Block engineer describes layoff after Dorsey email

Block’s latest layoffs landed with an email from co-founder Jack Dorsey, and for at least one senior engineer they crystallised what the post-boom tech labour market now looks like. Isaac Casanova, who had worked nearly three years at Block, told Business Insider he learned he no longer had a role when a friend urged him to check his inbox.

Casanova’s account is personal, but it maps onto a broader shift: large tech firms are treating headcount as the easiest lever to pull when growth slows and capital gets more expensive. He describes a market with “fewer positions” and companies “doing more with less,” alongside lower stock grants and smaller bonuses. In practice, that means the cost of a senior hire is no longer justified by status or tenure but by immediate output relative to peers, a dynamic he says starts “from day one” through stack-ranking.

AI tools are part of the story, but not in the way vendor decks promise. Casanova describes a workflow that moved from writing most code by hand to relying on products such as Cursor and ChatGPT, and an internal expectation to “speed up” because the tools are assumed to raise productivity. The pressure does not stop at adopting new software; it changes what management believes a team should cost. When an engineer can deliver the same feature set with fewer colleagues—or at least appear to—budget holders can shrink teams first and ask questions later.

That re-prices bargaining power. In the boom years, a strong CV could secure multiple offers and large refreshers; now job seekers are being told to “check your ego,” accept lower comp, and adapt to narrower roles. The worker’s risk is clear: you are asked to produce more, faster, while the company keeps the option to cut you anyway when priorities change. The firm’s risk is also clear: compressing teams can save cash quickly, but it can also turn institutional knowledge into a disposable asset and make delivery dependent on a smaller number of people and tools.

Casanova’s advice—separate identity from employer, build a network, and treat the new environment as a constraint to work around—reads like career coaching. The underlying balance-sheet reality is harsher: when payroll is the biggest expense, senior staff are the first line item to be re-argued, and “AI adoption” is increasingly the language used to justify the rewrite.

In Casanova’s telling, the shift was visible inside Block before the email arrived: colleagues joked they had not opened their IDE in a month. The layoff made the new expectation explicit—ship faster, with fewer people, and be grateful the tools exist.