[salviati]

It might actually be that they mean what they say.

If you look at the numbers, this doesn’t resemble a company cutting because it’s in trouble. Block is profitable, gross profit has been growing double-digits year over year, and they’re guiding roughly ~18% gross profit growth into 2026 with strong expected expansion in adjusted operating income and EPS. That’s not a balance-sheet emergency.

You can argue they overhired in 2020–2022 and are normalizing. That’s plausible. But the financials don’t suggest a company scrambling to survive. Cutting that aggressively while guiding strong forward growth is unusual if the only goal were short-term margin repair.

So while “it’s AI” can sound like PR, the numbers at least make it credible that this is a structural efficiency move rather than a distress signal.

[fortzi]

I don’t know… If the company is so healthy and has some nice financial buffer, I would expect the increased productivity due to AI to be used for more revenue generation. So either they don’t know how to translate all the quality hires they got into (enough) revenue, they can’t afford it, or maybe they they hired too fast to maintain quality :shrug: That’s my read at least

[fhd2]

It likely has to do with changed investor preferences. In the boom years, it was OK to grow at all costs, make money whenever. Nowadays investors are looking to cash out earlier, from what I observe. Gotta find ways to make the stock move up in that environment, cost-cutting-because-AI seems to work right now.

I'm not 100% convinced it means they gave up and are trying to cash out. It could also be that they just struggled to integrate all the people in a meaningful way, even if they're all really good. Having grown a company from a hand full of people to 250, I more than once fantasized about going back down to ~100. Scaling companies well is hard. 10k, I can't even imagine.

[vimda]

Profitable, and yet missed their revenue targets in Q3, causing their stock to tumble. That's an emergency. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-06/dorsey-s-...

[bionaut]

Or it just really is AI.

Maybe Dario Amodei saying this tsunami is coming and people are arguing it is not a tsunami and just a trick of the light are wrong.

We have had a giant bubble in white collar bullshit jobs the last 15 years and AI is going to pop that bubble incredible fast.

That doesn't mean the brilliant programmer is going to be replaced by Claude Code. The brilliant programmer type + AI what is going to do the popping, put more people out of work and massively gain from it financially themselves.

In other words, an extension of the same process that has been going on for the last 30 years.

[kevml]

There’s definitely going to be a shift over time. But it’s clearly not here just yet. So why preemptively lay off anyone? Isn’t that inefficient?

[Octoth0rpe]

> But it’s clearly not here just yet.

That's not clear to me, and apparently not to Block.

> There’s definitely going to be a shift over time.

Yep, and as the transition happens, it'll probably be bell-shaped. Someone will be on the left side of the bell, and someone will be on the right side. Block has chosen to be on the left side.

[palmotea]

> We have had a giant bubble in white collar bullshit jobs the last 15 years and AI is going to pop that bubble incredible fast.

Even if they are "bullshit jobs," they are what keeps food on the table for many people.

So the question is, what's bullshit about them? Are they bullshit because the capitalists could keep more money to themselves? Or are they bullshit because there are more socially beneficial jobs those people could be doing?

At some point, with increasing automation, "bullshit jobs" are going to be increasingly necessary, without radical changes in social or economic structure. Without them, you might as well just start sending the unemployed workers to death camps to be culled (though capitalism isn't so kind, and prefers to cull workers through slow deaths of neglect).

[_DeadFred_]

The despising drug addicts and welfare moms being supported by 'productive people' has now spread to despising working people making six figures. The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.

[palmotea]

> The thought seems to be there are elites/productive types that deserve it all, and the rest are just parasites and fuck 'em.

Yeah, the misanthropic individualism is really getting out of hand.

Also, the irony is a lot of people who imagine themselves as "elites/productive types" are going to find out too late that they actually aren't.