Jack Dorsey Laying Off More Tech Employees at Block After 4000 Last Spring - AI Is Killing Jobs

Eli the Computer Guy (0:00)

Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy. I mean, it's not even funny anymore. I mean, I do giggle. I do giggle. It's just because I'm a sick fuck.

But I do feel that the whole death of the tech industry, it's not as amusing as it was like a year ago. So one of the things I've been talking about for years, again, 10, 11 years at this point in time, is basically that the technology industry has gotten bloated, right? We have just gotten more and more quote unquote technology professionals, basically people being hired for technology positions, and then basically doing God knows what. I've been talking about this since 2016, 2017 It got worse during the COVID bubble, and basically now these companies are just cutting employees left, right, and center, and it's absolutely brutal. They want to say it's because of artificial intelligence. Again, I will tell you it's not because of artificial intelligence. The reality is they just have way too many employees. Look, if you have a department or a division, and you close that department or division, and let's say that's 10,000 employees, that makes sense. When you're looking at a company like Block, so this is Square, basically payment processing, when they can dump 40 per 40, 40% of their employees basically in a couple of month time spans, and we're talking about 4,000 employees they just got rid of, that's not AI. That is just a massive amount of over hiring. And the worst part is, apparently the companies aren't done yet, and this is one of the things I really want to warn you folks about, right? You see all these layoffs, and the important thing to understand is, this is not even the end of the beginning. This is barely the beginning of the beginning, right? So basically, right now, they're eliminating employees while the economy is good, before artificial intelligence is really showing the value of artificial intelligence. Now, to be clear, when I talk about AI, there is a massive amount of value that we will be extracting from AI. There is a massive amount of value that we will be extracting from automation. But we are just simply not... We are not there to this degree yet. Like, I'm not saying that jobs aren't being eliminated because of AI. It's just not this many. It's just not this many, right? It's just not how it works. So one of the things we're seeing right now is we've had one... We've had the first round of layoffs for a lot of these companies before the AI revolution has hit, and before the macroeconomic forces have hit, these companies are still doing well. Not only are these companies still doing good, these companies are still growing, right? Revenue for a block went up by 22 percent, and they're going through the second round of layoffs this year, which is the brutal thing. So basically, what's going to happen is we're going to have a round of layoffs, they're going to have another round of layoffs. I bet you we're going to see another one to two round of layoffs before AI hits, before the economy goes to hell. And then, and then, then we're actually going to start seeing the real layoffs happen. If we take a look at this, this is coming from Yahoo Finance and many other places, a block cutting more jobs months after Jack Dorsey's massive AI-driven layoffs. And one of the things to be thinking about too with Jack Dorsey is Jack Dorsey is supposed to be the friendly CEO. He's supposed to be the happy CEO. He's supposed to be the geeks CEO, as he's dumping a whole bunch of geeks into the garbage, right? Because again, it's just, remember with all these CEOs, they're just lemmings. There's this idea that they're visionaries. There's this idea that they're leaders. There's this idea that they're thinkers or whatever else. No. These bastards have simply monopolized key sectors of the modern civilization. They are rent-seeking on those key sectors, and beyond that, they are lemmings. They do what everybody else does, because that is what everybody else is doing. Block cutting more jobs months after Jack Dorsey's massive a quote-unquote, I would say quote-unquote, AI-driven layoffs. Block, the parent company of Cash App and Square, continues to cut jobs months after CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to eliminate nearly half of the company's workforce. So they already eliminated 40% of the workforce, and now they're getting rid of even more. Posts on LinkedIn and other social media platforms suggest another round of layoffs is underway, though the cuts appear more targeted than February's sweeping reductions. Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, it may prompt questions about whether the February restructuring was enough to achieve Dorsey's vision of a much smaller AI-powered organization. The reports are notable because Dorsey explicitly said the February cuts would be immediate rather than a gradual process stretching over months or years. At the time, he said he had two options, reduce staff gradually as AI transform the business or make the difficult decisions up front. He chose the latter, arguing that repeated rounds of layoffs would damage employee morale, company focus, and shareholder confidence. That's one of the things I'm interested too about this, is with these continuous rounds of layoffs. Like we saw this with meta, right? Meta, doing layoffs after layoffs after layoffs, restructuring, all of that kind of stuff. And one of the things I've talked about before, again, when you have employees, employees, wait for it, are human beings. They've got mortgages, they've got families, they've got kids in schools, they've got wants and needs and all that kind of thing. And so the reality is that sometimes companies have to do layoffs. That's the fact of the matter. Sometimes you just gotta get rid of a metric crap of people. And the fact of the matter is, you have no idea how all those people are gonna do once they've been laid off. Some of them are gonna go create another startup company, and they're gonna become billionaires. A lot of them are gonna become homeless. That's the thing, right? When you do a massive round of layoffs, there are children that next year are going to be homeless, directly associated with the layoffs that occurred. But that's just kinda how it is, right? It's a capitalist system. That's how it goes. One of the interesting things, though, is when you start thinking about doing layoffs, a big question as a manager or a business owner is how to do it in such a way that is an incredibly painful point in time, but then the company can move on. Right? You look at the employees, and you say to the employees, look, that was incredibly painful. Look, that was incredibly hard. Look, I know, I know there is anger. I know there is hard feelings. I know you think some people should have been kept and other people should have been fired. I know you disagree with specific decisions that we made, but here's the deal. As the boss, as the owner of the company, I made the fucking decision. It is my job to make the fucking decision so that you can continue to pay your fucking mortgage. When you sit here and bitch and whine and complain and moan about what a fuck up I am, realize you're bitching, whining, and moaning as your fucking mortgage continues to get paid. It is really amazing in this modern world that employees only notice when people are being fired or laid off or whatever else.