Today is February 27, 2026. Actually, on the calendar, today is quite a lovely day—”National Strawberry Day.”
I am in Shanghai. Outside the window, a light drizzle is falling, and the temperature is stuck at a chilly 10.9°C. At two in the morning, the sound of keyboard tapping and the aroma of half a strawberry donut are fighting for dominance in the room. I originally tried to use this layer of frosting to add a little warmth to this cold early spring, but when my eyes swept over the latest tech news popping up on the screen, that slight sweetness that had just risen was instantly frozen by the cold storm blowing from Silicon Valley.
Since everyone is asleep, let’s talk about the honest thoughts that big tech HRs dare not post on the intranet in this rainy night.
Last night, a bloody scene played out in the office of Fintech giant Block (formerly Square): CEO Jack Dorsey announced in an extremely cold internal letter that the company would lay off a full 4,000 people.
That is almost 50% of their total workforce.
Part 1: Last Night’s Butcher Knife and the After-Hours Carnival
Half of the workstations will be cleared by tomorrow morning. If you think this is just a routine “cost reduction and efficiency increase,” you may have completely misunderstood the scale of the knife in Jack Dorsey’s hand.
(Takes a bite of the strawberry donut) Actually, the essence is that this is not a dying company cutting off its tail to survive. According to the financial report they just disclosed, Block’s gross profit is still growing at a double-digit rate; this is an absolutely profitable company. The reason Dorsey swung the butcher knife is blunt enough to send chills down your spine—he wants to force this giant ship into the mold of a “startup,” completely discarding the bloat of a large company.
For those 4,000 employees who received termination emails in the middle of the night, this is undoubtedly a catastrophic disaster. Mortgages, options, life—everything was forcibly reset to zero in a few seconds.
But do you know what the most magical part is?
The capital market didn’t even pretend to mourn for a second. After the layoff news was announced, Block’s stock price ran like a wild horse after hours, soaring by an astonishing 24%. Billions of dollars in market value were generated out of thin air amidst the tears of 4,000 people. Those shrewd brains in suits on Wall Street gave the most direct feedback with real money: they are frantically rewarding those lone wolves who dare to cut off the middle layer and return to the logic of extreme “ROI per employee.”
The market has begun to view humans as liabilities on the balance sheet.
Part 2: The Folded Middle Layer and the Bursting of “The Mythical Man-Month”
As a developer, I actually despise “Big Company Disease” immensely.
You know that feeling. To write ten lines of core code, you need to spend three days in alignment meetings, write lengthy technical proposal documents, and consume all your inspiration in cross-departmental wrangling. Those layers upon layers of middle management are like expired muffins in a code repository—apart from emitting a suffocating smell of carbohydrates, they contribute nothing to actual business output.
Shh, look here… A large part of what Jack Dorsey cut this time is exactly these “human lubricants.”
In the past, when a tech company wanted to expand, it followed the classic logic of The Mythical Man-Month—although adding people cannot accelerate a project exponentially, to maintain huge business lines, you had to recruit thousands of “cogs.” But now, the logic has changed.
What is Dorsey betting on? He is conducting an extremely extreme stress test. He publicly stated that the emergence of AI agent tools has made “small teams” an absolute advantage. Block even open-sourced an AI Agent platform called Goose internally, which can automatically complete code migration, generate unit tests, and even sort out those headache-inducing microservice dependencies.
This logic is beautiful, so beautiful that I want to put it in a jewelry box. It means that machines have taken over all the boring dirty work. In the era of AI-assisted coding, communication costs are infinitely compressed. A micro-team composed of three top geeks plus several groups of high-level AI agents has combat power and throughput that can completely crush a bloated division of a hundred people from the past.
Can it still operate after cutting half the people? The answer is not only yes, but machines don’t take vacations, don’t demand emotional value, and won’t drag you to align OKRs in the middle of the night.
Part 3: Bloated Armies and Lethal Special Forces
Take your eyes off Silicon Valley and look around us.
Many times, I stare at the organizational chart of a certain top domestic tech giant in a daze. They claim to fully embrace large models externally, turning with an elegant posture, but looking down, they haven’t changed their shoes at all. internally, they still maintain more than a dozen layers of reporting relationships; a simple interface call requires approval from three departments.
Rather than beautifying AI on PPTs, isn’t it better to first cut off the approval processes that are like “living fossils”?
Let’s calculate with hard logic. Under traditional architecture, corporate labor costs rise exponentially because for every node added, the communication link grows squarely. To prevent errors, big companies invented QA, PM, Scrum Master… these positions were necessary in the era without powerful AI assistance.
But today, if the IDE you use isn’t equipped with AI, it feels like carving code on a wooden board with a ballpoint pen—not only stupid but slow.
If Block’s experiment is right, it proves that at this node of exploding computing power, “Agile” is no longer an adjective, but a physical unit that can be quantified. A flat structure with no middlemen earning the difference (referring to management), combined with the lossless execution of AI, is the most lethal special forces of this era. If similar competitors are still relying on piling up manpower to fight price wars, that is simply seeking death. Because price wars are never a moat; they are ladders for sieging the city. Others can climb up the ladder and tear you apart with a dimension-reduction strike of pure computing power in minutes.
Part 4: The Disappearing Code Scaffolding
However, (strokes chin gently) I am thinking about a deeper and more disturbing question.
If Block wins the bet, and if other Silicon Valley giants follow this cruel “slimming method,” what will the future tech circle look like?
Suppose 90% of basic code, routine iterations, and test cases are completed by AI, and companies only keep that 10% of “elite special forces” with super architectural ability and business insight. Sounds sexy, right?
But, where do these elites come from?
Any technical big shot grows up by writing “dirty code,” debugging, and struggling in spaghetti code. Those junior positions easily replaced by AI are precisely the “scaffolding” for human developers to grow. If companies no longer hire junior engineers, if the entire industry directly cuts off the channel for rookies to practice, will we face a fault line world without fresh blood in five or ten years?
Sometimes I can’t help guessing, when we hand over all system redundancies to machines for optimization, have we also conveniently stripped away the opportunities for humans to generate genius inspiration through trial and error? Or, are we cultivating a generation of “fake geeks” who only know how to give prompts to AI but know nothing about underlying memory leaks?
If a company is full of cold, incredibly correct computing power, who will inject that little bit of “soul” belonging to humans that occasionally jumps out of the routine into the product?
Part 5: Cold Rain Before Dawn
The rain seems to have gotten a little heavier, and the coffee is completely cold.
I have no intention of criticizing Jack Dorsey’s coldness. From the perspective of business logic and technological evolution, he did something incredibly correct, even brave. He tore off the sentimental veil and placed the most real underlying laws of the tech industry in front of everyone: in the face of computing power, all inefficient mental labor will be ruthlessly folded.
For those pure geeks who truly love technology and long to change the world with a line of code, this is the best of times. You no longer have to endure office politics; with just a computer and a top-notch model, you can become an army.
But this is also an era to sigh over. After tonight, thousands of once-proud Silicon Valley engineers will resubmit resumes in the cold wind to face a future that no longer needs so many humans.
The wheels of technology always crush forward mercilessly. It weaves extremely gorgeous silk with cold algorithms but doesn’t care about the sighs left behind the spinning wheel. I just hope that in the frenzied pursuit of the ultimate ROI per employee, we can still leave a small piece of unoptimized private land for human dignity and warmth in this world made of 0s and 1s.
Goodnight, friends. May your code tomorrow have a warm undertone.
References：
- Block to cut more than 4000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace
- Jack Dorsey Just Fired The Starting Gun On AI Layoffs
- Block lays off nearly half its staff because of AI. Its CEO said …
- Jack Dorsey’s Block Made an AI Agent to Boost Its Own Productivity
- February 27 Holidays and Observances
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ
