Owen Jennings is the Business Lead at Block. He explains how integrating AI tools enabled Block to reduce project team sizes significantly following a 40% headcount restructuring.
Insight
Jennings: AI broke the historic correlation between headcount and output
“There's been this correlation between the number of folks at a company and the output from the company for, you know, decades and decades. I think that basically broke the first week of December, and what we were seeing is that one or two engineers, or a desig…”
Assertion Supported
Jennings: Block's >40% RIF heavily targeted software developers over sales
“We did a reduction in force that was, you know, slightly greater than 40%. And that wasn't even you know, to the conversation we were just having, the tools were flowing through really meaningfully on the development side. And so the cuts were way larger on th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jennings: Block engineers no longer write code by hand
“I mean, we're like, we're not writing code by hand anymore. That's over. That's done.”
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Jennings: Engineers using AI tools achieve 10x to 100x productivity gains
“And what we were seeing is that one or two engineers who was on the tools Is able to be 10, 20, a hundred X more productive.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jennings: AI means fewer engineers, designers, and PMs needed per product roadmap
“What I will say is like to the extent that I do believe that fundamentally for like a given product or for a given roadmap, you're going to need fewer engineers, fewer designers, fewer PMs.”
Insight
Jennings: AI productivity follows Jevons Paradox, creating far more software companies
“It's like the classic Jevons paradox thing where I think that there's probably now just a super set of things that, that can be built. So I don't know, you know, a given tech company might be way smaller, but there might be 50 or a hundred more tech companies,…”