After hundreds While employees at Jack Dorsey’s Block were laid off in early February, some of those remaining at the company say the internal culture has reached a point where performance anxiety is mounting, the utilize of generative artificial intelligence is being required, and overall morale is rapidly deteriorating. Block is the parent company behind merchant payment processor Square and payment app Cash App. Dorsey co-founded the company in 2009 after previously co-founding Twitter.
“Morale is probably the worst I’ve seen in four years,” reads an employee’s complaint to Dorsey during a recent all-hands meeting, a transcript of which was shared with WIRED. “The overall culture on the Block is falling apart.” WIRED spoke with seven current and former Block employees who requested anonymity to speak freely about the company’s internal operations. A spokesman for Block did not respond to requests for comment.
Layoffs at Block began this month and could eventually affect up to 10 percent of the company’s workforce, according to the report. Bloomberg. Before the job cuts began, Block did just that approximately 11,000 people on staff. Instead of a one-time event, management slowly implemented the layoffs over several weeks and informed employees that the process would continue through the end of this month, sources told WIRED.
“We don’t yet know whether this will impact our livelihoods, and this makes it extremely difficult to make important life choices not knowing whether we will still have a job next week,” reads another employee complaint from the same meeting with Dorsey.
Multiple sources who spoke to WIRED say they were outraged when Arnaud Weber, Block’s engineering manager, sent an email after the first wave of layoffs labeling them as efficiency-related rather than a cost-saving measure. Sources say they disagree with management’s internal message that the layoffs are substantive.
“As part of our 2025 performance cycle, we have separated team members who were not meeting the expectations of their role,” Weber wrote in an email reviewed by WIRED. “These deviations were due to clear gaps in performance, role expectations, and alignment resulting from calibration on the bar for each level.”
Block employees are now expected to send weekly email updates to Dorsey, who will then utilize generative artificial intelligence to summarize the thousands of messages. In the same meeting, which had already been held after hundreds of employees had been laid off, Dorsey said common themes cited by employees in their latest news stories included “widespread concerns about layoffs,” “performance concerns,” and “the tension between accelerating delivery through AI adoption and maintaining code quality and engineering rigor.”
During the meeting, Dorsey reiterated that the firings were performance-related, claiming that “a significant portion of our community has called in on this issue.” He also stressed that remaining employees should utilize generative AI tools to maximize productivity, otherwise Block will risk being overtaken by the competition.
“The top-down mandates for large language models are crazy,” says one current Block employee. “If this tool were good, we would all use it.”