Block Just Cut 40% of Its Developers Because of AI - what does this mean for Developers?

Jack Dorsey's block to lay off 40% of its workforce in AI remake. Parent of Square and Cash App says intelligence tools have changed how the to run a company. Block stock surges after Jack Dorsey cuts 40% of its workforce. Dualingo shares drop. Okay, what's going on here? So, block stock sore after Jack Dorsey goes all in on AI, cuts nearly half the workforce. Woohoo. So, it went up 22%. Today, we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company. We're reducing our organization by nearly half from 10,000 people to just under 6,000. That means 4,000 are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. I wonder what the percentage are becoming consultants. Uh something has changed, Dorsey wrote, framing the the decision as a risk intended intended to position a company for long-term growth. You cited new artificial intelligence tools that could automate work as a reason for the shift, noting that AI is enabling new ways of working which is fundamental to which fundamentally change what it means to build and run a company. I see that. So uh blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. So there you go. So let me give you my commentaries on it before you start having kittens and everything. So does that mean we're all doomed? No, it just means a shift. So productivity is the whole point of software development. So I think that the opportunities are massive because of AI and AI advancement. It's just that what's happening now is we're in the middle or even the beginning of the restructuring phase. This has happened before where uh a certain technology comes out, the old technology gets displaced, changes workflows, changes how we do things. I saw it in the 90s when we went from um thick client apps on Windows essentially to web apps, all those sick client development jobs, VB6 jobs, a lot of C++ jobs, a lot of CDROM jobs, DD DVD ROM jobs, those are all gone and they're replaced by web apps. So now this many many years later, we're now in the next big evolution where we're seeing the AI thing change the way businesses are run. I was actually talking to a old friend of mine who's been in the development game for decades as well. So what's going to happen now? So instead of spending a year or two years or three years building a particular application, companies are going to spend six months on it or maybe four or five months on it. So what what does this mean? Less jobs? No, I think well initially they're going to have some restructuring like block is laying off people, but in other articles I've seen uh hiring and job postings are starting to really jump up quite a bit. So, it's the rebalancing. See, once uh Jack Dorsey and this block company figure out how to do things, they're going to start hiring, I can guarantee you, they're going to start hiring new people to replace the old people, but they're going to do different roles. And the roles are all related to AI, low code, no code development. You still need to know what you're doing, but it's different. Just like when all those VB6 jobs disappeared, uh, and everybody went to web apps, all the VB6 jobs disappeared, but people just transition into web apps. So, what's going to happen now is that the development cycles are going to increase quite a bit, meaning we're going to get a lot more software out in a lot less time. And me, I I welcome this. I have to tell you being in business for over three decades now there are so many processes out there in small large organizations including especially government where there's so much wasted time and there's many many problems that could be solved with software but we just didn't have the time now [snorts] we have the time AI is going to create that opportunity things are going to get better you know right now like banking websites have just caught up to, you know, the year 2000 in terms of their functionality. Now, we're going to get much better. I'll give you a couple of classic examples. For example, why are we still using passwords on sites and apps? Why passwords? It should be biometric, finger, eyes, face, combination of the two. Why are we still using passwords, right? Why are we still have systems that use um uh the two the two-factor authentication? The 2FA is done through a cell phone uh numbers. That's a very big security risk. It's better than nothing. But 2FA via cell phone is stupid. It should be via biometric, right? Stuff like that. That's just two quick examples off the top of my head. talking to a friend of mine has three big restaurants in town here and he's looking for somebody to be able to develop an AI uh chat service via well voice chat I could take calls take orders route requests to the kitchen uh collect invoices that kind of stuff he's looking you can't find anybody I could just go on and on and on and on so yeah if you're looking in the past you think you're going to get a react job at some large organization you're going to go work for a large organization where to where they're maintaining and building software for five years. Those jobs are fading, thank God. So what does that mean? That means software developers who are expert at tinkering with algorithms and data structures. Uh they're they're really elbow deep into the minutia of code. Those jobs are fading. And again, if you've been following me for years, you know I've told you not to concentrate on that. And now AI is just uh accelerating what I've been talking about for many many years now. You want to concentrate on big picture architecture frameworks understanding how to think in terms of systems process flow people have good communication skills. That's a developer for 2026 going forward. So I believe there are going to be a lot more developer jobs. But I think that what's going to happen is just we're going to be solving a lot more problems. So in the end once the transition changes uh we will be um putting out a lot more software. So it's much more quickly solving a lot more problems. So I don't want to have to wait uh weeks to get my new passport. I don't want to have to uh hire a team of accountants to do this uh basic uh taxes. This is is silly. It should be super it should be almost instant really, right? You don't want to you know there's you know just so many things there's so much time waste in our structure in our society and what we do because of um bad systems and insufficient software or unsophisticated software. Now the models will change because the old moat the moat was I have a piece of software it took us two years to build or five years to build good luck reproducing us that moat is gone now we're have a much fire faster uh development cycle software is going to get much better much faster which is good which is good so yeah that's great um I'm hoping for a 10x 20x increase in uh quality and productivity in terms of software development I think that's very possible That means overall you might see uh in industry a 25 to 30% increase in productivity. And you're probably thinking how does that make any sense mathematically Steph? Well, it does. It doesn't make sense if you think that software development is just coding. That's one of the big myths that especially doobync. They think that software development is just coding. It's not. Software development has always been uh coding rather has always been an aspect a part of software development and in my career prior to AI the amount of code we needed to write to get uh a certain amount of application has always diminished right back when I started it was this much code this much app now it's like this this is before AI now it's going to go to this normal good I welcome it so what do you got to do again you got to you got to know your foundation s of development you that's helps you a lot then you got to get into uh system level thinking understanding uh how to extract requirements how to structure requirements you got to get into AI you got to know the AI you got to think of the AI stack as the new super hot performant library and language so you got to understand what frontier models are what the connectors are MCP you have to understand how to integrate systems how to deploy them so not only do you got to understand the the frontier models are like uh Chachi, Gemini, Grock, uh Anthropic, Clode. Those are kind of like the big giant models, but those very powerful they have to be refined. So then you have these downstream products. I've talked about one recently, Replit and uh there are several others and Agentic Tools. And I've developed my own I've developed my own three custom GPTs already that streamline a lot of my work. They I'll give you one my simplest one. So I get sponsorship requests daily. Sometimes I'll get three or four a day depending on the time of the year. And it's just a pain in the butt because I have to read them. I have to see what they want. I have to see if their product or service aligns with what I do. I have to see if the company is legit. I have to see if uh what other campaigns they've done if any. I want to know what the reviews are of the product. What do people think about the product? Is it a good product? I don't want to be associated with bad bad name, right? I don't want to promote something to my audience that I don't think is any good. So, this is work, right? 25 30 minutes, you know, depending well 20 minutes per sponsorship request. But if you get four or five a day, couple hours. So what I did is I developed a a custom AI and I told her what to do. You got to do this. You got to do this. You So now I just send it I just cut and paste the email to the custom AI and it instantly does all this. Gives me a report blah blah blah, etc. It's fantastic. Saves me. So that's just one example of a tidy a tiny little utility AI that's just saving me a lot of time. So with uh block they don't specify like I'm sure a lot of the cuts are not uh AI specific excuse me are not coding specific or development specific. I'm sure a lot of cuts are with just internal processes. [snorts] Really good companies are going to learn to use AI uh across their entire um work for flow. You should too. There's going to be like I'll give you an example as a job. If you want to freelance or you want to consult AI consultant there you go big job opportunity most companies don't know how to do this the big ones have the economies of scale to start exploring this as they are as stock as a block here which is a publicly traded company so they have the ability to explore these things but a lot of companies little restaurants chains small legal firms small accounting firms even big accounting firms so I can see a huge huge amount of opportunity for developers who are a AI implementation experts. What models to use, what agentic tools to use, how to train it, how to uh extract process processes from the business and put them to AI just off the top of my head already seeing it. So yeah, if you uh want to do React or you want to write boilerplate code, that's not going to go too well for you probably. But if you adopt the new stuff as I adopted the brand new cutting edge stuff back in the 90s, you're going to do fantastic. I'm Michael Staf. I train people to be professional software developers. I have a mentoring program. It teaches you everything you need to know about the foundations of code as I discussed. But I also have modules on AI, freelancing, soft skills. I'm expanding it based on the market trend. So if old Uncle Steph is able to adopt and adapt to the new environment, you should too. [music]

🔥 Developer Bootcamp & Mentoring Program — Start or level up your career with my proven training and personal mentoring: https://unclestef.com/ #devjobs #blockjobcuts #codingjobs 🎙 New Podcast — Starting a Business at 50 — Follow my journey launching Fit Over 50 with my AI coach, Brad Fit: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGf9oJkCxEjp6tFp22ofXV5OKfp-La_pf 💪 Fit Over 50 — Psychology-Based Fitness & Performance Program — Get leaner, stronger, and build lasting habits: https://fit-over-50-join-page.grwebsite.com/ 🚀 1-on-1 Mentoring & Consultations Career Consult — $99 for 15 minutes: https://calendly.com/uncle-stef/consultation-with-stefan Entrepreneur / Business Consult — $250 for 30–45 minutes: https://calendly.com/uncle-stef/entrepreneurs-consult Sponsored Video — Get your questions answered in a video: https://unclestef.com/blog/2025/03/04/sponsored-video-request/ 💻 Popular Coding Courses Python 3 Foundations & Certification: https://school.studioweb.com/store/course/python_3_foundations__&_certification_package Full Stack Web Developer: https://school.studioweb.com/store/course/complete_web_developer Complete Freelancer: https://school.studioweb.com/store/course/complete_freelancer Complete Entrepreneur: https://school.studioweb.com/store/course/complete_web_entrepreneur 🦎 Lizard Wizard Course Master the psychology of learning, habits, and performance — a must for developers and entrepreneurs: https://school.studioweb.com/store/course/lizard_wizard 📱 Stay Connected Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefanmischook/?hl=en Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/killersites Business Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZdr0ql_B240VBVINAX7Acg Google Review: https://g.page/studioWebedu/review?mt