Certifications are a proxy. Back in the late '90s, when career-switchers were flooding into IT from every other industry, certs offered the fast path — a way to prove baseline competence short of going back for a CS degree. They exist because the buyer can't tell the difference between someone who can deliver and someone who can't — not until the system is in production and it's too late to switch vendors.
Everyone talks about the first time they used AI to generate code like it was a revelation. Like the clouds parted. Like they immediately saw the future. That's not what actually happened for most experienced developers. What actually happened was a knot in the stomach.
Three weeks ago, we wrote that Block cutting 4,000 employees wasn't an AI story. It was a coordination cost story. The speed gain came from removing the communication overhead that thousands of people generate just by being part of the system. Brooks figured this out in 1975. Block rediscovered it in February 2026.
"Just ship it" was a correction. It was the right advice for a world where most teams overthought, overplanned, and never released anything. The bottleneck was fear, not quality. Shipping — even something rough — was the unlock.
The standard consulting engagement is overstaffed by design. Not by accident — by design. And the economics have never made sense for the client.
Block cut 4,000 employees in February 2026 — nearly half its workforce. The stock jumped 24% overnight.