> I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent.

The rank and file mutinied for the return of Altman after his board fired him for deception. They knew what they were getting, though they may find it shameful to admit that their morals have a price.

How many people who reacted that way then are still at OpenAI? It seems that they have lost key people in several waves.

How many people have joined since? I don’t think the people who lobbied for that are all still there, and I’m not sure a majority of people now at OpenAI were there when it happened.

This is one of the reasons Anthropic can stay competitive with OpenAI on a fraction of the budget and with less than half the headcount.

The smartest people, that actually believe they have the skillset to take us to AGI, understand the importance of safety. They have largely joined Anthropic. The talent density at Anthropic is unmatched.

So, is Anthropic a threat to, or indispensable to National Security? You can't have it both ways. The US used to act like a nation with the rule of law, anyone cheering for the erosion will be hit by the downstream effects sooner or later, amd they will not like it.

"these days"? Too many countries/HNers are only just figuring out it's not fun being at the sharp-end of imperialism.

Attrition by definition implies no cuts: just people leaving for the usual reasons people leave, and not replacing them. Attrition can be accelerated by providing incentives like exit bonuses.

Young people love to be paid to switch jobs too - who would refuse 20 weeks of doubled income? From Squares perspective, this would lead to an adverse selection, because Square would lose the people who can easily get jobs elsewhere.

That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better than the ones who remain. If you have people you feel are under performers then yes, ideally you would lose those specifically but then it’s not a reorganization it’s a performance based layoff where you’re outright saying “you’re not good at your job”

> That is working on the assumption that those employees are meaningfully better

The assumption that people who get hired after interviewing are "better" than those who are fall off the hiring funnel underpins the entire hiring process that even Square relies on. Does the assumption seem outlandish to you?

> Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80?

In your accounting, you can claim that you have an investment worth $100 and book $100 worth of revenue. You're juicing your sales numbers to impress shareholders - presumably, without your $100, the investee wouldn't have bought $100 worth of your product. The last thing your shareholders want to see are your sales numbers stop growing, or heaven forbid, start shrinking.

Nvidia is not the first company to "buy" sales of its own product via simple or convoluted incentive schemes. The scheme will work for a while until it doesn't.

> i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.

I hope this gets drilled into the heads of everyone who sells their labor. The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome, instead, he chose this.

Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.

yea but layoffs aren't usually very performance based. i agree in general though.

I'd encourage anyone wondering where this perspective comes from to read "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher.

Mark Fisher is excellent. It will be interesting to see if his claim that the human face is required for capitalism's functioning will hold (does not look like it).

Backers probably told him to. I can't open LinkedIn any day without trending posts that engineers can hands off to LLMs. That must tilt some ideas to investors who see winners as ways to balance their losses.

How magnanimous of him to let us all know of his magnanimity!

He could have been even more radical and get rid of himself, his lieutenants could ask gpt about the strategy.

That's called quiting for better opportunities. I doubt the thousands who contributed to block's success will all land on their feet. I'm open ended I'm not a CEO forced to make those contradictory decisions.

i don't think this is true.

assuming $150,000 average salary thats around $600,000 totally so that increases the yearly profit by about 30%.

While destroying morale, and increasing the difficulty of successfully recruiting later

I directly quoted jack - take it up with him.

> The company is profitable, and Jack could have kept 4000 people employed with no difference in outcome

did he suggest no difference in outcome in terms of profits?

You can check for yourself, if you RTFA.

Everything I said was based off of jack's post, as I quoted it. If you take issue with the non-specificity ot think he was being less than honest - take it up with jack.

i don't think you understood what i'm saying nor what he's saying. you don't do a layoff without accepting a change in the outcome.

they are now estimating 18% instead of 17%

what exactly is your point? you misinterpreted what he said. he just said that all 4K were being fired, and he would rather do it in one cut than gradually. he did not say the company's outcome would be different with those 4k vs. not

> I can bet you a hefty sum that Alameda will never go without electrical contractors.

You *really* don't understand the issue then because no one is saying that there will be 0 electrical contractors.

Electrical contractors will continue to exist because demand will continue to exist, but the wait time to get the work done will increase due to not enough electrical contractors.

Or the work will be left undone because the owner doesn't have enough money to pay the few electrical contractors that remain.

Or the work will occur but will avoid all regulations because the cost of complying relative to the odds of being caught don't justify paying it.

That's a lot of words to say business won't be driven away by regulations.

You can't see if there is 1000+ dollars of fees for any small electrical change then there will be less actual work done in an area.

I understand why businesses would want to maximize work done in an area - I hope you're self-aware enough to realize this.

The tension you may be blind to, is that society wants to maximize safety in an area - and any work done should be in service to that goal, and not an end unto itself. We shouldn't blindly maximize for work done in an area, we have to make sure the result is safe: this introduces rules and regulations, and the time and monetary costs tag along.

No two people will agree where the balance is, but generally there's regional culture. Hell, Texas allows home-owners to do their own electrical work - does that "drive business away" since some people won't pay for small DIY fixes in TX? I can't say I've ever heard that argued, but I hear it deployed a lot in response to regulations.

Many states are littered with work environments criss-crossed by extension cords because if it plugs in it doesn't need a permit, forklifts moving IBC totes because that's cheaper than the permitting it would take to install real process equipment and be regulated differently. Rain and snow covered parking and work areas that should have structures over them but can't due to the realities of environmental calculations and permitting.

Every time someone trips on a cord and smashes their face, gets mashed by a forklift, slips and falls on ice and can't work for 6mo, you personally, along with everyone else who's fetish for bureaucracy has driven up the cost of "better solutions" that would've prevented that has a little bit of that blood on their hands.

I'm not saying to just let anyone do a 3ph 480v panel swap and connect that shit to the utility. But at this point that might be better than letting you people continue to run things your way.

It's like saying that a ball-and-chain thing is not going to entirely prevent you from walking, so you're not denied the ability to walk. While technically correct, this conclusion misses a few important related consequences.

Everyone just says F the permits and becomes a youtube academy engineer. Then you start seeing all the issues that the permit system was designed to fix.

Half my house was built less-than-safely by the previous owner because getting the permits for the structures would be too expensive, time-consuming, and maybe not even possible.

The increased costs (time and money) of permits really changes the risk-reward.

> I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing

America barely cares about the domestic poor[1] - do you think its captains of industry will care about the poor abroad? Charity begins at home.

1. See locations of Superfund sites. Or for a modern example, where they are choosing to build AI datacenters powered by on-site diesel generators or gas turbines.

A note about Superfund sites: It used to be funded by a small tax on chemical production companies. 70% of cleanup was paid for by the companies who caused it.

Then in 1995, congress "chose not to renew" that provision.

Now you and I literally and directly pay for the cleanup of hazardous waste. Companies don't really. Yet somehow they "Can't make factories" here