Block Cut 4,000 People. Here's Why This One Is Different.

It Wasn't a Surprise. It Was a Confirmation.

We've been watching the signs for two years. Amazon restructuring. Google admitting AI writes a quarter of its new code. Junior developer postings dropping 40%. Freelance rates falling off a cliff.

But on February 27, 2026, Jack Dorsey made it official.

Block cut over 4,000 people — roughly 40% of the company. Not a struggling startup running out of runway. A profitable public company with growing revenue, increasing customers, and improving margins.

His note to employees was blunt: "The intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company."

Read that again. A CEO of a public company said, in writing, that AI means you need fewer people to do the same work. Not "might need." Not "could eventually." Need.

Why This One Hits Different

We've seen big layoffs before. The 2022-2023 tech correction was brutal. But those were mostly about over-hiring during the pandemic, rising interest rates, and market correction. Companies hired too many people and had to course-correct.

Block is different for three reasons:

1. The company was doing well. This wasn't cost-cutting from desperation. Gross profit was growing. The business was healthy. They cut people because they genuinely believed they didn't need them anymore.

2. The CEO said it was because of AI. Not "macroeconomic headwinds." Not "strategic restructuring." He explicitly pointed to AI tools as the reason. No corporate euphemism. Just the quiet part, out loud.

3. Forty percent. Not 5% trimming. Not 10% optimization. Nearly half the company. That's not a reduction — it's a reinvention of how the company operates.

What It Means for Us

I've been writing code for twenty years. I started with Turbo C on a DOS machine and I'm still writing C++ infrastructure at a big tech company. I've seen every era of programming.

And I'm not going to pretend this doesn't scare me.

But here's what I think we need to understand: Block isn't an outlier. It's a preview. Every large tech company is running the same calculations right now. How many people do we actually need if AI can handle 30%, 40%, 50% of the work?

Some of them will be quieter about it. Some will do it gradually — through attrition, through not backfilling roles, through reorganizing teams. But the math is the same everywhere.

What I'm Not Going to Tell You

I'm not going to tell you everything will be fine. I don't know that.

I'm not going to tell you "just learn AI tools and you'll be safe." That's oversimplified to the point of being dishonest.

I'm not going to tell you programming is dead. It's not — not yet, probably not for a while. But the shape of it is changing fast, and the number of people who get to do it for a living is going to shrink.

What I Am Going to Do

Two days after the Block layoff, I launched The Last Programmers.

Not because I have answers. Because I think someone who's been through every era of programming should document the last one — honestly, without hype, without doom, from the trenches.

If you're a programmer reading this, you already know something has changed. You feel it in standup meetings that talk about "AI-first development." You feel it when a junior developer position gets 2,000 applicants. You feel it when you vibe-code an entire feature in an afternoon that would have taken a week.

We're living through it. Might as well make sense of it together.