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Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

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Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#261

Post by r3trohack3r »

smeeding wrote: post #248
fosk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is value in a global blockchain with the level of participation of crypto. And sure there are scams, there are scams in the real economy too. Ponzi is not an acronym for “I don’t understand its value therefore it’s a Ponzi scheme”.

I think the Ponzi claims stem from the fact that so many people are in the market for speculative profit (and not to revolutionize finance or whatever), and the fact that earlier investors can only capitalize on their investments by proselytizing, recruiting, and ultimately selling their bags to new investors. Framed that way, it’s quite Ponzi-ish.

This is true of any value storage vehicle. You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. Art, baseball cards, stamps, stocks, gold etc. all work this way.

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#262

Post by blibble »

lcvw wrote: post #255
blibble wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you can just quit and walk out the door? strange country

Absolutely. You could just literally stop showing up one day, it is the company’s problem at that point. 2 weeks notice is expected, and giving less is considered a bit of a betrayal, but it’s perfectly legal. As much as like the idea of having the security of a contact, being forced to work honestly seems kind of strange to me.

no-one's forced to work by a contract of employment

you can quit on the spot and ignore the notice period, and they can try suing you for lost business as a result, which is quite difficult to prove to any sort of standard

whereas it's generally very easy to go after an employer if they don't pay your notice if they sack you on the spot

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#263

Post by maccard »

solveit wrote: post #241
codegeek wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't get the point of Coinbase. Isn't it a centralized system to manage what is supposed to be decentralized and that kinda defeats the purpose? I may be dumb.

Email is a decentralized protocol and the fact that you use a centralized provider such as gmail only somewhat defeats the purpose of email being a decentralized protocol instead of Google Messenger.

By that metric banks are decentralised too - my bank only speaks to another bank over a protocol but fundamentally just trusts the other side is good for it

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#264

Post by lcvw »

rvz wrote: post #216
polote wrote: post #121

Already been discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31600505 It is no different than been fired I don't understand the noise it is making

> It is no different than been fired I don't understand the noise it is making Exactly. Not sure what the fuss is all about other than these companies not caring about you. I've seen worse and Fast straight up shut down [0] after assuming that the VCs will just bankroll them despite Fast making little to no money for years with an extremely inflated valuation in the multi-billions. I think lots of people have also fo…

I don’t think Meta or Google are doing that for the most part. Yes there is a small pay cut if you move away but if they said you could be fully remote then they have honored that. And I don’t think Tesla or Apple ever advertised that roles could be fully remote forever. That being said, you are absolutely right. Companies only care about employees to the extent they have to for retention. You always need a plan B, nothing is ever guaranteed.

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#265

Post by wly_cdgr »

It's not great, but how bad it is depends heavily on how they're compensating the people they did this to. Like, if everyone affected gets an immediate lump sum payment equivalent to say 4-6 months salary, it would be really not so terrible. The mere 1 month of salary they offered, though, is obviously completely unacceptable

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#266

Post by jbyers »

lrvick wrote: post #244
bingohbangoh wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment seems common on Hacker News but I'm not sure its wise. Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code. It's definitely true that not all companies that use these algorithm interviews are worth working for. But, at least in my experience, companies that don't require them at all are pretty awf…

I have advised, consulted for, or worked full time at 20+ companies, interviewed at too many to think about counting, and conducted technical interviews at 10+. Without exception the companies that weighted academic algorithm skills over practical architecture skill and implementation experience had some of the most confident and brazen mistakes in security or scalability and some of the poorest work-life balance.

Without exception?

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#268

Post by Alex3917 »

hiq wrote: post #204
mlyle wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-repudiation is an important problem. Some things we can rely upon trusted third parties, but all kinds of things we rely on imperfect systems with notaries and trusted third parties can be more effectively solved with ledgers. A whole lot of the interesting applications are non-monetary-- proving that a record was produced and made available before a certain time and has not been tampered with since. As a world e…

> big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it. Ledger-based solutions tend to focus on a tiny technical step of a big process without considering whether that's a bottleneck or even a non-negligible part and whether improving it actually results in a better solu…

> These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it.

The closest analog to crypto distributed ledgers is, well, ledgers. If you look around you, there probably isn't a single product that could have been produced without the adoption of double entry accounting. And yet that adoption process took around 300 years.

Crypto is on the exact same trajectory. When people look around them in 300 years, there probably won't be a single product that could have been created without distributed ledger technology. But obviously this isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes.

The IQ test is being able to see the trend even though crypto is currently at literally 0.00% adoption (on the basis of total financial transactions). Sooner or later, reality always goes to par with the math.

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#269

Post by chrisco255 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #229
mathattack wrote: post #184

Let’s ask “Why are they doing this?” I will start by saying most indications are that the management is very rational. Sometimes companies use downturns to get rid of people that they haven’t managed properly. It’s lazy, but cutting the bottom 10% in a layoff can be less short term work than performance reviews. They avoid the PR issues by saying “everyone is doing it.” This isn’t what Coinbase did. If companies are…

> So why are they doing this? My sense is they see what’s coming. I think this vastly overestimates how efficiently corporations are actually run. I've been in meetings with executives at several public companies. When the topic of adjusting HC or spending money comes up, usually those conversations happen in a ratio of 50% politics, 40% wild-ass opinion, and 10% data. And almost always, the "data" are completely che…

I think it makes a difference if the founders of the corporation are still the CEO. At any rate crypto goes through very quick bull/bear cycles, with the most recent downturn being in 2018 & 2019. And they can easily see broad volume stats across the industry (it's all on-chain after all).

Re: Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers

#270

Post by turzmo »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #15
carlivar wrote: post #7

Coinbase tried to recruit me last summer. I politely told the recruiter that I felt it was all bubble speculation mania. Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. I guess I was right? Not trying to brag or anything. Just a tip to everyone job hunting I guess. Watch what executives do (not what they say). Well, and human history of speculati…

Might be a bubble, but I paid off my student loan and a car by investing in bitcoin. I’m certainly glad I ended up on the right side of the bubble.

"investing"
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