Inside the layoffs at the Jack Dorsey Building

After hundreds The workers were laid off in early February of Jack Dorsey blockSome people remaining at the company say that the internal culture has evolved to the point where performance anxiety has become rampant, using Generative artificial intelligence Wanted, public morale deteriorates rapidly. Block is the parent company behind Merchant payment processor arena And the Cash App payment application. Dorsey co-founded the company in 2009 after previously co-founding it twitter.

“Morale is probably the worst it has been in four years,” said the employee complaint filed with Dorsey at a recent all-hands meeting, the text of which was seen by WIRED. “The overall culture at Block is collapsing.” WIRED spoke with seven current and former Block employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal operations at the company. The bloc’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Block’s layoffs began this month and could eventually affect up to 10 percent of the company’s workforce, according to a report by Bloomberg. Before starting to cut staff, Block had already done so About 11,000 people On employees. Instead of a one-time event, management rolled out the separations slowly over weeks and told employees the process would continue through the end of this month, sources told WIRED.

“We don’t know yet if our livelihoods will be affected, and that makes it very difficult to make big life choices without knowing if we still have a job next week,” another employee complaint from the same meeting with Dorsey said.

Multiple sources who spoke with WIRED say they were dismayed when Arno Weber, Block’s engineering lead, sent a message Email After the initial wave of layoffs it described it as performance-related rather than simply a cost-saving measure. Sources say they disagree with the administration’s internal messaging about firings being merit-based.

“As part of the 2025 performance cycle, we have parted ways with teammates who did not meet the expectations of their role,” Weber wrote in the email viewed by WIRED. “These exits were based on clear gaps in performance, role expectations, and alignment resulting from calibrations on tape for each level.”

Block employees are currently expected to send an updated email to Dorsey every week, which then uses generative AI to summarize thousands of messages. At the same all-hands meeting, which took place after hundreds of employees had already been fired, Dorsey said recurring themes cited by workers in their recent letters included “broad concerns about layoffs,” “anxiety about performance,” and “the tension between accelerating delivery by adopting AI versus maintaining code quality and engineering accuracy.”

During the meeting, Dorsey confirmed that the layoffs were made for performance reasons, saying there was a “large portion of our population that phoned him.” He also stressed that the remaining workers should be employed Generative AI tools To maximize productivityOtherwise, Block may be outdone by its competitors.

“The top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” says one current Block employee. “If the tool was good, we would all use it.”