Block signed a friend of mine, they quit their other job, then block was like whoops layoffs including people like this person who hadn’t even started. Super unethical.
Counterintuitively, systems with heavier employment protections can make it more common to cut recent hires.
Employment protections usually come with a probationary period before they kick in, so employers can remove bad hires early. This creates an incentive to remove new hires before their probationary period is up if they're showing any signs they might not be the best candidate for the job.
Even when new hires are good and the company wants to keep them, heavy employment protections favor longer term employees. If the business environment changes and they need to reduce headcount their hands may be tied in ways that require cutting the new hires before the tenured employees. This happens a lot in labor unions, too, where tenured employees have greater standing than new hires when push comes to shove and someone needs to go, regardless of performance.
In Germany we have pretty good employment protections (I think at least!), but this would be legal too. You have a 3 month grace period where the employer can terminate the contract without giving much reason - you gotta survive this period then the protections kick in and they can’t just terminate the contract without a justification and notice period.
It sucks but I think in this case even the best protections won’t help much.
I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira.
They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful.
The net result is we're building better features faster.
I prefer prototyping to slides. The reason is it helps me understand the problem and edge cases better. Getting AI to build means you could potentially understand it even less than if you put the slides together.
Hiring talent that is passionate about delivering a quality product is more important than ever considering there are so many ways to take shortcuts now that might not be obvious until later.
Can confirm this in my portco's and a couple other peers (one of whom previously founded a major threat intel platform).
If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs.
A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also know of one F10 that's building it's own entire security platform from scratch with a team of security engineers working directly with one of the foundation model vendors.
Too many people on HN are divorced or too OOTL from some of these initiatives and then get blindsided during layoffs.
What matters now is DOMAIN EXPERIENCE. Do you understand good development principles and the problem your ICP is trying to solve and how procurement is structured? I don't need a code monkey, process sloths, and queens of the calendar. I need domain experts who can actually execute.
I listened to his podcast episode on the Sequoia podcast a few days ago. Interestingly, his argument was "we don't need middle managers" and he plans to have all 6000 employees eventually report to him.
In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.
I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".
See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.
To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.
That is insane, Block seems to be very poorly run. The headcount still seems bloated, they'll blame AI and layoff more people for their own incompetence.
After reading a book about the history of Twitter ("Hatching Twitter"), I got the impression that Jack Dorsey is a disturbed individual with a poor grasp on reality. So it's not surprising that Block is poorly run.
I met my manager when I joined once, then every 6 or 12 months for performance review (which was aggregated feedback from my peers that he took 2 minutes to talk through: "looks like you're doing fine, if you need anything, my EA can schedule more time").
PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.
If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.
Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).
Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.
The "prototypes not slides" rule works great for product decisions where the devil is in the interaction details. You can't really argue about a flow in a slide deck — once someone clicks through a prototype, the discussion shifts from opinion to observation.
But I wonder how they handle discussions that are inherently abstract — pricing changes, infrastructure migration plans, org restructuring. Forcing a prototype there would just produce theater. The real insight is probably not "prototypes good, slides bad" but "stop presenting things that should be experienced.
I went to a meeting with a prototype once. It was a single happy path with stubbed data, coded in the most naïve way possible. It was, after all, a prototype just to give a feel for what the interactions would be like.
It put enormous pressure on delivery, since leadership had "already seen it working, how hard could it be to make it to production?"
It's funny (tragicomic) to watch the industry learn the same lessons over and over again (such as "'cheap' overseas outsourcing requires unrealistically precise specs otherwise what would take minutes will take days")
This one sounds like "...and this is precisely why we started using wireframes"
Did the same thing early in my career. Built a quick bootstrap website with like 5 pages and all the data was static. The backend was a year off. It was great for end users but the non-IT managers were dumb. Same issue about seeing something working and expecting the world.
Prototypes of what? What new products came out of Block in the past six years since pandemic? This makes it sound like Block is a place of innovations when it’s just a rent seeking enterprise.
If Block were experiencing rapid productivity improvements from AI why is their flagship Square product still worse than Toast? Toast is eating their lunch day after day.
Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions?
So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supposed to care?
Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become...
BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews!
Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...
Musk taking over Twitter took a lot of the spotlight off of Dorsey, as though it wasn't already a toxic plaxe. He got a second chance in the public eye to be the visionary that's "one of us" and he's doing his best to blow it
https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577735
These clowns live in a dreamworld created by their PAs and cronies
Employment protections usually come with a probationary period before they kick in, so employers can remove bad hires early. This creates an incentive to remove new hires before their probationary period is up if they're showing any signs they might not be the best candidate for the job.
Even when new hires are good and the company wants to keep them, heavy employment protections favor longer term employees. If the business environment changes and they need to reduce headcount their hands may be tied in ways that require cutting the new hires before the tenured employees. This happens a lot in labor unions, too, where tenured employees have greater standing than new hires when push comes to shove and someone needs to go, regardless of performance.
Hiring talent that is passionate about delivering a quality product is more important than ever considering there are so many ways to take shortcuts now that might not be obvious until later.
If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs.
A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also know of one F10 that's building it's own entire security platform from scratch with a team of security engineers working directly with one of the foundation model vendors.
Too many people on HN are divorced or too OOTL from some of these initiatives and then get blindsided during layoffs.
What matters now is DOMAIN EXPERIENCE. Do you understand good development principles and the problem your ICP is trying to solve and how procurement is structured? I don't need a code monkey, process sloths, and queens of the calendar. I need domain experts who can actually execute.
In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.
See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.
To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.
It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.
But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.
PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.
If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.
Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).
Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.
But I wonder how they handle discussions that are inherently abstract — pricing changes, infrastructure migration plans, org restructuring. Forcing a prototype there would just produce theater. The real insight is probably not "prototypes good, slides bad" but "stop presenting things that should be experienced.
It put enormous pressure on delivery, since leadership had "already seen it working, how hard could it be to make it to production?"
Never again.
This one sounds like "...and this is precisely why we started using wireframes"
That's exactly what you have to do for the CEO class
Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions?
So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supposed to care?
Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become...
BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews!
Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...
I wonder what he'll think about these vibecoded prototypes and if it's more thinking or less thinking
2 months ago they were still using PowerPoints? Jesus no wonder they had to lay so many people off. What the fuck is going on over there?