> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.

I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned

edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)

> Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric.

They literally did that. The irony is that the top comment is pointing out (correctly, IMO) how Block had all these people working on speculative projects for years and none of them really panned out.

The people let go can form their own companies. I don't believe anyone has a guarantee to have a high paying white collar job until they choose to retire.

Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."

>If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market?

To avoid laying them off in next year's job market.

Dripping a 10% cut every year for the next four years when you *know* that you're going to do it is cowardice.

"Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric."

Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.

Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.

> If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that

We are no longer in a zero-interest rate environment, so I think those experiments are more costly than they were a few years go

You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.

Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.

If you think 5 months is bad, try none. Job loss is a reality. Don’t become emotionally invested in it never happening to you.

No, the job market is dead outside of implementing workflows for AI.

Most C levels adhere to the “cattle, not pets” idea too.

obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp

some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out

Is this actual five months severance? Or five months base pay with no vesting?

Most people are making >50% of their income in RSUs.

Maybe I'm a big capitalist, but 5 months of severance seems very generous; a job hasn't been a commitment that the company will take care of you forever in several generations. Covering you until the middle of this year should go a long way, and yeah the job market is messed up, but at least it's not mid-November where holidays mean hiring falls off the rails.

Wrong? A company doesn't owe anyone a job. Either they need the employee or they don't.

> If the profits are still up and growing

Block has never really made a real profit. These layoffs are basically saying the company is no longer in moonshot mode and it’s now in the extraction phase of whatever it has, which means increase prices for whatever it sells and decrease expenses, i.e. payroll.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XYZ/block/net-inco...

Because they’re not running a charity

because that doesn't increase shareholder value, at least in the short term, which is all anyone cares about now.

More profits, line mustn't just go up, line must go higher. Giving away the devices is like saying "we're replacing both you and your device with AI and it's not like that device will help you get another job in this market anyway, good luck lol."