This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Isaac Casanova, who has worked at Block for nearly three years as a senior software engineer. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I wasn’t even looking at my computer at the time. One of my good friends started spam calling me. I picked up the phone, and he told me to check my email.
I read the email from Jack Dorsey, and I was like, whoa, I guess I don’t have a role anymore.
We were well aware that rolling layoffs were underway. Most people assumed it would be capped at 1,000. I didn’t feel like anything big like that was coming. For it all to happen at once like that is obviously a shock.
I never got a low rating. In my conversations with folks, I was doing fine. That’s why it’s characterized as a layoff, not a performance thing. This is just a change in business direction.
Check your ego — the industry is tough
I’m managing my expectations as I look for work.
It seems like companies are tighter with headcount and more picky about who they want.
There are definitely fewer positions. Companies are doing more with less. These agents are automating some tasks and are slowly improving at understanding concepts.
The compensation is definitely lower. We’re hearing across the industry that stock grants are lower than they used to be. Refresher grants are lower. Bonuses — if they exist.
Once you get in, it’s stack-ranked performance management. Your output is compared to your peers from day one. It’s definitely tougher.
You’ve got to check your ego. That might be the part people struggle with more than their technical ability.
Separate your identity from your job
At the end of the day, companies are beholden to shareholders.
Jack’s memo came across as what someone in that position making a tough decision would say. A call was made, and it had to be communicated. I don’t have any negative feelings about anybody that I worked with or at the company.
The biggest expense of running an organization is employees. The higher you are — senior engineer, engineering manager, head of product — the more expensive you are.
You need to remember that and evaluate your relationship with work. Many people in these positions tie their identity to their jobs. Those are the people most affected when these things happen.
You try not to take it personally. You see it as a new opportunity. There’s a human aspect — you just lost your job, and it kind of sucks for a bit — but you can’t let it hold you down. You can’t let it define you. These things happen, and you need to adjust.
The good thing about when these things happen is the network of people that you’ve met. Build the network so that when things like this happen, you can maneuver.
Be flexible — AI is changing the role
You could tell on the inside that things were changing.
A couple of years ago, I was doing most of the coding by hand. That slowly turned into using interfaces like Cursor, Claude Code, Goose, and ChatGPT. You’d slowly read things internally like, “Let’s speed up.” You were expected to speed up because the agents could make you more productive.
You’d have conversations with some of your colleagues and be like, “I haven’t opened my IDE in a month.” As a software engineer, that’s definitely a shift.
AI turns you from a person who just turns out code into more of an experimenter — a builder.
Software engineering, for a long time, was so by the letter, by the design, by the spec. Exact and precise, but slow.
Now we have these tools, the industry expects you to move fast. You can shift your mindset from that rigid engineering, step-by-step, to more of an exploratory “attack the problem, solve it, refine it later.”
Don’t get too trapped in the domain that you’re working in. Block tended to hire specialists who could also generalize when needed. So, be flexible. Using these tools allows you to get context in areas that you might not have had the opportunity to work in.
Do you have a story to share about tech layoffs? Contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal at cmlee.81.
