Blind

The DELL layoffs... it’s not that layoffs are cheaper than talent… it’s that they hired wrong and pivoted late. So now they clean it up in one move. Pay $569M once... remove billions in future payroll, and then margins expand basically overnight. That’s the math. And yes... this is very much directives from the Boards. They don’t push for disciplined hiring on the way up… they reward aggressive cuts on the way down though! Comp is tied to margin, not judgment... so the same cycle keeps getting approved, funded, and repeated.

⚡️ NEW: Block, Inc. has quietly rehired some of the 4,000 employees it laid off last month, with some workers receiving offers to return after the cuts were linked to clerical errors.

Recruiter I know has been placing tech talent for 15 years Never seen numbers like what she's tracking now Role that used to get 50 applications now pulls 1,200. Senior Android position last week hit 2,847 before they pulled the posting Her placement rate dropped from 73% in 2022 to 11% this year Companies ghost her after final rounds. She'll shepherd a candidate through 5 interviews, references checked, verbal offer given, then radio silence for 3 weeks One hiring manager told her straight: "We're not actually hiring. We're just seeing what's available before we decide between AI agents and offshore" She placed a DevOps engineer at a logistics company in September. Same role got posted again in November. Asked her contact what happened "Oh we kept him 6 weeks to document everything, then replaced him with 3 contractors in Chennai and a monitoring AI that costs $400/month" Another company she's worked with for 8 years just sent her their 2025 headcount planning Engineering org going from 67 people to 23. "AI productivity gains" they called it She's watching entire teams get "reskilled" in January only to get managed out by March once the knowledge transfer is complete Her biggest client told her yesterday: "We don't need talent acquisition anymore. We need talent extraction" 22 years building relationships in this industry Now she's updating her own resume The machines didn't just take the jobs. They took the people who found the jobs too

$WMT is reportedly disappointed with its OpenAI shopping partnership as ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout has underperformed expectations. In-chat purchases are converting at roughly one-third the rate of purchases made directly on Walmart’s site.

BREAKING: Meta is shutting down the Metaverse after spending $80 Billion on the project

Interesting.... 👀

The era of human coding is over

Amazon $AMZN CEO Andy Jassy reportedly just said at a internal meeting - AI TO DOUBLE AWS SALES TO $600 BILLION BY 2036

I don’t get why Meta employs 60,000 people. I don’t get why they need to invest in their own AI and be an AI company vs just use it They have products that barely change. They have no ideas, little NPD They are a media company that fails to serve medium and small customers well They need small amounts of AI to make the ad product better Zuck is the most lost leader there has ever been. Spending $600bn on metaverse 2.0 and will hopefully bring down the whole company . I can’t wait.

JUST IN: Elon Musk's xAI recruiting Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, and traders to train Grok on financial modeling.

Sam Altman admits AI is killing the labor-capital balance and says nobody knows what to do about it “If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”

A CS professor at a mid-tier state university just sent me their internal placement data Fall 2023: 89% of their graduates had offers by graduation. Average starting salary $94k Spring 2024: 71% placement rate. Average dropped to $78k Fall 2024: 43% placement rate. Those who got offers averaged $61k Spring 2025: 31% of graduates employed in software roles six months out This semester? 19% placement rate and falling Faculty meeting last Tuesday got heated when the department chair suggested "pivoting curriculum toward AI collaboration skills" One professor stood up and said "we're teaching students to build the systems that eliminate their own jobs" The career fair last month had 12 companies show up. Half were MLMs and insurance sales Students keep asking why they're learning data structures when the job postings all say "3+ years experience with LLM integration" Professor told me the hardest part is the parent meetings "My daughter took out $140k in loans for this degree and she's working at Starbucks" Meanwhile the university is still running ads promising "94% job placement rates in high-growth tech careers" The disconnect is crushing everyone involved Faculty knows the industry has fundamentally shifted but the marketing department is still selling the 2019 dream These kids mortgaged their futures for careers that evaporated while they were in class

Software was eaten by AI.

The software sector is facing a massive debt wall: ~$40 billion in software and services debt matures in 2028, the largest single-year concentration. The vast majority of this is rated B- or lower, deep in junk territory, with no investment-grade debt in the mix. In total, ~$100 billion in software debt matures from 2026 to 2029, with an additional ~$70 billion beyond 2030. Meanwhile, AI disruption is increasing credit risk for software borrowers, the exact companies that private credit funds have been lending to most aggressively. Software is also the largest sector in the leveraged loan market, representing 12% of the total. Refinancing this debt at higher rates with deteriorating fundamentals will be a growing problem for the sector. The software sector has a tough road ahead.