After hundreds of workers were laid off in early February from Jack Dorsey’s Block, some of the people remaining at the company say the internal culture has devolved to a point where performance anxiety is running rampant, using generative AI is required, and overall morale is rapidly deteriorating. Block is the parent company behind the merchant payment processor Square and the payment app Cash App. Dorsey cofounded the company in 2009 after previously cofounding Twitter.
“Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years,” reads an employee complaint submitted to Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting, a transcript of which was seen by WIRED. “The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.” WIRED spoke with seven current and former Block employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal operations at the company. A Block spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The layoffs at Block started this month and could eventually impact up to 10 percent of the company’s workforce, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Before the headcount reductions began, Block had around 11,000 people on staff. Rather than a one-off event, management has slowly enacted the firings over the course of weeks and told employees that the process will continue through the end of this month, sources tell WIRED.
“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,” reads another employee complaint from the same meeting with Dorsey.
Multiple sources who spoke with WIRED say they were appalled when Arnaud Weber, Block’s engineering lead, sent out an email after the initial wave of layoffs characterizing them as being performance-related rather than a cost-saving measure. The sources say they disagree with management’s internal messaging about the firings being merit-based.
“As part of our 2025 performance cycle, we have parted ways with teammates who weren’t meeting the expectations of their role,” wrote Weber in the email, which was viewed by WIRED. “These departures were based on clear performance gaps, role expectations, and alignment coming out of calibrations on the bar for each level.”
Block employees are currently expected to send an update email to Dorsey every week, who then uses generative AI to summarize the thousands of messages. In the same all-hands meeting, which took place after hundreds of staff had already been fired, Dorsey said that frequent topics cited by workers in their latest messages 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 made for performance reasons, saying that there was “a sizable portion of our population that have been phoning it in.” He also stressed that the remaining workers should be using generative AI tools to maximize productivity, or else Block would risk being outpaced by its competitors.
“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” says one current Block employee. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”
