Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is running into some serious issues while overhauling his financial services company, Block.
Earlier this month, the company started laying off its staff as part of what Bloomberg characterized as an “efficiency push,” potentially affecting up to ten percent of the company’s workforce.
It’s been a painful, drawn-out process that could drag on for weeks, sources told Wired, triggering major anxiety over job security.
“We don’t yet know if our livelihoods will be affected, and this makes it incredibly hard to make major life choices without knowing if we still have a job next week,” an employee said during a recent all-hands meeting, as quoted by Wired.
“Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years,” another employee wrote. “The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.”
The comments highlight persistent concerns being felt by many workers as generative AI continues to be cited by executives as they cut headcounts.
For Dorsey, AI has clearly been top of mind. Block staffers are now obligated to use AI, an order that has led to frustration.
“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”
They’re also required to send weekly update emails to him, echoing Elon Musk’s DOGE requirement for federal staffers to summarize five weekly achievements in emails. (The requirement was mostly ignored, months before DOGE largely crumbled.)
Dorsey then reportedly uses generative AI to summarize his staffers’ emails. During the all-hands meeting, he noted that “performance anxiety” and “widespread concerns about layoffs” were clearly vexing staff.
Dorsey seemingly did little to address these anxieties, accusing fired staffers of “phoning it in.” Block’s engineering lead, Arnaud Weber, also said that the firings were performance-related.
The company’s woes are symptomatic of a familiar story playing out at many other tech companies. Workers are facing immense pressure as their employers implement AI at all costs, forcing them to adopt the tech whether they like it or not.
Researchers have found that the tech isn’t reducing workloads at all, but intensifying them instead, a concerning trend that’s already leading to “AI burnout.”
The psychological effects also have experts worried. Researchers recently found that the continuing threat of being made redundant due to AI automation is manifesting in symptoms among workers including anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, and loss of identity.
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