title: Jack Dorsey lays off 4,000, says others will do same 'within the next year'
author: u/abrownn
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/technology
published: 2026-02-27T16:28:07+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rgbbzr/jackdorseylaysoff4000saysotherswill_do/
word_count: 464
Link: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/jack-dorsey-block-layoffs-21944033.php
Score: 3337 | Comments: 481 | Subreddit: r/technology
Top Comments
u/bbzzdd (926 pts):
Dude definitely microdoses at work.
u/Sasquatchgoose (1418 pts):
I guess the hype for fintech is dying off
u/mowotlarx (524 pts):
Doesn't that just signal to us that these companies are failing and need extra money quick? Not that they've become more productive or profitable. This is a huge red flag.
u/MagicBobert (534 pts):
This definitely has nothing to do with the $1B worth of crypto his company bought a year ago that is down 45% since then.
Yep it’s definitely AI.
u/dontKair (68 pts):
Dorsey admitted on Twitter that he over hired for this company
u/Reasonable-Nose7813 (548 pts):
Look how proud he is to lay off 4000 ppl. The level of coldness is amazing
u/benthamthecat (87 pts):
Circling the drain, but it will never be his fault when the company finally dies, always some external " unforeseen " event and never ever incompetenct management.
u/jdlyga (75 pts):
Between 2019 and 2025, Block’s headcount grew 2.5x from about 4,000 employees to over 10,000.
And there's your real answer.
u/Tearakan (163 pts):
He lost a ton on bitcoin. Dude is trying to cover his losses.
u/know_limits (19 pts):
If you’re managing your workforce closely and you find excesses, then you would trim it as you go. If you find that you suddenly have twice the people you need then you’ve been asleep at the wheel.
u/w1n5t0nM1k3y (70 pts):
If you can lay off that much staff and still get things done, then you were probably very overstaffed before and I wonder why you ever hired the people in the first place.
AI isn't good enough at this point that it can replace 40% your workforce with it and not have any ill effects.
If this chart is anywhere near accurate, it looks like they went from 5500 to a high of almost 13000 employees in 3 yer. Maybe this is just a correction back to a more sane level of employees for this company.
u/sarduchi (57 pts):
Because he's right about so many things... /s
u/NefariousnessAble736 (13 pts):
Going to work for him next time will be very unappealing for a lot of people
u/axotrax (12 pts):
His beard sucks and he sucks
u/woohooguy (11 pts):
Next news story will be a major security breach at his companies because AI.
u/manachar (29 pts):
When capitalist tell you that technology will improve things by increasing productivity freeing up humans to do bigger and better things they seem to always forget about history.
Technology, when captured by an ownership class, always hurts the workers.
It isn’t used to make your job better. It’s used to make you do more and pay you less. Worst part is your labor is being used to fund the technology used to keep you trapped.
u/cohojonx (9 pts):
A person I worked with told me that companies purposely overstaff so when they get in trouble they have insurance and get rid of people to make the numbers work. I thought he was crazy but it makes me wonder.
u/colcob (16 pts):
More to the point, what the hell is Block, and how did it employ 10,000 people?
u/VVrayth (8 pts):
The news here is that Jack Dorsey had more than 4,000 employees.
u/NMe84 (8 pts):
"Others will do the same within the next year" is a cute way to try and reject responsibility for uprooting a small village's worth of people's lives.
u/MarzipanThick1765 (30 pts):
"thank you for building the machines that replaced you, now please fuck off" - yours truly, Jack
u/[deleted] (6 pts):
These piece of shit tech bros need to be taken in hand. There’s absolutely no reason why the majority had to be slave to these few oligarchs assholes.
u/Fluid-Layer-33 (6 pts):
Who is going to buy these tech billionaires shitty products when no one has jobs anymore? I hope all of these companies crash and burn.
u/aninjacould (6 pts):
Block share price jumped 20% after this announcement. At this point, laying off employees and blaming AI is a pump and dump scheme. CEOs are doing a disservice to their shareholders if they don't do it.
u/monkeysknowledge (6 pts):
I think AI is overhyped, but I know it’s starting to affect the job market.
u/Deer_Investigator881 (22 pts):
I actually agree. Others will definitely follow. 24% stock bump AND less expenses on humans is too good for most boards to pass up
u/GoodExciting7745 (22 pts):
“Learn to code” is gonna get replaced with “Learn to clean toilets”
u/_gadgetFreak (6 pts):
Wasn't this guy against another crony capitalist for firing employees from Twitter?
u/gdj11 (6 pts):
Fired 4k people and then bought nearly $7 million in bitcoin. These assholes don’t give a shit about other people.
u/Chaos_Theory1989 (6 pts):
I hope AI implodes.
u/CandidCat5921 (7 pts):
I’m in FAANG. What I find really odd is AI has so many people saying it’s not a real threat, and people are lying about it. But that doesn’t match up at all with what I’m seeing internally at a major tech company where I’ve been a developer for ~20 years.
For those who have gone “all in” on AI we’re seeing developer productivity improvements that are like 3-4x what people were capable of prior to the latest generation of models. But I think what a lot of the naysayers don’t realize is it still takes quite a bit of interaction. If you expect to be able to write a couple of sentences in a single prompt and get clean/performant/secure code work on a complex project back out… you’re dreaming, and when it doesn’t work you’ll say “AI sucks”. But for the devs that have interactive sessions with AI to guide it and improve the code? They will run laps around any engineer not using AI. What used to take a senior dev 2 days can now take a couple of hours with a model like Claude Opus 4.6 and a session of back and forth with the AI.
Where it gets a bit ominous for juniors is AI scales much better for more experienced developers. It’s easier to spot mistakes and fix them. That means our junior engineers are seeing productivity boosts, but the gap between a junior and a senior in terms of deliveries is widening immensely. We’re basically at the point where every senior can have the capability of 2-3x extra juniors on their project, and it’s all “free” in terms of extra work to them. It’s a weird world, but I can tell you internally at one of the most well known software companies in the world, more and more senior engineers now prefer giving work “to” AI rather than a junior developer.
So what does that mean for the software industry? It means as adoption spreads, you’re going to see more and more companies pull the moves Dorsey’s company did. They’ll look at productivity, see 3-4x improvement in developers, and realize if they cut half of their developers, on paper they still have a huge performance improvement.
I think the short sightedness is the 3-4x performance improvement comes from things that are streamlined. When a major problem comes up that needs hardcore non-intuitive debugging/strategy to solve, that performance often improvement starts falling drastically. So the engineers become more stressed, because now instead of spending 80% of their time designing stuff and writing code, they end up spending like 80% of their time dealing with issues and the “non fun” stuff. It’s going to lead to a lot of burnout across the industry.