Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block employees are reportedly concerned. A report claims that the employees at the parent company of Square and Cash App are worried about worsening workplace conditions following a fresh round of layoffs. Some Block employees are reportedly seeing rising performance pressure, declining morale, and growing anxiety across teams. According to a Wired report, several current and former employees said internal culture has been affected after hundreds of workers were laid off earlier this month.This comes after Block began reducing its workforce earlier this month. The latest cuts could affect up to 10% of its workforce, or roughly 11,000 employees.
Sources told Wired that the layoffs are being carried out gradually over several weeks rather than in a single announcement and that employees have been informed that the process may continue through the end of the month.The report claimed to have spoken to seven current and former Block employees, who requested anonymity to discuss internal operations. Some employees reportedly told the publication that performance anxiety has increased within teams.They also noted that, following the layoffs, the use of generative AI tools has become mandatory in certain workflows.
What Block employees said about the company’s reported lastest moves
Block employee’s feedback shared during a recent all-hands meeting reflected concerns about workplace culture. According to a transcript reviewed by Wired, the employee’s complaint, which was submitted to Dorsey, read, “Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years. The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.”
“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,” another employee complaint shared during the same meeting with Dorsey readThe report also cited multiple sources who said that they were concerned after Arnaud Weber, Block’s engineering lead, sent an email following the initial round of layoffs. In the email, Weber described the job cuts as performance-related rather than a cost-cutting measure. The sources said that they disagreed with management’s internal communication that framed the layoffs as merit-based decisions.
“As part of our 2025 performance cycle, we have parted ways with teammates who weren’t meeting the expectations of their role. These departures were based on clear performance gaps, role expectations, and alignment coming out of calibrations on the bar for each level,” Weber wrote in the email.According to the report, Block employees are currently required to send weekly update emails to Dorsey, which are then summarised using generative AI tools. During the same all-hands meeting, held after hundreds of employees had already been laid off, Dorsey said commonly raised themes in these updates included “widespread concerns about layoffs,” “performance anxiety,” and “the tension between accelerating delivery through AI adoption versus maintaining code quality and engineering rigor.”
During the meeting Dorsey reiterated that the layoffs were linked to performance, stating there was “a sizable portion of our population that have been phoning it in.” He also encouraged remaining employees to adopt generative AI tools to improve productivity, warning that Block could fall behind competitors otherwise.“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” said one current Block employee. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it,” Dorsey said at that time.