It's a bird! It's a plane! ... It's a Blog!

Well, here I go again.

In my last post, I explained why I moved off of Substack. In this post… I don’t really know what to do lol.

A part of me thinks maybe I should go through how I made this site.

A part of me thinks that I should talk about something more political since the State of the Union was this week.

A part of me thinks I should write about my current things I’m up to (I’m working on moving my office out of the garage and back into the house but have to do a TON of clean up around the house and in the garage before I can make that a reality… and it’s a real exercise in “what are the things I actually need versus the things I keep because our society is built around consumption”).

And then, there’s a larger part of me that thinks, with the layoffs at Block happening, it’s probably best that I talk more about layoffs, AI, and my feelings around how the tech industry is really operating.

I’ve written previously about how I feel about AI and layoffs, but I have a very visceral reaction to this round of layoffs that is even more pointed than it has been in the past.

I think that it’s a combination of reasons, not limited to 1) Jack Dorsey being an OG of the “I fucked up the internet because I’m a giant piece of shit” Olympics (this coming from someone who has used probably every product the guy has built and been on the early adopter side of many of them… he’s constantly talking a good game while being an absolute giant pile of human garbage every time he has to make a hard decision). 2) I have a lot of experience in the payments space so this feels like a direct slap in the face to everyone I’ve worked with who is responsible for making our payments ecosystem 3) AI as a scapegoat 4) Executives over hiring and then making the people they hired suffer for it. 5) the slavish way we adhere to the quarterly earnings cycle.

I don’t need to tackle all of these, especially Jack Dorsey. You can read any number of screeds right now about his absentee leadership, his lack of ability to be a good leader, etc. He doesn’t understand privacy while also running large financial technology companies. He’s got a great beard, and… that’s about the nicest thing I can say about him :)

It’s also not helpful for me to call out the financial services friends I have who are impacted — and let’s make this clear, you’re not just impacted if you’re laid off. They’re reducing the number of total jobs available in the industry. Because of that this will affect ANYONE in the payments or fintech spaces, because now it’s harder to leave your current role, it’s harder to get raises, it harder to get promotions, and it’s harder to keep your job. We have a glut of talent and lack of opportunities for that talent.

And I could go deep into that but I think it’s a byproduct of the three items I’m going to focus on more — AI as a scapegoat, Execs making mistakes and employees paying for it, and the slavish adherence to quarterly earnings.

Let’s start with AI as a scapegoat.

I have had a lot of opinions about AI and not all of them are in line with one another. And that’s because AI is in a really conflicted space at the moment.

There’s some obvious ways that AI is actually helpful/useful (for instance, I built this blog with claude code. Not only did we build it together, we built the integrations I needed, we built the automations I wanted, we made it look more like my vibe… it was really helpful as a tool to get me off of substack).

There’s some obvious ways that AI is odious and harmful (stealing content, disenfranchising creators, spying on people, launching weapons without human involvement, water and energy usage, etc).

But the thing that AI isn’t is a tool that makes it so we need fewer employees. It’s just not there yet. There are a ton of great uses that obviously can accelerate the value that individuals are providing, but they’re not able to replace the things that are actually driving value.

Value isn’t driven by lines of code, code quality, cicd pipelines, or anything else that is a technical metric that you can use to say that someone’s job can be replaced by AI. It’s also not driven by reducing headcount for the sake of saving money.

Value is driven when you put people first and identify what they will need to want to use your product and then deliver on those desires. You can’t do that with AI because AI isn’t a person. It’s a tool. Can it help take a lot of unrelated data and turn it into a more specific analysis that shows where to invest time and effort? Maybe! But even then you need to validate what the AI is telling you! You need a “human in the loop”. But what we’re saying is “we don’t need all these people” and it’s bullshit.

Sure, claude code was good enough to build this site, but is it good enough to build an enterprise grade payments system without human oversight? Would you want to trust claude, or chat gpt, or god forbid grok with your financial future? I sure wouldn’t.

And, as I said earlier… I’m a tech early adopter, and I wouldn’t trust any of these tools to build anything more complicated than a text based web application without any human intervention.

I’m not saying people are perfect, or always build the best systems (you can see that looking around at any tech platform lol), but my point is that people being involved at least lets me know that there’s a responsible party that can own their work. If square messes up my payment, I can call the company and hold them accountable. But, if claude screws up on behalf of square, who owns that mistake? Is it Block? Is it Anthropic? Is it me for trusting it? Is it insured by FDIC if it’s built by AI?

I’m not saying I won’t use the tools, obviously I do! And I find utility in them! But the idea that you can remove half your workforce because of AI is a farce and should be treated as such.

The next topic is the execs making decisions, but their employees paying for them… Literally all the articles I’m reading about this Block layoff surround the idea that Jack “overhired”. But more pointedly it’s that he overhired during a time when capital was cheap, and now that it’s no longer cheap, he’s “overhired”.

Let’s just think about the hubris it takes to be in his position.

He’s being positioned as taking a conciliatory tone, and his (admittedly) generous package for folks being laid of is being lauded… but in the end, he’s admitting that he made a mistake as the person running the company. He hired big when it was cheap, and now that it’s not cheap it doesn’t make sense to keep all these people around.

But what’s the consequence to him personally? A rising stock price? Making him even richer than he already is?

Yes, he’s trying to do good things for the people out the door, and I guess I should be kinder in my assessment of him for that fact. But it doesn’t change the overall calculus of being a leader of one of these tech companies. You overhired when capital was cheap, and you were able to use that to parlay your stock price into going up when you had no demonstrable revenue to support it because you were increasing your costs and pulling your potential revenue numbers up in an imaginary spreadsheet. Now you reduce that headcount to make it so your EBITDA looks amazing because you have your same revenue at half the cost! Stock price goes up again.

I’m sure that there’s some moral component where he’s hurting in his soul about laying people off (I tell myself lies a lot to feel better about the world, let’s not dig too deeply into it lol). But his moral panic about his role in society doesn’t change that there are people who he hired who are now worried about whether or not they’ll be able to keep their house, or keep their kids fed, or stay in this country!

In the West Wing, there’s an episode where a computer company has an issue with a chip they make and even though they think that it’s going to likely only affect 1% or less of people using it, they want to warn people of the potential damage, knowing it’ll tank their stock and likely require layoffs. But instead of doing that, the CEO says, no one in leadership is taking a salary until we solve the problems, and we aren’t laying anyone off — we’re going to focus on making sure our employees are taken care of.

And yes, it’s a fictional tv show. Yes it is from a bygone era. Yes it’s progressive political porn. I get it.

But one of the problems with my generation is that we were given these kinds of lessons our whole lives — you need to be looking out for the less fortunate. You should be looking to the helpers. You should be looking to take care of those around you. We’re a community based on shared values not on shared heritage. All this shit was drilled into us only for the people in power to keep consolidating and then shitting all over the people who are just trying to do a job so they can have a home and food and a reasonably happy life.

So yes it’s great that folks get a generous package on their way out. But we should really be more focused on why the people doing the work are suffering while people like Dorsey get to admit their own failures and fall backwards into a fuckton of money for doing it.

And finally… quarterly earnings goals.

We really did a number on ourselves with this one.

And I get it, it’s actually an example of my overriding belief that we’ve jumped the shark on how we regulate industries. We’re living in an old paradigm that keeps benefiting oligarchs while making the middle class suffer.

Quarterly earnings statements drive the stock market. Which makes sense, because essentially the stock market is a betting market on business success. It’s polymarket. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

I spent time as a financial advisor, I had my series 7 license, my series 66 license, so I’m not just spouting things out of my ass.

If the stock market was based purely on financial viability and interests, you would be able to make money by simply betting on companies with the best financials. But that isn’t how it works. The stock market is primarily driven off of fear and speculation.

Fear makes the markets go down as people sell off their assets to put them in less volatile investment vehicles and speculation makes markets go up as people invest in companies they assume will create more stock value based on the way they’re operating. And the quarterly earnings statements are literally a vehicle to decide which of those emotional responses you’re going to have.

It’s why when revenue projections go down they are combined with cost reductions — to make the metrics SEEM like they’re doing the thing that would cause speculation instead of fear.

And the reason it’s a betting market is because you can’t control people’s emotions so you might do everything you can to drive your investors toward speculation, but they’ll see through your desperation and be fearful, or buy your bullshit and speculate away.

So what ends up happening is, we have executives who are solely focused on those earnings statements, and lose the perspective that’s required to have longevity. If you’re looking only at the next quarter, how can you make an investment that’s going to take 5 years to pay off? You’re gonna get fired before you get to that payoff!

Which leads to an incentive structure less focused on empathy for the people who create and sustain your business and instead it’s focused on the hard lines of revenue and profit projections on a 3 month rolling period. Yea, I gotta lay 4k people off, but our stock will go up 10% and we’ll be able to stay in business for the remaining 4k employees! I can imaging Jack or another CEO thinking, if I try and keep those 4k that I laid off, it could endanger the 4k that AREN’T being laid off!

And then the justification train just keeps rolling on. Because our culture doesn’t allow for short term failure in the pursuit of long term success. Even in sports, it used to be that you needed to go through a playoff run and get your ass kicked to see the level of competition you were against and how much harder you had to work to get to the mountain top. But we don’t want to wait! We want it now! Your QB sucked this year? Get a new one! Don’t try and let him sit and learn for a year, he’s gotta get out on the field!

Immediacy, and the toxic culture it creates, is exemplified brilliantly by the quarterly earnings cycles.

And I guess this is where I should say how I would fix things. But I think that the answer is too difficult to summarize. Because it’s a collective action problem. We see these business leaders as having all the power. But in reality they’re flexing their power because they’re weak.

They know that if they had their employees band together to make decisions the CEOs would be ousted in a heartbeat. It’s why the fight against unions is always so ugly.

We have more power as a collective than we realize when we’re stuck thinking like an individual.

And the only way for us to show it is to do so together. Which is why talking to your colleagues about their struggles, seeing what keeps them up at night, seeing what they would do if they could do anything with their day, and being a normal ass human in your interactions with your coworkers is the best path to fixing our current situation.

The kleptocratic class wants us to see each other as enemies. They want the 4k people who were let go to see the 4k people left as the enemy. They want to have us think that they have our side because of generous severance packages. But they don’t. They are using tools at their disposal to make sure that we don’t blame them.

Because they know what happens when people start to rise up against inequity. And unfortunately it doesn’t turn out well for the oligarchs.

Well, that got weird huh. Lol. Who knew I’d accidentally write a “rise up against the masters of the economy” screed as my first blog on my own independent platform.

Anyway, thank you for being with me on this journey and I look forward to doing more and more to bring out the empathy in our daily lives to show how empathy really is the solution to most of our societal and work problems!