My stable job in the UK allowed me to save, but rental prices in my area would have taken up a huge portion of my income. Each month, I withdrew from my savings as everyday expenses became luxuries. I still had bills to pay, such as car finance, insurance, gas, phone, and a contribution to my parents’ mortgage.
I couldn’t move out of my parents’ house at 28. My goal was to buy my own place, but this was unrealistic. Renting was just as high as a monthly mortgage payment. Saving for a down payment while renting in the UK was impossible on a single average salary.
Even though I was employed, I couldn’t afford the life I wanted. I felt like I was surviving, not living. I was craving financial freedom and independence, but the UK couldn’t offer them.
Two years prior, I had traveled around Thailand and fallen in love with the food, the pace of life, and the value for money. It was a country that had always been on my mind, and eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t live comfortably in the UK anymore. I felt financially stuck and embarrassed that I was still living with my parents.
The only way out was to quit my job, become a freelancer, and relocate to Bangkok — a city filled with opportunity where housing costs half as much as in the UK.
Staying in the UK no longer felt sustainable
For months, I was figuring out what to do. I could spend years trying to catch up, or I could change my environment and live a more affordable lifestyle.
After researching Thailand and reminiscing about my travels there, I realized it was the perfect country to start my own business as a freelance writer.
While I was backpacking there previously, I ate freshly cooked meals for as little as $1. I looked into rental listings in Bangkok, and I was shocked. A modern one-bedroom condominium with a gym and swimming pool costs as little as $400 a month.
The author in Thailand.
In comparison, the average rent in my area of the UK was around $1,200 — more than a third of my monthly salary before bills. In Bangkok, I could pay half that and have more space and amenities.
I had been building a freelance writing business alongside my 9 to 5 job to create freedom to live in Thailand. By the time I decided to leave, I had one client secured. It didn’t guarantee stability, but there was no positive future for me in the UK.
Last June, I handed in my notice and booked a one-way flight to Bangkok. Within a month, I said my goodbyes, packed up my life, and left the UK behind.
My life in Thailand costs less, I get more, and I’m happier
Moving to a new country alone and starting my own business was terrifying, but I knew it would eventually give me the financial independence I couldn’t find in the UK.
Now that I’m my own boss, I still work hard. But the difference is that I’m building something for myself. In the eight months I’ve lived in Bangkok, my client base has grown. I earn slightly less, but my money stretches further.
I rent my own condominium for $500 a month, which includes a swimming pool, a gym, and a coworking space. My electricity bill is $40 a month, and water costs just $2.
Things that once felt like luxury in the UK are now part of my everyday life. I buy fresh fruit from local markets. I pay $6 an hour for a weekly cleaner. I don’t cook; I eat out every day without calculating whether I should skip it to save money.
Getting around is affordable, too. I no longer own a car. A train journey costs around $1, and bike rental rides start at $1.
Since moving to Thailand, I’ve embraced what the Thais call “sabai sabai” — a stress-free way of life. For the first time in years, I feel fulfilled, financially free, and happy.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Robin Peppers Daniel, a job seeker in her early 60s who lives in South Carolina. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Last April, I received a notification that I had 30 minutes before I would lose all of my work access — and that within an hour, I would receive some paperwork. Then my boss called me with the news: I, along with several colleagues, had been laid off.
I was working for Wells Fargo in a management role, and had some suspicion that a layoff was coming. This wasn’t my first layoff. In 2018, I was laid off from Walmart, where I worked as an instructional design manager.
A little over a year later, I started working for Wells Fargo as an external regulatory reporting consultant and was later promoted to a lead control management officer role.
My last working day at Wells Fargo was in April, but I was technically still employed and received paychecks through mid-June, followed by a few months of severance. Nearly a year after being laid off, I’m still looking for a full-time role.
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My search strategies haven’t landed me a role so far
After some reorganization about a year earlier, there was redundancy in certain areas, and I felt like my workload started to dry up. My husband and I decided to start financially preparing, which proved to be beneficial.
I’d already been casually looking for work, partially because I’d felt for a while that the role wasn’t a good fit for me. But it wasn’t until I was laid off that I updated my LinkedIn profile, and not until around June that I began actively searching for roles. I was initially focused on banking and corporate trainer roles, but I’ve become open to any position where my skills are transferable.
In terms of my job search strategies, I adopted the “open to work” banner on LinkedIn and posted that I was seeking work, which helped me connect with people who said they’d be open to referring me for roles. I’ve also tried looking for job postings on company websites rather than only on LinkedIn, where I’ve found that some postings can be outdated.
Despite these strategies, I was still struggling to land a job. There was one opportunity last year that I thought might work out. I had a referral from a former coworker who said she’d spoken about me to the hiring manager. After three interviews, I waited several weeks and eventually heard they were going in another direction.
I pick up substitute teaching shifts when I can, but I’m still unemployed
My husband and I have enough savings to be financially stable for roughly the next 18 months. In a perfect world, I would retire and get out of this work rat race, but right now, I unfortunately can’t afford to.
Last August, I applied to be a substitute teacher in my area so I could have some form of income once my unemployment benefits ran out.I used to substitute teach when my daughter was preschool age, and I enjoyed it.
However, I had to be very strategic about taking on substitute work. I live in South Carolina, but I worked in North Carolina — and was therefore subject to that state’s unemployment system. In North Carolina, you can earn a maximum of $350 a week in unemployment benefits for up to 12 weeks — $4,200 total. You can also earn up to $70 a week without impacting your unemployment check.
A full week of substitute teaching paid about $550, and depending on how many days I was needed, I had to make sure what I’d gain in income would offset what I’d lose that week in unemployment benefits.
I’m now considering teaching full-time
I’m pursuing an alternative teaching pathway in South Carolina that would eventually allow me to work as a full-time teacher after the initial testing is complete. The salary wouldn’t be what I earned in banking, but it would allow me to do something that I enjoy.
I’ve also started exploring part-time options that could hopefully provide me with income and benefits, including a small web design business my husband and I have run for years and a small skincare products business.
Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads
I’ve realized this could be a really long-term unemployment spell
During much of my job search, I was fairly optimistic because I’d previously found full-time jobs through my network. Over time, I’ve realized that I could be unemployed for a while.
I think my age might be holding me back in my job search, and that some employers view me as overqualified, given my past work experience and education. As a result, I’ve been conscious of the way I present and talk about my experience level.
Nowadays, I’m only half-heartedly looking for full-time work. If a job posting has more than 100 applicants, I don’t apply. I’ve resigned myself to semi-retirement.
If I have any advice for struggling job seekers, it’s that tapping into my network and family has been the biggest help for me, even if it hasn’t led to a job yet. I’ve had some former coworkers — more acquaintances than friends — reach out to tell me about jobs. I really believe that in this market — where AI might be the one reviewing your résumé — it’s all about networking.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Prakhar Agarwal, an applied researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs who previously worked at OpenAI. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment and academic history.
My day-to-day varies a lot depending on what stage of the project we are in versus what the immediate deliverables are.
At OpenAI and Meta, you have these milestones — say, a big training or reinforcement-learning run — in 10 months. It gets intense when we’re approaching the deadline.
Whatever work I identify is always based on the current iteration of the model. If I say the model isn’t good at X and my solution helps fix X, it is based on that version of the model. If I miss the deadline, I don’t know whether the next version will have the same issues or not.
If we are further away from that deadline, then we’re mostly working on evaluations and trying to find failure cases and issues with the existing model.
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The work is super dynamic. Sometimes you think something is super easy and you’ll get it done in a day. Other times, it’s the opposite — because there are so many unknowns, it might take a week.
Working at frontier labs feels very different from Big Tech
What we’re limited by in these foundational labs is compute. It’s not like Big Tech or other places where you can keep hiring a bunch of people and give them small pieces of a task to do.
Everyone needs compute to actually do something, and as soon as you have a lot of people, the compute gets divided, so no one will be able to do anything.
You also want high-bandwidth communication between stakeholders — you don’t want 10 different layers of communication. The speed of iteration is much faster. These core groups tend to be much smaller and tighter.
The idea of a “team” is also very fluid. Each person has their own projects, but they collaborate with others to work on joint projects. At Meta and OpenAI, there are a lot of senior people and not a lot of junior people, so everyone has a decent scope of projects.
Sometimes I collaborate more with people outside my immediate team than within it. Your scope isn’t restricted to four or five people. Your scope is the problem you’re trying to solve.
Communication and going deep with coding are key
Communication is the most important aspect in these labs. Because a lot of things aren’t documented, you need to be able to articulate what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what the next steps are, convey your results, and get feedback on your work.
Becoming comfortable going through the code and identifying the specifics is one of the most important skills I’ve seen. The speed at which the code evolves is much faster than the documentation. If you’re stuck on something, read the code and try to understand it yourself.
Having some understanding of what’s happening across different verticals also gives you a good overview of the ideas and approaches people are trying. Because everything is super related, you might learn something from there or find ways to contribute.
The biggest advantage these labs have is knowing what doesn’t work
A research paper tells you, “I did X, Y, and Z in this specific order, and it works.” But what you don’t see is that before doing X, Y, and Z, I tried 50 different things that didn’t work — and people don’t talk about that.
That, to me, is the real strength of these foundation labs. Because of all the experimentation and all the work that has already been done, the teams have built really strong intuitions. They know which things won’t work or won’t scale, and which are going to work well.
People outside often look for the gains, but they miss the point that even the misses are very valuable.
Advice for those who want to work in top labs
I don’t have a good answer for managing burnout. You’re pretty much just going with the flow. You’re working at the cutting edge, and to put it simply, if you want to be here, you can’t think about it on a strict day-to-day basis.
What I would tell my younger self is to be comfortable exploring new avenues and new ideas. What I’ve seen is that we try to play to our strengths or stay in a deterministic setting where we know we’ll do fine. But in these domains, the speed at which things are moving is so fast that you need to be able to switch to a new topic.
Build the muscle to handle being thrown into something completely new. Sometimes, it’s more psychological than a skill issue.
Do you have a story to share about working at a top AI lab? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pratiksha Patnaik, a 30-year-old cloud infrastructure engineer at Google Cloud Consulting, based in Seattle. Her identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been with Google for around three years and I started as an infrastructure engineer. I’m still an infrastructure engineer and on a day-to-day basis, I work with customers to build different solutions, depending on the needs of the customer.
At first, I was mostly involved with networking security and infrastructure customers. But as we saw the AI wave come in, we started focusing more on customers that want to adopt gen AI products and solutions.
I didn’t transition into an AI role, but I’m working with a lot of AI services, and AI engineers who are working on features for those services. My job is a combination of working with customers and the product team, to provide technical solutions for customers. It’s a constant feedback loop to figure out if the solution we’re building is right for the customer we’re working for.
Our job is to know how these products work. Sometimes when we work on the products, we identify feature gaps or bugs, so we need to work with the product team or engineering team.
I’ve been in the same role the whole time, but the nature of my job is changing because of everything going on in the AI space. We get a lot of demand in AI products and we have to do a lot of trainings on it to deliver.
I spend an hour or two weekly on trainings
The more AI progresses, the more difficult it’s become to keep up. As the rate of AI innovation gets quicker, the role of engineers has transitioned from mastery to continuous adaptation at scale.
Just being aware of everything that’s happening in the tech industry, along with what we have to do with the customer, has changed dramatically from what it was like a year ago. Back then, we had to execute within known constraints. But as time passes and AI evolves rapidly, those perimeters have dissolved and we have to invest much more time to learning about changes in this space. We now have to navigate an ever-expanding problem space alongside our customers.
I spend around one to two hours a week up-skilling on new concepts. We have a lot of internal trainings that we can utilize. So I see if there is something new that I’m interested in learning about and that can help me do my job.
I am gaining a deeper level of understanding in high-performance computing, AI observability, model performance benchmarking, and the underlying architecture of GPUs and TPUs.
It can get overwhelming
The culture at Google is very much about constantly learning. Every day we learn about a new tool or model version. That motivates me to keep learning. We also have to skill up in order to put our best foot forward in front of the customers.
But with the pace of technology nowadays, I feel like I need to know everything — and if I don’t learn, I might be left behind.
The reality is that it’s not practically possible to know everything with the changes that are coming out at an exponential rate. To remain effective without burning out, I prioritize intentional depth over exhaustive consumption. By focusing on what really interests me, I can make sure that my learning is not just a chore of “keeping up,” but an investment in expertise.
When I read too much, I get overwhelmed and it’s not possible to retain all of the information I’m consuming. We’re at a point where the amount of information we have is huge and we have to figure out where to spend our time and what’s the most beneficial for us.
Are you an engineer experiencing changes in your job? We’d love to hear from you. Email the reporter from a non-work device via email at aaltchek@insider.com or secure-messaging platform Signal at aalt.19.
Growing up in the suburbs of southern California, I knew a few things to be true about my family. Most importantly, I knew that all we had were each other. Unlike my friends at school, we did not have any extended family. There were no big Thanksgivings, hangouts with our cousins, or sleepovers at our grandparents’ house.
It was just us four, navigating the differences between the Western culture we lived in and the Eastern culture of our roots.
I grew up in Los Angeles as the eldest daughter of an immigrant family. My parents had left their motherland in search of new possibilities in this one. The only family they would have here was the one that they would go on to create: my little sister and me.
But all that changed when I landed a job in a different city after college.
My parents encouraged me to move
When I received my acceptance letter to a university in Los Angeles, I was reassured that I would not be too far from home. When I was not on campus, I was back in my childhood living room, catching up with my little sister over our favorite boba orders and proudly taking pictures of her high school theater performances. I was playing Chinese checkers with my mom on our dining room table, followed by walking our family pup with my dad under the palm trees.
Meanwhile, in college, my life was actively progressing. By the end of my degree, I landed a dream job that would be the first building block of my future career.
It was based in Seattle.
All my life, my parents had encouraged me to go where the opportunity is. After all, that is what led them to America, where they were able to give their children the childhood they never had. In their eyes, if Seattle was where the opportunity was, that is where I should go.
“The flight is not too far,” my mom said, “but we will miss you.”
I couldn’t shake the guilt of leaving my family
I felt a continuous wave of internal conflict. On one hand, I was excited to experience something new. On the other hand, I felt guilty for leaving my already small family.
When I asked my friends if they ever felt guilty about moving away from home, I was surprised by their responses. For most of them, it never even crossed their minds. They chose to move because they never saw themselves living in the same area they grew up in, and they knew it would not provide the industries they needed.
The author decided to move to Seattle.
Courtesy of Sherri Lu
They took possibly never living near their parents again as a given part of adulthood. Their parents share this belief and, like mine, encouraged them to carve out the life path that best suits them.
Perhaps my guilt stemmed from the fact that I was choosing to leave a city that could potentially offer similar career prospects. Would I feel the same guilt about moving away if my family were located somewhere I did not feel as warmly about?
Eventually, I did talk myself into taking the job. As I settled into Seattle, I thought about how my grandparents felt when their daughter moved across the ocean from China to America. By comparison, my living just a few states away felt minor.
“How did you feel when Mom told you she was considering leaving home?” I asked my grandma over video chat.
“She needed to make her own decisions on what she thought was best for her life, but I did secretly cry about it,” she told me. “I made sure your mother never saw because I did not want it to influence her decision.”
I made the right decision
Beyond my career, living on my own gave me the space to understand myself more deeply. I began sharing my self-discovery journey online with “Eldest Daughter Club” and grew it into a community of other women doing the same. I found different forms of family as I bridged the distance between my own.
I called my family often and planned routine trips back home. Although our in-person time was now more limited, I made sure that a larger percentage of it was true quality time.
Guilt was the feeling that encompassed the discomfort of leaving behind the familial support system that I had always counted on. In the end, support transcends location.
We must all make the decisions on what we think is best for our lives. Guilt is just a signal of what you cherish, but it does not tell your whole story. That is for us to build, wherever we decide to call home.
After four years of coursework, practicums, and part-time jobs, graduating felt like a huge accomplishment. I finally had room to breathe. Then fall approached, and it was time to get a “real job”.
I earned my bachelor’s degree in social work, picked up ESL teaching certifications along the way, and assumed I would either go straight into the field or head to teacher’s college.
It felt like the responsible choice — one that made sense to my family,to my need for stability, and to the unspoken expectation that, after graduation, you pick a path and stay on it.
That summer, I came across a college instructor position I was technically qualified for, so I applied, interviewed, and overcame some serious impostor syndrome. By September, I was teaching my first college-level courses from home.
At first, I felt great. The hours were good, my students were kind, and my family was proud of me. I was even teaching future community-service workers.
On paper, it was a dream job. It felt grown-up, fit my background, and seemed like the right thing to do. Over time, though, that feeling faded.
I wasn’t ready to settle down, and I could feel it
After graduating, I got a job in my field as I felt I was supposed to.
Alessa Hickman
Between life changes, teaching burnout, and a growing disconnect from my passions, I felt stuck.
I’ve always been creatively inclined, whether that meant writing, making videos, cooking, or creating digital resources in my free time.
Instead, many of my nights were spent prepping lessons, grading assignments, and reading essays, leaving little room for the hobbies that filled me up.
Gradually, the work took a toll on me, but the expectation that a “good” job is one you stick with for years made leaving seem like breaking the rules.
In my early 20s, I felt boxed into this pipeline that didn’t suit me, and I didn’t want to follow a version of success that didn’t feel sustainable.
I’m entrepreneurial by nature, constantly chasing new ideas, certifications, and ways to apply them. So when I started exploring what else I could do with my skill set, freelance writing made the most sense.
With my husband’s support, I decided to leave teaching and pursue freelancing full-time — a move that raised quite a few eyebrows.
My craving for something radically different pushed me to leave my job and my country
I fell in love with Japan when I first visited.
Alessa Hickman
Around the time my teaching chapter closed, I learned about Japan’s Working Holiday Visa program. My husband and I first visited Japan in early 2024 and instantly fell in love with the country.
Back in Ontario, that feeling was hard to ignore. We were renting an apartment with a lease ending in October, and after spending my entire life in my hometown, staying felt more limiting than comfortable.
Between the rising cost of living and a sense that I had outgrown my routines, I wanted to explore something new.
I’ve enjoyed building a life in Tokyo.
Alessa Hickman
We applied for the visa, were approved, and sold most of our belongings as our move-out date approached. In December 2025, we flew to Tokyo and rang in the new year halfway across the world.
Living here has been incredible. Learning Japanese, navigating a new culture, and building a life in Tokyo have been exactly what I needed. And yes — the food’s been amazing, too.
Moving abroad and changing paths didn’t mean abandoning my education or values. Instead, it meant reframing them.
Read more stories about moving somewhere new
My definition of success looks different now
I’ve learned that life after college doesn’t have to be linear.
Alessa Hickman
I’m no longer in a classroom, but my background in social work and teaching continues to shape the work I do.
I create and edit content that’s rooted in helping others, and I’m lucky enough to write about my life and experiences abroad.
When I told people I was quitting teaching, and later that I was moving to Japan, it was seen as somewhat unconventional. My husband even left his stable job to come here.
However, the move opened many more doors than it closed. Living in Tokyo has brought new experiences, stories, and opportunities I would’ve never had otherwise.
I’ve learned that postgrad life doesn’t have to be linear — and maybe it shouldn’t be. For some people, stability is the right choice. But for others, taking a detour can lead to growth you’d never find by staying put.
For me, choosing uncertainty meant choosing myself.
I don’t know what my life will look like in two or five years from now, but I do know that I’m building it on my own terms. That feels like a pretty good place to start.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Cathy Xie, a 25-year-old marketing professional based in Toronto. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I remember opening my laptop about a month into my job hunt, seeing yet another automated rejection, and feeling this kind of collapsing desperation. I knew I needed to do something different in my approach if I wanted to stand out in the job market.
I tried three new job-finding strategies, but I didn’t get hired until I sent an email directly to a CEO with the subject line “My landlord inspired this email.”
Job seekers should be thinking less about their résumé and cover letters, and more about how they can get a potential employer’s attention.
I mass-applied to jobs for a month
In 2024, I founded a startup aimed at helping students and new grads with unconventional backgrounds pivot into tech and navigate the job market. Unfortunately, we had to shut down about a year and a half later due to changes in the market. It’s a little ironic that the tech job market is what put me back on the job hunt.
After mass applying to roles across marketing, product, and growth, largely targeting tech and AI companies, I felt drained. I was also spending so much time doom-scrolling on TikTok, watching video after video of young Gen Z job seekers talking about their frustrations with the job market.
Job searching was always in the back of my mind, and I knew it was time to try a different approach.
Referrals and niche startup boards only helped me so much
The first route I tried was referrals, but those were not a huge success.
My next approach was scouring niche startup boards, subscribing to free newsletters that posted about startups hiring, and even following LinkedIn creators who report on startups that had just raised. Then I’d apply directly through the company’s website and try to email someone on the team who would likely be my manager for that position. Though I didn’t end up with a job from that approach, it was still a great way to network.
My last approach, cold emailing a founder, ultimately landed me my new role. I’d been following this founder’s journey on LinkedIn for a while because I was passionate about his startup’s mission to address the housing crisis in major cities. He posted that he was hiring a marketing manager and included a link to apply. I thought to myself, “I am not applying the traditional way again.”
I had just come across a social media post from someone about how cold emailing helped them achieve so many of their life goals, and how rejection was redirection. It made me think maybe I should just email the founder directly. I had nothing to lose.
The founder responded to my email
I know, as a founder, you get thousands of emails, so I needed to make sure my email was one he had to open.
It was also important to me to make my email as personal as possible because I think it’s a lost art. Especially with AI, we’ve become overly formal with writing. My subject line was “My landlord inspired this email” because I thought it was funny and might grab his attention.
In the body, I introduced myself, described my past roles and how they prepared me for this job, and wrote about my passion for and interest in the startup itself. I tried to keep it personable and a little funny. I kept it around 150 words, so it was short and sweet.
He responded just over a week later by emailing me back and messaging me on LinkedIn to set up an intro call with him and the CMO. After two more interviews, including an intro to a case study and a case study presentation, I was offered the role of marketing manager.
The job has been great so far, and my team is amazing.
Here’s my advice for job seekers
The first two questions a lot of people ask themselves when applying to a job are “How should I write my résumé?” and “How should I write my cover letter?”
However, I think the question you should ask yourself instead is, “How can I get the attention of this person?” Once you ask yourself how you can get in front of a person, you open up so many ways to approach this job hunt, rather than just doing the traditional cold application.
With this wave of AI, it’s so easy not to put in effort with job applications and just mass apply. But I think what comes with getting people’s attention is putting in the effort.
You can spend a few hours cold applying and maybe get one or two automated emails, or you can spend those hours doing a couple of very personalized outreaches. It will take effort, but I think it’s important to put that effort in if you want to stand out in today’s job market.
Do you have a story to share about finding a job with an unconventional method? If so, please reach out to the editor, Manseen Logan, at mlogan@businessinsider.com.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Isaac Casanova, who has worked at Block for nearly three years as a senior software engineer. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I wasn’t even looking at my computer at the time. One of my good friends started spam calling me. I picked up the phone, and he told me to check my email.
I read the email from Jack Dorsey, and I was like, whoa, I guess I don’t have a role anymore.
We were well aware that rolling layoffs were underway. Most people assumed it would be capped at 1,000. I didn’t feel like anything big like that was coming. For it all to happen at once like that is obviously a shock.
I never got a low rating. In my conversations with folks, I was doing fine. That’s why it’s characterized as a layoff, not a performance thing. This is just a change in business direction.
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Check your ego — the industry is tough
I’m managing my expectations as I look for work.
It seems like companies are tighter with headcount and more picky about who they want.
There are definitely fewer positions. Companies are doing more with less. These agents are automating some tasks and are slowly improving at understanding concepts.
The compensation is definitely lower. We’re hearing across the industry that stock grants are lower than they used to be. Refresher grants are lower. Bonuses — if they exist.
Once you get in, it’s stack-ranked performance management. Your output is compared to your peers from day one. It’s definitely tougher.
You’ve got to check your ego. That might be the part people struggle with more than their technical ability.
Separate your identity from your job
At the end of the day, companies are beholden to shareholders.
Jack’s memo came across as what someone in that position making a tough decision would say. A call was made, and it had to be communicated. I don’t have any negative feelings about anybody that I worked with or at the company.
The biggest expense of running an organization is employees. The higher you are — senior engineer, engineering manager, head of product — the more expensive you are.
You need to remember that and evaluate your relationship with work. Many people in these positions tie their identity to their jobs. Those are the people most affected when these things happen.
You try not to take it personally. You see it as a new opportunity. There’s a human aspect — you just lost your job, and it kind of sucks for a bit — but you can’t let it hold you down. You can’t let it define you. These things happen, and you need to adjust.
The good thing about when these things happen is the network of people that you’ve met. Build the network so that when things like this happen, you can maneuver.
Be flexible — AI is changing the role
You could tell on the inside that things were changing.
A couple of years ago, I was doing most of the coding by hand. That slowly turned into using interfaces like Cursor, Claude Code, Goose, and ChatGPT. You’d slowly read things internally like, “Let’s speed up.” You were expected to speed up because the agents could make you more productive.
You’d have conversations with some of your colleagues and be like, “I haven’t opened my IDE in a month.” As a software engineer, that’s definitely a shift.
AI turns you from a person who just turns out code into more of an experimenter — a builder.
Software engineering, for a long time, was so by the letter, by the design, by the spec. Exact and precise, but slow.
Now we have these tools, the industry expects you to move fast. You can shift your mindset from that rigid engineering, step-by-step, to more of an exploratory “attack the problem, solve it, refine it later.”
Don’t get too trapped in the domain that you’re working in. Block tended to hire specialists who could also generalize when needed. So, be flexible. Using these tools allows you to get context in areas that you might not have had the opportunity to work in.
Do you have a story to share about tech layoffs? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com or on Signal at cmlee.81.
In the months before Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of staff on Thursday, workers were embracing AI tools in what one called an almost “celebratory” way.
Dorsey and other company leaders had made no secret of their interest in AI, but the company was profitable, and some workers couldn’t imagine the technology fully replacing humans at scale any time soon, they told Business Insider.
Still, there were pockets of unease. Block, the parent company of financial tech firms including Cash App and Square, had executed a series of smaller performance-based cuts in previous months. At least one employee said he’d had a nagging feeling that the AI tools he was using had gotten really good.
“I had a hunch that, at some point, the company would cut people because of AI. I just didn’t think it would be right now,” Ivan Ureña-Valdes, a data analyst who was laid off after four years at Block, told Business Insider.
When Dorsey dropped the hammer via a memo posted on X, he said AI was the reason 4,000 workers were losing their jobs.
“A significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better,” Dorsey told analysts on Block’s earnings call on Thursday following the news.
Two hours after the layoff announcement, Dorsey logged onto a video call with the calendar title “gratitude,” sporting a baseball cap that said “love” to address the staff.
As he spoke with employees about Block’s layoffs and his reasoning for the deep cuts, some sent comments thanking him for the opportunity to work at the company. One asked if his hat was appropriate given the context. Dorsey answered that it was about gratitude.
Throughout the meeting, he was flooded with waves of emojis from muted participants, three attendees told Business Insider. Popular reactions were the thumbs-down, thinking face, and crying-laughing emojis, two people said. Dorsey explained the cuts in his trademark monotone and said he was doing what’s best for the company.
Business Insider spoke to seven former Block employees about the internal push to use AI in the last year; many said they were happy to oblige. Some were laid off on Thursday; others lost their jobs in recent performance-based cuts. Though they adopted AI tools to varying degrees, they view the technology as unable, at the moment, to do all the jobs of the thousands of workers who were let go. So it came as a shock to see half the company chopped in one fell swoop.
While some in the tech world expressed skepticism that AI was the true impetus for the cuts, suggesting that Dorsey had bloated Block’s ranks, others saw it as the first wave in a coming tsunami of job cuts across the industry. The alarm over a potential white-collar jobs apocalypse has gotten louder in recent months. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has signaled that AI could lead to white-collar job cuts at the company. Last year, Salesforce made cuts to its customer support team, thanks to the use of AI agents, CEO Marc Benioff said.
Block’s layoffs are so large in scope and more pointedly attributed to AI than most that they added fuel to a fear sweeping the white-collar world: AI is coming for your job, and learning to use it isn’t enough to save you.
“I’ve seen a lot of public commentary about this layoff and how workers need to be using AI to protect our jobs,” said one nontechnical worker laid off on Thursday. “I was actively building with AI and know that many of my impacted colleagues were doing the same.”
Jack Dorsey ‘loves AI’
Dorsey has planted a flag in painting Block as an AI-forward company. He said on Thursday’s earnings call that Block was “one of the first to harness agentic capabilities.” And in July, Dorsey made headlines for using an internal coding tool called Goose to vibecode a “weekend project” that led to the messaging app Bitchat.
Investors appeared to favor Dorsey’s narrative of cutting costs with AI: After being down roughly 16% year to date before the layoffs, Block’s stock ended Friday up nearly 17% on the day.
“Jack loves AI and was constantly pushing us to use it,” Ureña-Valdes said. “I got to use these tools as much as possible every single day.”
He said he’d “felt the rumblings of AI disruption for a while” because he was using it in his work and noticed the tools were getting better.
One former software engineer said that Block had many internal AI demos and that her coworkers’ feelings about AI were “mostly celebratory.”
Another former software engineer let go during performance cuts earlier in February said the company had warned that output expectations for engineers would increase. He said the company’s head of engineering voiced productivity expectations that left them worried quality would suffer. After this week’s layoffs, his team shrank from eight engineers to one.
One employee laid off on Thursday said she had embraced AI at Block, but saw that it required human oversight. The day before the layoffs, she said, she caught errors in a company chatbot. She said the cuts surprised her manager, who was spared from the layoffs. The two sat together and cried it out.
AI is not ‘layoff insurance’
Several researchers and former Block employees say they’re skeptical about AI’s actual role in the layoffs.
“Block must have uncovered a secret sauce, perhaps within the software development process, to claim all of these jobs are AI-related,” said Jason Schloetzer, a business professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “From the dozens of executives across industries that I’ve spoken with about AI deployment, they certainly aren’t seeing these types of gains outside of the software development process.”
On Thursday’s earnings call, Dorsey said there has been a marked improvement in AI’s capabilities and that “Block wanted to get ahead of this shift rather than be forced into it reactively.”
“The models just got an order of magnitude more capable and more intelligent,” Dorsey said. “And it’s really shown a path forward in terms of us being able to apply it to nearly every single thing that we do.”
Some former Block employees, as well as others in the industry, said pandemic overhiring, rather than AI, spurred the layoffs — a common refrain for Big Tech in recent years.
“Over the course of my time at Block, leadership did repeatedly signal the need for a ‘smaller Block,'” the laid-off nontechnical worker, who worked at Block for two years, said.
Companies like Block are conducting layoffs “with a chainsaw, not a scalpel,” said Chris Kaufman, a leadership consultant in Detroit.
“They’re not conducting audits of who took an AI course,” Kaufman said. “They’re making macro decisions about cost structure and organizational design. That’s usually just looking at headcount and salary across the board.”
Being AI savvy, Kaufman said, “can increase productivity, but I don’t think it is any way layoff insurance.”
Danielle Bell, a business communications professor at Northwestern University, said it’s obvious the workforce — both inside Block and out — is worried about AI. “If this is the new reality that we’re in, executives need to be more honest with themselves, with stakeholders, with the board, Wall Street, and particularly employees about what AI is here to do.”
Whatever the reason, one of the engineers cut on Thursday said there was a feeling in the air that something was coming. This engineer said she noticed that performance reviews were moved up from their February start. She thought she was safe after the earlier performance-based cuts — until she was laid off on Thursday.
“People were tense, even after good news would come through,” she said. “Lots of rumors flying around the office in person.”
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ivan Ureña-Valdes, who has worked at Block for nearly four years as a data analyst. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When I got an email from Jack Dorsey, I was in the middle of interviewing someone for a role at Block.
It was pretty strange because, in the past, with layoffs, I knew people had their access cut almost immediately.
A coworker messaged me: “Hey, are you okay?” My heart started racing. I knew from that message it meant that I was probably getting laid off.
I felt really bad because I was in the middle of interviewing someone. I had to tell them, “I was actually just let go from the company. I probably won’t be able to submit your feedback in time. Please reach out to your recruiter.”
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I’m the sole provider for my family. It was tough.
I had a hunch that AI would lead to cuts at some point
We knew there were many performance cuts happening around right now, and those have largely finished. I had no idea this cut was coming.
For 4,000-plus people to be cut without anybody knowing, that tells me decisions were made very high up.
I’ve survived three rounds of layoffs, some companywide, some engineering organization-wide. I knew I wasn’t being let go for performance-related reasons. I was in the middle of working on two large projects, probably the largest projects I’d worked on since joining the company.
I had a hunch that, at some point, the company would cut people because of AI. I just didn’t think it would be right now.
Working at Block, I saw how AI was automating tasks away
I appreciate Jack for his honesty. It’s much fairer of him to come straight out and say why it happened — that it’s because of AI and the vision he sees.
I’m honestly grateful for the generous severance and benefits. It definitely helps make the rough situation a bit easier.
I’ve felt the rumblings of AI disruption for a while now, especially since Anthropic launched Opus 4.5 late last year.
Jack loves AI and was constantly pushing us to use it. I got to use these tools as much as possible every single day.
I could see in my own work very quickly how much of it was already being automated. So much of the data analyst world is finding the right dataset, writing something that will allow you to pull the data set that you want, and then generating output. Every single one of those steps is significantly faster and easier because of AI.
It was definitely a “whoa” moment when I realized just how powerful things had gotten.
AI will continue to replace jobs
I 100% think that more disruption and more of these types of cuts will probably come at other companies, which is unfortunate.
I’m much more pessimistic about all of it than many other people probably are.
Given that we live in the US, where growth is everything, it’s inevitable that AI will continue to replace people wherever it’s financially beneficial to do so.
I’m optimistic that I can find a job in the general data field, whether it’s something I’m extremely passionate about or pays as much as I did before. It will be difficult to find something that matches the environment I was working in because I had developed really strong ties with my coworkers. The pay was fair within the data analytics or business intelligence world, and the role was remote.
There are incredible companies out there doing great work, though I am nervous about the industry as a whole and the competitiveness as I search for that perfect next role. Some people are getting really, really high salaries at AI companies, while tons of people at Block are getting laid off.
Do you have a story to share about tech layoffs? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com or on Signal at cmlee.81.
