and people are happier.
shunting people into a chat bot hell where they have to explain what's wrong when they're not equipped to know what's wrong. isn't going to increase productivity.
regprenticer | 15 hours ago
My recent experience is that chat it's are suddenly very accurate and useful. I recently asked an LLM a question about settings in lightroom and it didn't just answer the question but wrote me a plugin to import those settings all in about 60 seconds.
If your organisation employees 1000 help desk people, then it's likely they can automate 900+ of those jobs.
andtheangel | 14 hours ago
Good for you.
I asked one to summarise a piece of legislation. Did a great job. Then asked for a specific reference to add to my document. It admitted it had no useful reference and had used the wrong version of the legislation.
I maintain that AI is largely misleading junk. It has its uses, mainly as an aggregation search engine, but it's not the fundamental change people think it is.
Just because it is confident and deferential, it sounds useful. A lot of damage will be done before people realise.
smellybear666 | 14 hours ago
"AI" summarized a meeting I had on a project that said I was going to do something (a pretty consequential something I might add) when I said I would do the exact opposite.
But anytime someone looks back at the notes of that meeting they will think I said the opposite of what I said, which is bonkers.
regprenticer | 13 hours ago
> I maintain that AI is largely misleading junk. It has its uses, mainly as an aggregation search engine, but it's not the fundamental change people think it is.
Largely misleading junk might suggest that it's 5% right but 95% wrong. In reality it's the opposite.
Is a search engine always right? If you relied 100% on Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button how reliable would a search engine be.
Is a person always right. Does a person always understand you or get what you are saying first time?
> Just because it is confident and deferential, it sounds useful. A lot of damage will be done before people realise
People do this all the time. Doctors, Mechanics, the police all of these people have lied to your face or misled you at some point. If there was a "truth detector" you could rely on to understand the absolute truth of a statement then people would score worse than LLMs.
octahexxer | 14 hours ago
That wasn't tech support, techsupport is when shit has gone wrong stuff ain't working you don't know why and you don't have time to learn because it's not your job you paid for the service and you can't do your job and you don't have time.... That's when you think being stuck with an Ai chat will work? Good luck with that..clearly you can ignore my lifetime of working in support I have no clue.
BasvanS | 14 hours ago
They’re basically the same thing. To people who don’t understand either of them.
Guess who makes the purchase decision?
oneWeek2024 | 6 hours ago
...even if that's true. rephrase that AI interaction if instead of asking for settings a user asks AI. lightroom isn't working....i can't do my work. "my computer is slow"
AI makes suggestions that a user may or may not know how to do, or even actually execute. ---it's hard enough being a live human, to get a user to even restart a machine. (it's why remoting into a system and doing it for them is often faster)
and at what point does an AI have to do something to the machine that requires an admin bypass? what level of system control does the user have to make edits...even purge temp files or clear cache folders. run a script. launch a program in safe/admin mode to test other issues.
maaaybe an AI can be trained on the ticket data base to know common issues. maybe not. maybe it doesn't know the nuance that kathy on the 4th floor routinely does the same stupid mistake... an no matter how many times you explain the process. you're not her manager so... you just fix the issue.
and again...maybe kathy, who's a low lvl person you can waste 30-45min of her time troubleshooting but jeff who's the lead acct person. he's better served bringing him a known good loaner laptop so he can do his work. fixing his shit on your time, and bringing a A tier user a working machine with as minimal disruption to their day as possible
regprenticer | 5 hours ago
The job you're describing is some kind of IT repair man. Offices used to be like that 15 years ago. I dont think anyone came into this conversation seriously expecting AI to swap motherboards or memory sticks on computers.
However - None of this happens anymore. I and most people I work with have been 100% remote for 6 years, no-one is traveling 16 miles from then office to bring me a "known good machine". I know America is quite backwards in respect of IT but you seem to be working in either The Office or The IT Crowd.
The vast majority of businesses are using Virtual Machines nowadays , I've worked in banks, government offices and oil companies. The actual kit people use , in proper corporate environments, is as basic as it gets and needs minimal maintenance or repair.
ETA - all Jeff or Kathy need to do is log onto any other machine in the building. They will log straight back into their VM and all the work they were doing will be in the same state as it was when their dodgy laptops failed. That's how corporate IT works in the 21st century.
playfuldarkside | 12 hours ago
I’m trying to imagine any of our corporate executive people using a plug-in given by AI to fix anything on their computer when most still need hand held instructions just to fix a simple issue or expect someone to remote in onto their computer to fix it for them. Maybe to another tech savvy person but aren’t those the people they are getting rid of? Good luck with that. I can imagine the people getting “helped” would be very frustrated trying to explain their issue to a chat bot when they don’t even necessarily know what the issue is.
regprenticer | 12 hours ago
in 2008 I worked for a bank with 140,000 staff
They were under pressure to cut staffing to about 70,000 because that was about the average headcount average for banks
Since then a number of new "challenger banks" have emerged many of who started, and achieved reasonable market share with less than 200 employees (revolut, starling, metro)
They have the same issue, and have had to start customer service departments. Running the customer service/help desk for a bank in the UK seems to need around 4,000 staff.
Those 4,000 jobs are the first target of bots. Those small challenger banks want to get back to 200 staff.
The banks that employ 140,000 people to do the same thing as a bank that employs 200 people will eventually fail.
A bank with senior managers/CEOs who can't work Bluetooth or print documents will ultimately fail. Every manager at a bank with 200 staff is a capable coder
What you are effectively arguing is that you are a chimney sweep support provider, and that chimney sweeps could never survive without you so.... As long as the world still needs chimney sweeps you have a job for life.
You can swap chimney sweep for any out of date job you like. The famous example from "All quiet on the western front" is the soldier who has a job for life because his family owns a horse whip factory.... In the decade the Model T Ford was booming.
DisappointedSpectre | 12 hours ago
Recently context windows have expanded, which allows for more specific data related to a particular query to be included in the modeling. For example instead of a 10k character limit you now have a 50k character limit on top of a 25MB file upload limit for supporting documents.
This doesn't reduce hallucination rates, but it does make it so that responses are better structured and supported when they're right.
gimmickypuppet | 9 hours ago
I do not like when I get a chat bot or automated system. I spam “0” or say support non-stop until the system gives up to bypass it.
CoolBakedBean | 9 hours ago
i’ve been trying to get accesss to this table i need for my job. we jsut replaced our IT and i just opened up my 27th ticket this morning for the same issue. they will close it again without resolving it but i dont know what to do.
my bosses bosses boss is about to become aware of this. but until then i just document it all, tell my boss im trying to get access, and then i open a new ticket.
it’s become kind of fun. once they close it even tho its not resolved i just open a new one.
it’s funny cuz i bet their metrics are off the roof cuz technically they’re 27/27 for me
Bossanova12345 | 9 hours ago
Utilizing new technology means they deserve to die?
Lol, you must have typed that in your mom’s basement, surrounded by Funko Pops.
Ketracel_what | 9 hours ago
Drunk already?
cbushin | 17 hours ago
The CEOs and management will never blame AI for anything. Everything will be the remaining employees' fault. The employees will be working overtime to correct the mistakes made by AI. The management will credit AI for the overwork of the employees. #4 will not be an option. Employees may try to blame AI, but the bosses love it and will ask "Even if the AI fucks up, why blame it when you can blame the employees?"
fuckthiscode | 16 hours ago
There was a whole article on Wired seven days ago that talked about how the company is already coming apart at the seams before today's news literally buried it from search results. It's already at your stage #4 with things going very wrong, but apparently $24B in revenue with only 11k staff isn't good enough for greedy fuckers like Jack.
roodammy44 | 14 hours ago
Was it this one?
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-rolling-layoffs-jack-dorsey-block/
I worked for Block for a while, the rolling layoffs led to a burnout for me, so I can imagine they had a very bad effect on everyone there. There was a lot of talk about “psychological safety”, but that doesn’t exist when there’s a very real chance your head is on the block within 6 months. Funny that the article starts with “performance anxiety” as I was googling that phrase for a long time. It took me months of unemployment before I learned to relax again.
Now we know that the rolling layoffs were the “easy” option rather than today’s culling, considering Jack wanted 40% gone. He is all in on AI, but you know he was also all in on crypto.
[OP] Lebarican22 | 18 hours ago
I am waiting for AI to fail. If it won't be a complement to the human workforce, it is a threat.
BaronCapdeville | 16 hours ago
You should be waiting for AI to evolve, which is much more likely. How we use it and interact with it, anyway.
Using the internet as a touchstone, consider the origins of the internet and the infrastructure we all Used at the time (desktops, modems who’s output was measured in units of baud) vs how different our interactions with the technology is today.
AI won’t fail any more than the first room-sized Computer “failed” which doesn’t exist today.
AI will, seemingly all at once, shift into a new role or use-case that is likely very close to how it’s used today, but applied in a manner that makes it infinitely more useful than it is.
We can’t see it clearly yet, because that’s how time works.
Today’s “AI” is just laying the groundwork for what is coming next. When it arrives, AI won’t have “failed”, it will simply be another discarded obsolete tool that’s been replaced by the tech it’s preceded.
pile_of_fish | 15 hours ago
I think the right comparison is the early dot Com bubble. Vast overinvestment, many really dumb ideas... but on the other side, some parts of the tech absolutely did work, and became universal. The current bs with llm stuff everywhere is eclipsing really amazing things going on with narrow, powerful, human-directed tools.
BaronCapdeville | 15 hours ago
100% agree.
OfficeSalamander | 8 hours ago
Yeah, like AI is definitely useful at my job - I'm a software dev and it allows much faster velocity, but I also have to be on the lookout for mistakes it makes now. In a way it's nice - it means that rigorously testing software is even MORE important, so well done you can have a well constructed code base.
It has also enabled a lot of vibe coded "slop" as much as I hate the term too
Petrichordates | 16 hours ago
That's like waiting for computers to fail.
dillanthumous | 13 hours ago
In a sense, they did initially. Look up Solows Paradox.
If AI follows the same trajectory there will be lots of outward signs and talk of productivity but very little statistical evidence for it.
Worth some research.
Petrichordates | 8 hours ago
Youre missing the point. Betting against AI long term is obviously a losing bet.
dillanthumous | 3 hours ago
And you didn't even attempt to engage with mine.
ComfortableJacket429 | 9 hours ago
It was never meant to be a complement. AI leaders wanted to replace us from the start.
NitroLada | 9 hours ago
Are you waiting for factories and automation to fail as well?
MrF_lawblog | 18 hours ago
They are keeping a subset of those laid off as consultants. Hopefully those consultants charge 4x but most likely not.
Maxpowr9 | 10 hours ago
So many consultants have already been caught using AI by clients which is why said industry is especially vulnerable to layoffs too. Why pay some consultant 4x the amount when AI can do that work for you? I don't think anyone is gonna feel bad for the people that work at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
FearlessPark4588 | 15 hours ago
Twitter did this before AI was a thing. I wouldn't say they're doing particularly well now, though.
SunshineSeattle | 17 hours ago
!remind me 6 months
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Viperonious | 16 hours ago
Lessons learned? What's that? And who has time for that? Lol
No_Bad_4872yy | 14 hours ago
Yup. Imagine losing your lawsuit because a lawyer cant be arsed to read a book and verify.
https://nltimes.nl/2026/02/22/dutch-lawyers-receive-warnings-using-chatgpt-cite-nonexistent-cases-court
weaponjaerevenge | 16 hours ago
Yes but why we gotta do 1-4?
wellanticipated | 16 hours ago
🫶
AntiqueFigure6 | 12 hours ago
Or forget about 5 and probably 4 and company just goes bankrupt.
Junglebook3 | 16 hours ago
In large software companies, 100% of Software Engineers I've spoken with use AI agents daily.
FearlessPark4588 | 15 hours ago
By force and with measurement of how often it's used
just_imagine_42 | 9 hours ago
Thise who use it daily know perfectly how funny the layoffs due to AI narrative is.
Junglebook3 | 9 hours ago
I agree, but the person I was responding to is simply wrong.
adiabatic_storm | 16 hours ago
AI has become extremely good within the past 2 months. Leaps and bounds better. The differences are quite extreme compared to 2025.
Claude Code alone is an absolute powerhouse, and agentic AI is crushing it across the board right now.
I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but the tech is now undeniable. These people won't be getting their jobs back.
SteveSharpe | 9 hours ago
The downvotes on Reddit won't change reality, which you have seen. The AI tools have gotten so much better in two months. A comparison to ChatGPT from 2025 isn't even relevant anymore. Imagine what it'll be by the end of 2026.
Mrikoko | 16 hours ago
This is just delusional
rraddii | 17 hours ago
This is just pure copium
ddouce | 17 hours ago
Look, it's important that some billionaires, who already have enough money to support 100 generations, get to keep even more.
4,000 people losing their livelihood is a small price to pay so that Jack Dorsey can increase his wealth front $3.8 billion to $10, $20, even $100 billion.
I mean, $3.8 billion is barely a billionaire. Have a heart.
mukavastinumb | 16 hours ago
You make Jack sound selfish. This will also help Altman, Jensen etc…
Ordinary_dude_NOT | 16 hours ago
And block was just doing fine financially, they were not even under stress. They could have also gradually reduced their workforce instead of such a big slash.
I know he mentioned they pressure tested this but who knows.
MikeTangoRom3o | 14 hours ago
This comment shall be framed on the biggest billboard.
BadmiralHarryKim | 6 hours ago
3.8 billion isn't even four points. How could he even show his face at the next poor person hunt?
Tofuhands25 | 16 hours ago
You do know they those 1000 people aren’t entitled to work at block right? Just like block is not entitled to the forever servitude if these 1000 had quit and worked for another company…they were handsomely paid during their time working there and on the way out.
PurpInnanet | 15 hours ago
Found a "free market" Kool aid drinker. The job market is shit. Coders are getting automated left and right. And only ONE person is gaining profit from all that slashed overhead. While every CEO in their sector is doing the same thing.
I will side with you where people need to live below their means. If you lose your job and you are in immediate shit then they aren't financially educated.
But this economy today is nothing like it used to be. This isn't the industrial revolution by a long shot. This shit is not producing as much jobs as it's taking. And the people who are left prompting continue to make shit salaries.
People shouldn't have to make "side hustles" to make ends meet. They should work more to get luxury items. Overtime used to mean money towards vacation, a new TV, home renovation. Not a small savings surplus
WheresTheSauce | 9 hours ago
How are you on an economics sub and think like this? Holy shit
Tofuhands25 | 15 hours ago
Woah no need for name calling..let’s be civil. My point was whether you employ 10 or 100 people, you shouldn’t be villainized if you as the owner decide you no longer need as much employee. Hiring and firing is not personal.
Just like when jack initially hired these thousands of employees, do you think he deserved praise? Hell no.
PalatinusG1 | 13 hours ago
We really need to care more about morality. Replacing people with AI is bullshit. Companies not only exist to make money for their owners. They are also need to provide jobs. That's the social contract: the owners make a lot of money but provide decent jobs for many people. Once that's off the table the revolution will start.
cstst | 13 hours ago
Have you ever paid somebody to do something? Did you continue paying them on a regular basis when you no longer needed them to do it? No, that would be silly. How is this any different?
These people entered into an agreement to work for block. Just like block can't force them to keep working there if they don't want to work there anymore, block isn't forced to keep employing them if they don't need them.
PalatinusG1 | 12 hours ago
Sure our system sucks right know. I hope you see the societal implications if every company start doing this? Companies need to understand economics. Without consumers with money to spend most businesses will go bancrupt pretty fast.
cstst | 12 hours ago
What exactly sucks to you about two people freely deciding to exchange things (work for money)?
There is a reason why pretty much every country that was previously Marxist/Leninist has adopted free market capitalism. It has lifted billions out of poverty. What has socialism done? Resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people over the past century.
That being said, yeah, we're entering uncharted territory. I'm not sure what the best solution is tbh. Probably some sort of a UBI or something like that. The solution isn't to force Block to employ people for no reason though. What would be the point if they aren't providing value to the company? Might as well just have them stay at home and send them a check.
Tofuhands25 | 11 hours ago
Amen to this!
PalatinusG1 | 10 hours ago
Well yes that'll be the outcome. Companies replacing people with AI or robots should be heavily taxed so a UBI is possible. The money has to come from somewhere.
devliegende | 11 hours ago
You're the one who drank the cool aid
Tofuhands25 | 13 hours ago
Is that not entitlement though? AI can bang out a design or presentation 2x faster than me. Why force the owner to use an inferior resource and pay for something he no longer wants to use aka me?
You’re injecting morality into this because you are concluding that without these jobs, then the people may suffer. While that may be true, that’s not the responsibility of the owner.
Is it just because you once worked for a company that you should be guaranteed employment as long as you want?
What’s your honest proposal?
PalatinusG1 | 12 hours ago
Who's responsibility is it that everyone can have jobs?
Tofuhands25 | 11 hours ago
If we go down the list
Employers/companies - definitely not. They hire and fire as needed regardless of profit. If they find ways to automate and scale making more money with less people, kudos to them. No obligation to hire extra people to do nothing.
Employees themselves - to an extent, we each have our own responsibility. Who wants to hire you if you bring no skills or a poor attitude? The exception is if there’s literally not enough jobs out there.
Government - probably the most responsibility? Ensure a prosperous nation. But even then that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone has a job. The desired outcome is different than the execution.
Your thoughts?
PalatinusG1 | 10 hours ago
Well I'm afraid this isn't solvable without taxing the businesses who use AI or robotics instead of human workers. You want to use AI instead of hiring people? Great: you're going to have to pay extra tax so the government can pay those people a UBI.
I just don't see a workable future where over half the jobs are gone and people are told to go fuck themselves.
Tofuhands25 | 10 hours ago
This I don’t necessarily disagree with! That’s why I was saying if the shared outcome we want is for everyone to have a financially secure future, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to have a job. UBI is def an interesting option.
devliegende | 11 hours ago
Do tell
quintanarooty | 8 hours ago
Do you work in HR?
PurpInnanet | 3 hours ago
Not anymore. I tried but when we had to fire someone who was exposing something I literally lost sleep that night. I am in no way saying HR is all that. But I wouldn't want to be in that situation again
paolilon | 16 hours ago
Companies that lay-off people because of AI lacked the good ideas to take advantage of more productivity. They are essentially saying that they don’t need better innovation, which is nuts in this timeline. It’s the equivalent of saying that “since offensive linemen are heavier than they used to be, we don’t need as many of them.”
Aromatic-Pizza-4782 | 16 hours ago
If AI is so good, why not take those productivity gains and leverage them to produce more output? Why not grow faster, take on useful but more complex features? Use the human capital you have to out grow and out compete the competition? Instead companies just lay folks off? So confusing.
rage_panda_84 | 15 hours ago
It's sort of weird that a leader in AI research, Google, has recovered to the same size workforce it had at its pandemic high. Same with Amazon and Apple. Microsoft is bigger and Meta would be except for the people laid off as part of the metaverse lol
So yeah the real companies aren't doing this. They all just did some trimming after the pandemic hiring binge (that probably got out of control). Nothing like this.
JC_Hysteria | 11 hours ago
Google has a massive customer support base and many businesses to establish and grow simultaneously.
This payments company just went from 11k to 6k employees. Seems like they’re making a statement that they will have razor-thin margins and stiff competition moving forward- so I don’t know why the market rewards this behavior. To me it signals they’re not going to grow unless the people they kept are stellar.
First few earnings reports should tell investors if it was a good move or not.
rage_panda_84 | 9 hours ago
Their stock has lost 80% of its value in the last five years due to bad bets on crypto and blockchain
This is firing those workers cause management failed
It should help the bottom line but it has nothing to do with ai
JC_Hysteria | 8 hours ago
Right, it’s many things at once. He says they’re targeting $2M gross profit per head, which would be extremely efficient if they pull it off.
My issue is with public companies trying to go this direction…knowing investors will continue to reward this behavior.
rage_panda_84 | 8 hours ago
This is rebalancing from a "startup growth in blockchain/crypto" that failed to a "long-term profitability" in Square's main business.
They don't need 40% of their engineers because those engineers were working on poorly conceived products that failed.
This is nothing new. Has absolutely nothing to do with AI (except that Square has no reasonable way to jump in on the AI fad). Investors always reward layoffs. But it's not unreasonable, they're rewarding the fact that Square has stopped pouring money into failing products.
JC_Hysteria | 7 hours ago
Are you replying to me or the [now removed] post? I didn’t say anything about AI, and don’t think it’s because of it.
Important_Habit_6957 | 12 hours ago
Amazon has been laying off software engineers heavily
bmc2 | 9 hours ago
So has Meta. And it's not just metaverse.
rage_panda_84 | 8 hours ago
according to trueup, job postings are surging, up 60% from their post-pandemic lows
Some companies might still be rebalancing, but overall the industry is seeing demand for software engineers continue to rise, and recently (in the last month or so) surge even higher.
So healthy companies (maybe the ones that aren't trying to spin a massive bad bet in blockchain) are hiring, not shedding 40% of their workforce.
Makes sense cause anyone who has used AI coding tools knows that when it works it's cool, and it's great for searching a codebase, but the hit rate for successful changes is still terrible. We're still hovering in the high 20%, maybe hitting 30% for accepted changes.
Plants-Matter | 15 hours ago
It's not confusing at all if you understand that "raw output" isn't the lever to pull to make more profit.
TraderJulz | 14 hours ago
It definitely can be
Plants-Matter | 6 hours ago
In some industries, yes.
Regarding the business we're all discussing in this post, no.
redline83 | 14 hours ago
It’s because it’s a shit company that’s just a payment processor. They don’t need to innovate now that they have captive market.
Baby_Fark | 11 hours ago
Technological advancements that increase worker productivity never benefit workers in a capitalist system.
Imagine how differently companies would be handling AI if the workers were discussing it amongst each other and voting for what to do. I bet they wouldn’t vote to fire themselves!
P.s. workers owning the means of production and using workplace democracy to make major decisions like this is what socialists call socialism.
tristeecfome | 10 hours ago
Because this is not really about AI. A bunch of tech companies overhired during the pandemic and now are having to scale back.
But instead of just saying that they grew too much and too fast, they try to blame kt on IA as a way to hype investors.
>Block, for example, employed 3,835 people by the end of 2019 and had grown its headcount to over 10,000 before Thursday’s layoffs.
So they still have more employees than in 2019, before AI was a thing.
chrisbcritter | 18 hours ago
Back in my day, a CEO would get a bad earning's report and announce layoffs to get his stock value back up. He didn't get to declare it the fault of "AI". He just had people fire a bunch of folks. But without AI, how did the diminished staff maintain productivity? They worked harder. Their jobs/lives sucked more. But often the company already had a market share and so being more efficient at automatically charging a client didn't really matter so loosing some of the staff hardly mattered.
Perhaps Block really is embracing the AI business model and it will be interesting to see how this pans out. If not for AI, however, this would feel an awful lot like a typical story of a company down-sizing during a sluggish economy.
rage_panda_84 | 15 hours ago
They went heavy into the blockchain fad and that worked out so well for them that this is the result lol
Over a 5 year period, the stock has fallen 80.2%. But yeah it's definitely AI
chrisbcritter | 9 hours ago
So they have a "visionary" CEO that looks like he sells Extacy at concerts and is obviously a deep thinker who is original but went in on the block chain because it is the next big thing. Yeah, he laid off half his company because he is brilliant and has adapted AI so innovatively that he created a new dimension in business efficiency.
If WeWork had started up now, they would have claimed to use AI innovatively to rent work from home office space.
PurpInnanet | 15 hours ago
I agree with you. I met someone who has automated their own job. I am in the middle of doing this myself (telling absolutely no one). This guy still works 30 hours a week. There is no magic "run a business" button.
What I do think this generation should start doing is accepting hourly pay and not salary. Salaries are the biggest crock of shit. If you get paid a flat rate than your time should also be flat.
Plants-Matter | 15 hours ago
Salaries are great though. Suppose you were able to automate 90 or 95% of your job and nobody noticed. Surely a salary would be better than hourly.
Salary: The less hours you work, the higher your hourly rate becomes.
Hourly: The less hours you work, the less you get paid.
DisappointedSpectre | 12 hours ago
As far as I'm concerned a salary is being paid out for certain outcomes, while an hourly wage is paying for presence.
Plants-Matter | 5 hours ago
Well put, I completely agree.
JC_Hysteria | 11 hours ago
Yeah, I’m good on that- you’re arguing for zero stability? You really don’t think an hourly wage model wouldn’t be even more levered against workers/non-owners?
You do know the only reason the 40-hour workweek exists is because most people were worked to the bone beforehand…because they didn’t have an alternative. Capital growth consistently demanded unpaid over-time.
What we really want is everyone to be skilled and incentivized to maximize the productivity of their hours- and have a reliable income stream while doing it.
Nervous-Cockroach541 | 10 hours ago
Is it more likely AI is giving 200% increased productivity, or the company is in trouble and using AI as a shareholder friendly way to coverup company or management failures. At this point if any company has to layoff employees, why not just say AI?
OddlyFactual1512 | 10 hours ago
ReturnOfBigChungus | 9 hours ago
Laying off 50% resulting in only 10% productivity loss is an absolutely brain dead take.
Nervous-Cockroach541 | 10 hours ago
So I decided to check, and the company has indeed missed 3 of it's last 4 earnings estimates. And has a P/E ratio of 27.42 which is much higher then their industry average. This is 100% the real reason behind the layoffs.
Also if a company could cut half it's labor costs for only a 10% drop in output, they all would do it. It's more complex then layoffs equal better margins. Not the least of which, it's not always clear who the top 20 and bottom 80 are.
OddlyFactual1512 | 10 hours ago
You're 100% certain you are correct, but your statement that 100% = 200% demonstrates your estimations are off by at least a factor of 2.
Nervous-Cockroach541 | 9 hours ago
Sure, I misspoke when I said "200% increased productivity" instead of "200% productivity"
If you think your amazing "UmMm AcTuAlLy" to a relatively minor and common error is some gotcha. I don't think it is, nor do I think it holds any rebuttal to the core criticisms I've raised.
Sturdily5092 | 15 hours ago
This reminds me of the signs I used to see around the office to improve morale back in the day that said something along these lines...
"In this office, we promote the incompetent, fire the good employees, and blame the hard workers."
pandizlle | 15 hours ago
This is the excuse of someone whose business was failing, needed some way to cut costs dramatically while not losing investors with a convenient excuse to tell them.
Any company who uses AI tools wouldn’t fire a single soul over it. It’s a tool.
ironteddybear | 17 hours ago
If Block is anything like Dorsey’s other company Twitter, they probably just figured out that 40% of the staff don’t really do anything productive. AI layoffs may just be an excuse for poor management and overhiring.
Mobile-Boysenberry53 | 16 hours ago
But do they know which 40%?
AtlQuon | 15 hours ago
The 40% that is actually working, trying to improve, addressing issues that need to be solved and are mostly not cheap to do. Those are sacked asap as they are annoying for companies. I have seen it in real life, 'improvement' leading to 60% reduction in work done and nobody cared because shareholders were happy. CEO/company logic is fun.
SteveSharpe | 9 hours ago
In my 25+ year career I've seen many periods of layoffs in companies I've worked at and I've never seen it impact the top performers. I see no reason why this AI world will be very different. The top workers will use AI to 10x their own output, and the ones who were just sitting back waiting to be told what to do won't be needed anymore.
devliegende | 11 hours ago
People who work hard, improve things and address issues don't have to worry about layoffs. They'll find another job in no time. Companies are always looking for people like that.
andtheniansaid | 11 hours ago
have you seen the tech job market? If layoffs massively outpace new jobs, then no, they won't find a job in no time.
devliegende | 11 hours ago
Tech has over hired and over paid for years. Probably this is just a painful transition to normality.
Smile-Nod | 9 hours ago
He had the company send him weekly updates, he dumped it into an LLM, and decided based on that.
No joke.
rraddii | 17 hours ago
Never forget when everyone swore twitter would collapse tomorrow and it was pretty much fine
averysmallbeing | 17 hours ago
Imagine thinking twitter is fine, lol
rraddii | 17 hours ago
Functioning yes. For what? Probably not great things. But it works
Individual_Laugh1335 | 17 hours ago
How is twitter as a product in any worse shape today than pre firings? Like it or not grok is also one of the top 4 SOTA AI models and they’ve also done a good job of integrating that into their product. There are a buncha reasons to hate on Elon but don’t let your biases get in the way of rational thought.
artificial_bluebird | 17 hours ago
What? X is completely run down, it's a dumpster fire. Network effect is really the only thing that keeps this thing alive at this point. Before the firing, when it was still Twitter, it was a very usable and fun portal to be on.
Individual_Laugh1335 | 16 hours ago
What are the major things that have made it into a bad product it post mass layoffs?
4Looper | 16 hours ago
Bots. The bot problem has exploded since Elon took over. The algorithm is heavily politically skewed to the point that it's extremely noticeable. Content moderation is gone now too which makes the bot problem even worse - the website is a cesspool more than ever before.
rage_panda_84 | 16 hours ago
It's bleeding daily users and it's not even the most used microblogging site anymore. And compared to actual social media? It's nothing.
It's filled with bots, spam and Nazis. American humans are like 5% of the users.
WheresTheSauce | 8 hours ago
You are being obtuse. You know they mean in terms of technical functionality.
averysmallbeing | 8 hours ago
1.) are you of the opinion that all the staff laid off were involved in technical functionality? They were not.
2.) technical functionality issues of something that was originally functioning take time, considerable time, to become apparent. Like how losing half the bolts from a car might take a long time to produce an accident, but still be ultimately responsible.
WheresTheSauce | 8 hours ago
Twitter as a product has become worse due to terrible executive decisions, not a reduced workforce. It has been 3.5 years.
If there was one thing which Musk was vindicated about in this whole deal with Twitter (and it may literally be only one thing), it was that their staff was extremely bloated.
Blackonblackskimask | 16 hours ago
The app fucking blows.
Magikarpical | 15 hours ago
Twitter doesn't process billions of dollars in transactions every quarter. i recently left the company, there's a lot of manual work around refunds, known product issues that require engineers to change data in production, etc. there will be very quick product degradation and more customers will leave their products.
devliegende | 11 hours ago
Musk rolled it into XAi to hide the fact that it was a failed investment and he rolled XAi into SpaceX to hide another failure
rage_panda_84 | 16 hours ago
Threads has more daily users than Twitter now. It was never a very profitable business but it's now slowly collapsing
ringobob | 16 hours ago
No one who actually knew what they were talking about thought it would collapse immediately, and there were a few close calls that made me wonder if I was wrong and things really were that unstable.
For a mature product like Twitter, so long as you leave it alone, it could probably run for years with a skeleton staff to work random edge cases that pop up. Making changes is when things break. And indeed, a bunch of components and subsystems that they were actively working on had very public breakages.
With fewer developers, you need fewer devops, fewer QAs, fewer SREs. If you cut too many people, you have less ability to fix a problem, and less ability to create a problem.
That doesn't mean problems aren't accumulating, nor that they haven't already shown up. They have.
They've also fallen far short of where Musk said they'd be years ago. Like he was talking about people having their "whole financial life" on Twitter by the end of '24. Musk has a known problem with over promising, but he made it worse by cutting so many people.
Digd21 | 13 hours ago
All of these companies that are "cutting so many jobs because of AI" are just downsizing because their business not viable or they are just downsizing. I work for a 500 billion plus market cap company and everyone is talking about AI but its not even close to taking people's jobs yet besides maybe technical writers or things like that. Everyone is just pretending AI is doing shit for them.
Don't get me wrong AI is gonna change everything eventually but I am so tired of reading so many of these bullshit statements on how 50% of white collar workers are out of a job within a year... give me a break... people dont understand how slow and terrible corporations are at changing things in their business
Rumunj | 11 hours ago
It's hilarious that it worked. It's a failing company in a downward spiral for years. He comes out saying oh trust us were doing great, those layoffs show how great we do and market and people online buy this lol. Even here people discuss it like it's anything else then a nicely wrapped PR spin.
forgotmyemail19 | 9 hours ago
I hate to be the nay sayer, but I think a lot of ppl are coping in this comment section or just saying things to make themselves feel better. I have more of a negative outlook. I think these companies will fire 50-60% of their staff, the AI will do their jobs perfectly "fine" not great, there will be a fuck ton of errors, but like we just saw with Paramount, they don't care about the money anymore. They have an agenda and it's full steam ahead. I just want to know how these businesses survive in 10+ years when all of their consumers work at grocery stores or construction sites and can't afford any of their products. It amazes me how shortsighted some of the "smartest people in the world" are.
TaskForceCausality | 9 hours ago
>>how these businesses survive in 10+ years when all of their consumer work at grocery stores or construction sites
They’ll sell to other businesses. The world economy will essentially regress to Ancient Rome - the middle class will end, leaving two broad segments of society. Varying degrees of poor, and a small elite controlling nearly all of the capital.
Smile-Nod | 9 hours ago
Only if their businesses are stagnant.
Block hasn’t changed its revenue much. It doubled its workforce during 0 interest rates after COVID.
It was heavily invested in crypto, which just crashed.
Its stock price is down 75% since 5 years ago when they staffed up.
It’s losing payment market share to Stripe and Toast.
If AI didn’t exist, the outcome would be the same. “Do more with less”
heyiambob | 13 hours ago
Man I’ve been saying this in several threads lately, everyone seems to be in total denial. But as someone at a large tech company that has adopted many of these enterprise AI tools, it’s the real deal. Once you know how to use them to build internal apps, dashboards, and automations, it absolutely causes redundancies. These kinds of decisions aren’t on a whim.
TaskForceCausality | 9 hours ago
>>everyone seems to be in total denial
In fairness, I understand why. Denial is an easier reaction than accepting the high probability in ten years- and probably less- humans will not be doing “white collar” work anymore.
That’s a future with a lot of question marks. What will society look like in an economy where human labor has no value in the knowledge economy? What future will everyone’s kids have to look forward to? Even the experts can’t build consensus on what generative AI means for the future.
Meanwhile, Sally Smith in Des Moines Iowa can barely keep up with day to day life as it is. So it’s easier to pretend AI is a scam bubble. Scams come and go, and are much easier to understand than seismic economic shifts.
Typicalusrname | 12 hours ago
If it wasn’t for investors sentiment and the share price, they’d have just done it quietly. Some companies refuse to open new reqs and shrink through attrition silently
Blackout38 | 9 hours ago
This whole AI excuse is just a cover up for the toxic cultures and bloat that has built up in many of these companies. There is personal testimony out there from former employees that saw the writing on the wall and got out but look not further than just the revenue per employee graphed over time to see how they easily are no longer valuable.
Smile-Nod | 9 hours ago
When you ask Claude if Dorsey is covering for a stagnant and failed business, it says it’s likely.
If he trusts AI so much, maybe we should too.
Block hasn’t changed its revenue much in the last few years
It doubled its workforce during 0 interest rates after COVID.
It was heavily invested in crypto, which just crashed.
Its stock price is down 75% since 5 years ago when they staffed up.
It’s losing payment market share to Stripe and Toast.
Content-Syrup9375 | 15 hours ago
It’s so that he can have more money for himself to support his philanthropic endeavours like sex assignment hormone drugs for African albino transgender babies.