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Inside Rolling Layoffs at Block Under Jack Dorsey
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Employees report declining morale at Block as layoffs continue. Workers say performance anxiety is high and AI tools are mandated for productivity. Company officials remain silent on the situation.
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Business
San Francisco: After hundreds of workers lost their jobs in early February from Block, a company owned by Jack Dorsey, many remaining employees feel worried and stressed. They say the work environment has become tense. People worry about their jobs daily. Performance anxiety keeps workers on edge. Management now requires workers to use artificial intelligence tools. Some say this focus on AI is hurting work quality.
Block runs two major services. Square helps businesses process payments. Cash App lets people send money to each other. Jack Dorsey created Block in 2009 after helping start Twitter earlier.
Workers say spirits at the company are very low. One employee wrote to Dorsey during a company meeting that morale is worse than ever in four years. Many workers feel they cannot plan their lives because they might lose jobs next week.
The company began layoffs this month. These cuts could affect one in ten employees across the company. Before this, about 11,000 people worked at Block. Instead of firing everyone at once, managers are slowly letting people go over several weeks. The process will continue until the end of this month.
After the first round of cuts, Arnaud Weber who leads engineering at Block sent an email. He said the layoffs were about performance, not saving money. Many workers disagree with this message. They say management should be honest about why people are being let go.
In his email Weber wrote that some workers failed to meet role expectations. He said decisions came after reviews of worker performance at each job level.
Workers at Block must email Jack Dorsey every week about their work. Dorsey uses artificial intelligence to read and summarize these thousands of messages. In the recent company meeting Dorsey said workers often mention three things in their emails. They worry about more layoffs coming. They feel performance anxiety. They argue about using AI tools to work faster versus keeping code quality high.
During the meeting Dorsey said layoffs happened because many workers were not trying hard enough. He called them people who were “phoning it in.” He told remaining workers they must use AI tools or Block might fall behind other companies.
One current Block employee said requiring people to use AI tools from the top down is crazy thinking. The worker said if the tools worked well everyone would already use them.