Elon started the biggest cut in tech by firing half of Twitter in Nov 2022 from… Jack.
And since the acquisition, headcount has dropped 80%, while the platform has scaled faster.
All doomsday scenarios and hypotheses for what happens without thousands of engineers, support/IT teams, QA staff overseeing servers and systems day and night did not materialize.
This accelerated the pressure toward Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and other large tech companies to shrink and trim some departments, reduce the middle-management layers, cut some R&D spend, and focus on operational efficiency. We’ve seen this playing out for over 3 years now (and counting).
Jack just laid off nearly 50% of Block. But claiming GP per employee moved from $500K to $2M meanwhile.
Since all companies out there are hiring, people will always be needed. But the era of filling in seats just for the sake of headcount is permanently gone.
The most devastating change today is less tied to AI and more relevant to what Jack reveals here: overhiring, audacious goals, bold expectations (and experiments), and previously acceptable market criteria and GP norms that are now optimized and squeezed.
If you’re accountable, practice extreme ownership, have hard skills that actually come to use, your talents will be in demand.
But for fully WFH button-clickers mimicking basic LLM tasks, these artificial roles are compressed and consolidated for purely practical reasons.
