Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#121

Post by pram » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #46

sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…

Wow that severance is incredible! They reached out to me awhile ago but thought their whole platform being tied to crypto was extremely risky. Engineers need to save for bad times and have months and months of cash for downtimes as in 3-4 months there will be alot of people looking for jobs. Fun fact in 2009 I interviewed at google and the HM said that 500 people applied to the job I was interviewed at(onsite) and th…

I mean, that was Google. In 2010 I got a Linux admin job from a 30 minute call so it's not like employment was an impossibility.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#122

Post by flashgordon » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #67

izzydata wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think billionaires should exist, but I also don't think these employees have been wronged. That is a pretty generous severance package.

How much money should people be allowed to have?

Ok let me take a stab at it. I actually am on the fence on this so purely a thought exercise for me. Plus as someone getting into midlife crisis this has been on top of mind for me.

How about take (in no order):

1. 1 or 2 fancy cars/suvs

2. Be able to travel business class (say once a month) for vacations and stay in decent hotels

3. Nice education (say 2 degrees at a top college)

4. Nice house (say 2 rooms per family member in a "decent" neighborhood) (add things like backyard, poop etc if you like)

5. Obviously enough money to pay taxes

6. Oh and ensure health-issue-free lifestyle

7. (Hobby or two)

8. (Ultra Branded clothing?)

See what it takes to get all of the above and double it. Or even 3x it. Ymmv ofcourse. I am not a traveller so fancy hotels or biz class is not a big deal. I am also not a car person so 1 and 2 are not big deals for now (things can always change).

I still can't see this needing billionaire status?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#123

Post by staunch » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…

> Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance.

Regardless of what one thinks of Coinbase, their decision to offer employees generous severance deserves massive praise. If you were on the fence about working at Coinbase, currently or in the future, it should be a major point in their favor.

If nothing else, it shows competence. Too many incompetent CEOs (and their boards) wait too long and then do layoffs with little or no severance. Instead of the responsible thing and laying people off early enough to give them a proper severance.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#124

Post by Swenrekcah » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

nightski wrote: post #97

qbasic_forever wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put a wealth tax on billionaires without putting taxes on poverty level workers ($500/month in the US). You're making bizarre nonsensical arguments here--slippery slope, strawman, etc.

Wealth taxes seem so dumb to me. In many cases it's forcing sale of private or public company ownership from those who know the company best often to - you guessed it - institutional investors. It's bad enough how much control institutional investors have, but to force it by law seems even more ridiculous. There has to be a better solution.

This is the real problem. In theory it could be argued that a wealth tax and estate tax are the only really fair taxes in a capitalist economy.

He who owns then capital is king, so tax the capital.

But in reality it would as you say force all sorts of unwanted liquidation and monetisation of assets just to pay the tax.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#125

Post by qbasic_forever » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

elefanten wrote: post #94

qbasic_forever wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put a wealth tax on billionaires without putting taxes on poverty level workers ($500/month in the US). You're making bizarre nonsensical arguments here--slippery slope, strawman, etc.

That was clearly not the point. The point is there's always someone with a different bar for what is excessive wealth. Chances are that 80%+ of the world population would find your income staggering, the same way you consider a billionaire's wealth staggering. So how do you decide who's scale to use?

We already have a tiered system of taxes in the US. We don't tax everyone 50% because the average US wage is 100x that of a third world country average wage. It's possible to examine only the US wealth distribution and make choices about taxing the highest of the high earners there in isolation of all other earners in the world.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#126

Post by countvonbalzac » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

hooande wrote: post #116

memish wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an arbitrary cut off and it's not just about whether they will work less hard or not. It's about effective capital allocation. If they earned their wealth through smart capital allocation, why would you want to remove capital from proven allocators and forcibly move it to the least effective allocators? TLDR. Elon makes vastly better use of capital than the government does. He turned $180M into SpaceX and Tesl…

buying twitter at $54/share is an effective use of capital?

This^ + how much capital did Elon Musk actually allocate to Tesla and SpaceX? It was much closer to $100m than $1 billion or $100 billion.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#127

Post by trgn » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #64

Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

I'm just a run of the mill average joe, who has a rock that has been in my family for generations. Turns out some weird little cult likes my rock and wants to buy it for $1B. Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?

There's a great thought proposal on how to tax assets fairly. In this system, you are taxed at the self-assessed worth of an asset. However, if somebody bids over that price, you are obliged either to sell it to them, or raise your self-assessment.

It's somewhat of a game (joke perhaps), usually used in the context of ways to fairly assess land value.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#128

Post by whimsicalism » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #49

I honestly thought the pandemic would be the trigger for a recession. Clearly that wasn't the case (or at least it was a delayed effect). This doesn't seem to be a case where a single event triggered a recession (eg subprime in 2008). It seems to be a combination of events. Inflation is a big one. This one is interesting because the two biggest factors (housing and gas) are completely artificial price hikes. Housing…

> But really it's just price hikes "because we can".

This is just an absolutely wrong-headed understanding of what is causing inflation that is premised on some corporate benevolence that existed prior to 2020 that no longer exists. [0] The question to ask is "why are prices able to be raised now"? The answer is contracting supply and surging demand.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1525171240796712960

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#129

Post by flashgordon » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #64

Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

I'm just a run of the mill average joe, who has a rock that has been in my family for generations. Turns out some weird little cult likes my rock and wants to buy it for $1B. Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?

So here is the thing. Your rock, your wish. It is wierd when you get to take interest free lines of credit on the 1B valuation on the rock and never pay the 500m in taxes :)

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#130

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #23

wonnage wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no turnaround coming

An equally as irrational position as, "Crypto is the best thing ever!"

I mean the end state of crypto isn’t a very positive one. Either it will crash catastrophically or it will slowly fizzle out until the majority of people just forget about it. Either way, at some point virtually nobody will be using it.