Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

blog.coinbase.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 616 posts

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#301

Post by nojito »

matwood wrote: post #93
nojito wrote: post #12

>If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensur…

Pretty standard when layoffs occur. They happen and people are told to pack up and leave. System access is usually turned off while the announcement is being made to prevent disgruntled from harming the business. Coinbase is probably still mostly remote, so it's about the same thing as shuffling everyone into a conference room and turning off access.

It’s also a sign of a terrible company. Rolling layoffs are almost always better for the organization.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#302

Post by PheonixPharts »

joezydeco wrote: post #110
greatpostman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. FTX people clearly know a lot more about market making and how exchanges work. Makes coinbase look like amateurs. Coinbase hired their CPO with a 650 million dollar pay package. They should have spent that money on 2 - 5 million a year hft programmers and traders

Coinbase have always been amateurs. Were you here 9 years ago when they melted down the first time? That was fun. That was also when I decided the fix was in and I got out of crypto.

has always been amateurs.

In this era of cheap money it's been maddening to see how absurdly incompetent companies can be and still push forward with no consequences.

I've seen teams of people working on credit scoring with no understanding of expected default. They literally just throw data at XGBoost, and couldn't understand why they couldn't find a way to profit off a group of people with a 30% default rate when the upper bound of interest they could charge was 25%.

This pattern is repeated all over startup land (I've also never met a company that knew how to model churn correctly, this is an essential business metric and yet again people throw XGBoost at it), but cheap money means that doing anything is rewarded with more money so every idea seems like a good one.

Crypto companies will be the first to go, but hard times are coming for anyone working at a company that doesn't have a profit.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#303

Post by yunohn »

Barrera wrote: post #60

> If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensu…

> Those claiming that this is a "crypto" sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month

That may very well happen, but Coinbase is directly blaming their layoffs on over-hiring for web3 usecases and ideas that they feel are no longer financially viable.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#304

Post by wbradmoore »

dgfitz wrote: post #219
UncleMeat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Friendly, smiley, fake. My father had to lay off a bunch of people in 2008. I am now a manager. He told me that if I am ever forced to do this to not ever do this crap to my team. Tell them that this is bullshit. Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept. Tell them that the are right to be mad, disappointed, and even to hate you for choosing their head to roll. Anything better than fake smiles…

Company I worked at had a layoff in 2012, security manager escorted 200 people out of the building. At the end of the day, he was escorted out of the building. It was quite shitty for that fellow, I felt terrible for him.

No post body was provided.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#305

Post by ivan_gammel »

bambax wrote: post #257
synu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe you have to keep paying the person, but it's not uncommon for them to be told not to come in anymore.

Yes but you can't really "cut them off". You can tell them they don't need to be there, and most will be happy not to. But you can't revoke their access for no reason. If you want to do that you need to prove they have (already) committed a fault of such gravity that allowing them to stay would harm the company irremediably -- it's a high bar to cross.

Europe is not a country, there are different laws everywhere. I haven't seen one yet, that would explicitly make it forbidden to cut off the access. Can you share a link to such law?

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#306

Post by NikolaNovak »

watwut wrote: post #287
NikolaNovak wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be mixing things up. You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked. They're completely orthogonal. Depends on role, company, situation. It's an assessment and tradeoff - is it worth / do I need the next two weeks of work and KT from this person, vs the risk of having access. The notion of revoking security access to limit risk is definitely not a US thing.

He is not mixing things up. The idea that immediate revoking security access to everything is only way how to do things is definitely a US thing.

Nobody is saying it's the only way to do things. In USA it's not the only way to do things. It's not only done in USA (I worked in Canada and in Europe, never in USA).

I'm Canadian, it's our national pastime to diss our neighbours to the South, but the notion that a laid off employee can be a high risk to the company knows no borders. Are we making a claim that those working on Rafale or Gripen get to keep messing with classified files after being fired, because "we don't DO that in Europe"? :)

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#307

Post by ddeck »

Namari wrote: post #155
synu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe you have to keep paying the person, but it's not uncommon for them to be told not to come in anymore.

true, they call it gardening leave

That's what I've always known it as. It can be quite long, especially in financial services.

My last position was three months.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#308

Post by mrits »

pid-1 wrote: post #170
cj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just 3 months ago many people thought the markets could potentially bounce back (e.g. if the ukraine conflict didn't escalate and if inflation came down on its own - neither of which happened). Not so long ago, CNBC was still talking about the probability of a recession a quoting probability percentages less than 50%. I think the reality is that 2-4 months ago, very few people thought things would get as bad as they…

Hedges started shorting the S&P 500 in 2021. Surely if you are a high level executive, your data shouldn't come from CNBC.

Technically they started years before that and lost a lot of money. If you are a high level executive, your data shouldn't come from hedge funds.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#309

Post by wutbrodo »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #224
nemo44x wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the severance the ex-employees are getting? It’s super generous and amounts to months of work. Id rather that than face the humiliation of having to come in for weeks to a company that has fired me. Flexible labor laws are also a major reason Americans are paid considerably more than euros.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Having to spend half your available income for things that are automatically taken on your salary in Europe is _the_ major reason Americans are paid considerably more

Are you thinking of anything beyond healthcare? Youre correct that salaries and GDP are difficult to compare, but US disposable income pc is dramatically higher than almost anywhere in Europe, with the couple exceptions being tiny enclaves like Luxembourg or petrostates like Norway. Subtracting healthcare spending doesn't come close to closing the gap btwn the US and eg France.

And this isn't explicable by retirement either, as Actual Individual Consumption is also dramatically higher in the US.

Hell, I'm not even sure your hypothesis makes sense at first glance. If the salary difference was simply a matter of shifting govt spending into the personal ledger, wouldn't pretax incomes be as high in Europe? After all, much of the layoffs we're talking about are high-income enough that the employees would surely be net-payers in any mildly progressive tax system.

Re: Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

#310

Post by cdiddy2 »

a_chris wrote: post #131
nemo44x wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty standard to not let terminated employees hang around. It feels cold but it’s just the way it has to be. Sone places will even do this when an employee submits a resignation on good terms. Just a way for the company to cover themselves.

This is absolutely untrue. In Europe we work several days/weeks after the layoff notice. You can fire people from the night to the morning only in US

I(an american) was quitting a job at a UK company and tried to put in my 2 weeks notice, they said the standard was a 2 months notice for them and so I just kinda bumbled along for 2 months not doing much. Really odd practice
Post reply on HN