it's 8am, friday the 27th of february 2026, you just came home from the gym. you decide to check twitter before going to work. the first tweet you see, in some kind of sick and twisted sense of fate, is from your ceo.
moments later, you're bombarded with calls and texts. you log in immediately and witness the carnage.
achieving something
my very short 5 year career in tech so far has been interesting to say the least, block being my first and only foray into "big tech". there are so many things i'm proud of working on that not only made me grow as person & engineer, but had some kind of impact on real people - creating new products for a payments pipeline processing millions of transactions a day, enabling merchants to file their taxes more efficiently, being on call and fixing seriously critical bugs during incidents and saving the company from mind-warping legal liability, and so on.
my biggest achievement was leading a project to build a new internal bidirectional database syncing tool, to replace an existing vendor supplied tool and associated services, all tallying up to a total contract savings of ~$2.5M USD per year. this project forced me to design and build a highly available distributed system, it forced me deal-make with all manner of people up and down the organisational hierarchy, it taught me how to organise, and it elevated my sense of personal agency and self belief to make shit happen. this culminated in my first ever trip to the US - in order to "launch" the project, in Jan 2025 - then followed by numerous other US trips sprinkled throughout 2025 for other projects.
unleashing the horde
now, for block, there are many strong arguments to be made in favour for why a restructuring of this magnitude was necessary to shake the stray cats out of the tree to use a crude analogy - but unfortunately this is always an imprecise process, and unintended casualities are inevitable. as to the true reason why it was decided to perform the most drastic reduction in force in S&P500 history, and whether it's truly because of AI, it's probably not my place to comment (remembering a kanye quote i'm not gonna say nothin to mess my promotion up).
all i know is there are now thousands of mostly very talented engineers from block alone ready to disrupt the market, and that this move opens the floodgates for other companies to finally also make very drastic RIF's. putting my posi vibes cap on, there's no telling what thousands of high agency and capable people are going to be able to do to the world to make it far better than it is now - motivated by their own talent and insatiable desire to change the world.
now what?
i'm not really sure. i think most people would rush to find a new job, and the working-class part of me keeps saying that i should be doing the same, but i consider this an interesting opportunity to explore some ideas that have been gnawing at me for a long time. what fascinates me right now are 2 things: the first is building bespoke hardware for some highly specific use cases - thinking about track timers for race cars, and autonomous geomapping drones; the second is being able to experience first hand a full end-to-end delivery of a new product/service that solves a real problem for at least 1 person.