Block

• Remote-first.
• Super smart, kind, empathetic coworkers and friends for life.
• Huge visibility and a well-known brand.
• Genuinely, the mission of empowering everyone is great, and I loved helping small businesses succeed.

Square's overall culture and benefits were amazing for a long time, but this slowly has gone down the drain over the last year or so, rapidly advancing recently. There was an insane push for AI velocity without any regard for product roadmaps or vision or even asking "how will this help sellers?", just a dictate to use AI for everything, culminating in borderline AI psychosis.

The company continues to employ aggressive performance management, stack ranking, and monitoring code metrics after claiming they would not factor into performance ratings. Block also recently cut 70% of engineering in favor of AI, leaving sellers at a possible disadvantage.

In general, don't work here. This is not a company that respects you or wants you to grow. They want you to blindly pump out code regardless of quality or actual impact to cover up for years of mismanagement and a lack of a coherent product strategy and vision. You, as an IC, will be blamed for things completely out of your control.

It's a real shame. This was an amazing company where I was proud to work. It's a husk of its former self.

There's no hope. Resign. Jack, it's so clear you want to run a nimble, small startup, so go do that, and leave Block alone.