"CEO said a thing" journalism, discussed on HN very recently:<p><a href="https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/" rel="nofollow">https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577735">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577735</a>
After his stunt with the mass firings "because of AI," employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings <i>with Jack Dorsey</i>.<p>These clowns live in a dreamworld created by their PAs and cronies
Most early stage companies are now doing the same thing as well. It's basically a re-invention of the "build fast and test" model that was the norm amongst startups in the late 2000s and early 2010s.<p>Yes it led to some degree of tech debt, but it also made it easier to experiment, validate, and identify good and bad workflows.<p>At least in my network, we don't think AI will replace all workers and we strongly believe AI will lead to a significant amount of tech debt, but we do also recognize a <i>lot</i> of work in tech today is busywork and will be automated away in the hands of actual engineers with domain expertise.
If I showed upper management a functional prototype in a first meeting about a future product, they would assume it was already done and ask when it could ship, while not accepting any dates further out than a month in the future. No way I’d set myself up for failure like that.
Block signed a friend of mine, they quit their other job, then block was like whoops layoffs including people like this person who hadn’t even started. Super unethical.
I’ve been in IT for 25 years, it has happened to me once, unfortunately it isn’t that uncommon.
Why did they even hire if they had to just fire a person who hadn't even started. It really reflects to the level of incompetence within the company.<p>I am sorry for your friend, I hope that he is doing fine, Is there anything that they can legally do for this to block?
That's so messed up. I hope they're doing ok.
I listened to his podcast episode on the Sequoia podcast a few days ago. Interestingly, his argument was "we don't need middle managers" and he plans to have all 6000 employees eventually report to him.<p>In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.
I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".<p>See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.<p>To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.
Why does anyone listen to him about product design/buisness running?<p>Twitter was a success _despite_ him. the original idea was strong enough to blast through all of the odd/wrong decisions he took. The time it took to make hashtags a thing, the terrible scaling, the huge overhiring, and deliberate duplication of teams, and his inability/reluctance to make any product decision. Sure he's got great connections, but he is a terrible leader of a buisness<p>Most of his product philosophy is negatively correlated with businesses that need to make a profit to survive.<p>I know what he'll do, he'll have someone make a bunch of agents to manage all these poor people via chat. he'll boast about how AI native the company is, it'll be chaos.
There's no doubt they see AI (or whatever the emerging tech) as disrupting everyone and everything EXCEPT themselves; the more interesting question is: conscious omission or reality distortion field of one?
I think Google tried this a while ago (flattening the org).<p>It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.
They did, I actually worked there at the time, my manager had 140 directs. It obviously didn't work.<p>But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.
If every manager initially had 5 reports, a quick geometric series shows that eliminating all managers would save you 20% of headcount. Of course, managers tend to get paid more, so maybe you'd save a larger fraction of wages.<p>I wonder if that's the main concern or if communication / coordination costs are the larger concern
Wow, holy smokes… 140 directs. Kind of curious: what did the differences look like on a day to day in that sort of org structure?
I met my manager when I joined once, then every 6 or 12 months for performance review (which was aggregated feedback from my peers that he took 2 minutes to talk through: "looks like you're doing fine, if you need anything, my EA can schedule more time").<p>PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.<p>If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.<p>Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).<p>Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.
I've never had close to 140 directs (or even friends) but did get close to 40 (direct reports; never had more than a dozen friends or so). Frankly, it sucks. I was (IMO) doing a terrible job, dropping balls everywhere and not serving the people I had a responsibility & emotional commitment to help. It came down to one of: 1. fail at what you truly believe is your job, 2. give up on what you believe, or 3. don't play the game. I picked #3 and quit, but most go with #2 and many are VPs and CEOs today.
That is insane, Block seems to be very poorly run. The headcount still seems bloated, they'll blame AI and layoff more people for their own incompetence.
It only works if the person at the top is a real visionary. And you’re talking about a handful of people on earth who have this frankly.
He came to the same conclusion that Steve already had decades ago.<p>These people are amusing to say the least.
I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira.
They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful.
The net result is we're building better features faster.
How can you be less innovative than Block? Their products are 100% ripoffs of better products
I prefer prototyping to slides. The reason is it helps me understand the problem and edge cases better. Getting AI to build means you could potentially understand it even less than if you put the slides together.<p>Hiring talent that is passionate about delivering a quality product is more important than ever considering there are so many ways to take shortcuts now that might not be obvious until later.
Can confirm this in my portco's and a couple other peers (one of whom previously founded a major threat intel platform).<p>If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs.<p>A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also know of one F10 that's building it's own entire security platform from scratch with a team of security engineers working directly with one of the foundation model vendors.<p>Too many people on HN are divorced or too OOTL from some of these initiatives and then get blindsided during layoffs.<p>What matters now is DOMAIN EXPERIENCE. Do you understand good development principles <i>and</i> the problem your ICP is trying to solve <i>and</i> how pricing, packaging, and procurement is structured? I don't need a code monkey, process sloths, and queens of the calendar. I need domain experts who can actually execute.
[flagged]
And this is better how exactly? If you're running a business, do you not want to catch employees mistakes as <i>early as possible</i>? Most ideas are crap. I'd way rather they get elimated after someone spent an hour making slides than a day vibecoding a prototype.<p>And then there is the problem that vibecoding is addictive so the more one has done of it on the prototype, the worse one's judgement of whether it's actually something worth building...
At face value this seemed cool, but the more I think about it slides or prototypes are the same thing, just a different kind of theater.
Since the crux of this seems to be about replacing middle managers, what do people think prevents AI from successfully managing 140 direct reports on day to day operations on behalf of a lone CEO? I'm reading "it doesn't work," but that sounds like more of a potential opportunity to me than a truism.
I feel like he's just doing it for attention.
If Block were experiencing rapid productivity improvements from AI why is their flagship Square product still worse than Toast? Toast is eating their lunch day after day.
Sounds like Apple under Steve Jobs.
I'm not sure what the flex is here.<p>Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions?<p>So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supposed to care?
Prototypes of what? What new products came out of Block in the past six years since pandemic? This makes it sound like Block is a place of innovations when it’s just a rent seeking enterprise.
"CEO pushes incremental gain as huge disruption that proves prior controversial decision correct" - I need AI to tighten my headline.<p>IME people good PMs already did this WITH slide decks, then tools like Balsamiq, and now AI tools, so it's made the process easier? quicker? people spend as much time but go further down actual implementation? Unfortunately I assume the last, which is too bad, but there doesn't seem to be a much story here.
I bet, considering the massive skill needed for it: "hey claude, turn this presentation into a prototype".
I have to speak up....<p>Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become...<p>BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews!<p>Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...
Musk taking over Twitter took a lot of the spotlight off of Dorsey, as though it wasn't already a toxic plaxe. He got a second chance in the public eye to be the visionary that's "one of us" and he's doing his best to blow it
> "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs once said, according to a book published last month by David Pogue.<p>I wonder what he'll think about these vibecoded prototypes and if it's more thinking or less thinking
"Just two months ago every meeting that we would have, you see a presentation or a Google Doc and we go through it," Dorsey said.<p>2 months ago they were still using PowerPoints? Jesus no wonder they had to lay so many people off. What the fuck is going on over there?
[dead]
[dead]
The "prototypes not slides" rule works great for product decisions where the devil is in the interaction details. You can't really argue about a flow in a slide deck — once someone clicks through a prototype, the discussion shifts from opinion to observation.<p>But I wonder how they handle discussions that are inherently abstract — pricing changes, infrastructure migration plans, org restructuring. Forcing a prototype there would just produce theater. The real insight is probably not "prototypes good, slides bad" but "stop presenting things that should be experienced.
I went to a meeting with a prototype once. It was a single happy path with stubbed data, coded in the most naïve way possible. It was, after all, a prototype just to give a feel for what the interactions would be like.<p>It put enormous pressure on delivery, since leadership had "already seen it working, how hard could it be to make it to production?"<p>Never again.
It's funny (tragicomic) to watch the industry learn the same lessons over and over again (such as "'cheap' overseas outsourcing requires unrealistically precise specs otherwise what would take minutes will take days")<p>This one sounds like "...and this is precisely why we started using wireframes"
I wouldn’t say “Never again”, unless you put in the caveat that you shouldn’t do this again for the same leaders.
Did the same thing early in my career. Built a quick bootstrap website with like 5 pages and all the data was static. The backend was a year off. It was great for end users but the non-IT managers were dumb. Same issue about seeing something working and expecting the world.
> theater<p>That's exactly what you have to do for the CEO class
Or new infrastructure. You bring a demo of a new distributed transaction manager?
Flagged for AI