Block recently eliminated 40% of its workforce. Employees, no matter their tenure, no matter how many of their kids' recitals they missed, no matter how many times they "put the company first" received a single email to indicate their role was being eliminated and their access revoked.
This isn't just about Block. It's the reality playing out industry-wide, and if it hasn't happened where you are yet, it will.
What nobody wants to say aloud is that the traditional social contract between employer and employee is dead...and it wasn't killed by AI, or the economy, or oil prices. The companies themselves killed it, a long time ago. They spent decades building campuses with climbing walls and kombucha taps and "bring your whole self to work" all-hands. But when the moment mattered, they fired 40% of that "family" over a form letter.
The doggy daycare days are over. Tech has turned into banking: you produce or you're out. Loyalty is dead in both directions, and the only people who haven't caught up are the ones still optimizing for promo committees.
So let's stop eulogizing the old deal and start looking at the model that already handles this honestly: pro sports.
Pro Sports Already Solved This
The NBA doesn't pay you for years of service. They pay you for projected future value over a contract window. Rookie contracts exist because you're unproven. Max contracts exist because you've demonstrated leverage. Nobody pretends it's a family. It's a team that you have to earn your spot every season.
This is already happening in tech, but just not evenly distributed. Zuck isn't posting for L6s on LinkedIn while waiting for the calibration committee to convene. He's offering eight- and nine-figure packages to individual contributors because he knows their expected value over the next 24 months. That's a front office making a max contract offer at the deadline.
So already at Meta, the stars get max contracts while everyone else is on "the ladder". Same company, two systems. One is forward-looking, market-priced, and honest about leverage. The other is backward-looking, committee-driven, and held together by "career development" narratives that even the managers delivering them don't believe.
Nobody calls the NBA cruel for paying Jaylen Brown more than a 12-year veteran. They call it market-pricing his expected contribution.
Calibration Theater
The career ladder has been a fiction for a long time. AI just exposed it. The ladder was held together by what I'd call Calibration Theater — those annual or semi-annual rituals where managers horse-trade promotions using backward-looking narratives and vibes disguised as rubrics.
"They haven't demonstrated L5 judgment yet."
"They need one more quarter of sustained impact."
"The scope wasn't quite there."
This is Feedback Theater applied to careers. A system masquerading as measuring output, when it was really measuring how well you narrated your work in a promo packet, how well your manager could lobby, and how effectively you played a game that had nothing to do with building.
Ryan Peterman recently interviewed Ethan Evans, a retired Amazon VP, about corporate politics. Evans laid it all out: managing people out via reorgs, orgs stealing scope from each other, empire building, backchanneling, political messaging. He treats these as skills. And inside the current system, he's right. But that's the indictment: "Perf" was never about performance. It rewarded performant bullshit (e.g. reorg politics, scope theft, backchannel influence).
The winners weren't the best builders. They were the best politicians. And none of it created a single dollar of enterprise value or any value for customers. So, the ladder was never a meritocracy. It was a queue, built around theater rather than results.
AI is Tech's Equalizer
In the NBA, the salary cap forces parity. It (thankfully) prevents the Lakers and Knicks from hoarding every superstar. Any team, with the right draft picks and the right coaching, can win. Dynasties still happen, but they have to be earned through development and smart roster construction, not bought through sheer financial muscle.
AI did the same thing to tech. An L3 with Claude Code can ship in a weekend what used to take a team of four, and the output is right there in a PR. When that happens, the calibration committee can't say "they haven't demonstrated sufficient scope." And when a manager advocates for someone whose numbers don't exist, it's abundantly clear.
The moat that justified the whole career escalator was context:
Technical context is knowing which microservice falls over at scale, and it used to take a decade to build. Now an AI agent can read an entire codebase in hours.
Organizational context is knowing how to navigate the egos and personalities. While it still exists, it depreciates faster than ever. When companies restructure every six months, that political moat evaporates. And good riddance.
When any team can win, nobody's dynasty is safe.
The Rebuilding Year
You know the franchises. Leadership talks "efficiency" instead of "vision." Decisions are driven by fear of losing rather than hunger to win. The all-hands has a slide about "doing more with less" that everyone knows means "we don't have a plan."
In the ZIRP era, leaving would've been seen as disloyal. But in the NBA, smart players on rebuilding teams don't tank their stats to match the culture. They play harder. They put up numbers. They build the tape that gets them the next contract.
A rebuilding year is a contract year. The moment where your performance either builds leverage or confirms the market's suspicion that you peaked. What it isn't is a reason to give unearned loyalty in exchange for the right to wear a jersey.
The Contract Year Playbook
Stop acting like an employee waiting for a promotion, and start acting like a free agent managing a career.
Your comp is tied to your expected contribution over the next 18 to 24 months, not some backward-looking rubric of "time in role." The evaluation is constant, the cycles are shorter, and the pricing is aggressive. The future L5 isn't the person who waited the longest in the queue , but the person the front office would bet their season on.
Free agency is normalized. The stigma of "job-hopping" — and the non-competes that enforced it — were tools to suppress labor mobility. In a world where employers cut people in a quarter without hesitation, staying too long is the actual career risk. Moving between teams every few years isn't disloyalty. It's testing the open market to make sure your contract reflects your current leverage.
Review your own output with the same ruthlessness a player watches tape. What did you ship? What moved? What was theater? Keep your leverage high. Know your market. But most of all, build your tape with accomplishments that don't need a promo packet, a calibration narrative, or a well-timed backchannel to your skip-level. Let the PRs speak for themselves.
Every year is a contract year now. Play like it.
