The fintech company Block fired roughly half of its employees earlier this month, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly blaming artificial intelligence for making large teams obsolete. Yet across the industry, businesses employ 6 percent more software engineers now than they did a year ago.
The contradiction sits at the heart of the current AI employment debate, "Hvylya" reports, citing Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey's new essay.
"We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working," Dorsey explained publicly. "I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now."
To Dorsey, his employees were horses - innovation was driving them out of existence. But industry-wide hiring data suggests coders are more like coal: corporate executives are desperate for workers who can develop or implement AI products, and that demand is pushing headcounts up, not down.
The framing may also be too clean. A former Block employee told The New York Times that the cuts looked more like "standard prioritization and cost management, not an A.I.-driven reinvention." Whether AI was the cause or the excuse, the gap between one company's layoffs and the broader market's appetite for engineers remains striking.
Lowrey places Block's decision within a framework borrowed from the 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons: when technology makes a resource more efficient, total demand for that resource often rises rather than falls. Software engineers, for now, appear to be living proof.
Also read: OpenAI's chief scientist has described a workplace revolution where nobody really edits code by hand anymore.