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

Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#361

Post by pkulak »

rglullis wrote: post #347
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…

Why stop at 100M? Why not 50M? Why not 10M? Why not 250k? Trying to control the amount of wealth one "should" have is misguided. We should have ways to limit the amount of power that can be concentrated. If we did that, we would have a better shot at having a more equitable society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

Just because you can't immediately pinpoint where a line should be, doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist at all.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#362

Post by arrosenberg »

nickjj wrote: post #317
oh_sigh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 employee per 2000 customers seems like it makes perfect sense as to why customer service would be bad.

It doesn't need to be. For example I do personal customer support for ~40,000 folks who take one of my video courses (programming and tech related). I often write personalized multi-sentence responses to their issues and follow up to reply back to them as many times as needed to get it fixed within minutes or hours of a request coming in. I think the big difference there is it's my business. The best possible custome…

The big difference is that you aren't involved with peoples' finances. There is a whole other level beyond the crazy you attract in services and retail.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#363

Post by rapjr9 »

hardtke wrote: post #154
tuckerpo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: I had an old co-worker who was given 6 month's notice that he'd be let go from a previous job, and his manager at the time helped him look for a new gig + gave him shining reviews and references. After the 6 month period was up, they still gave him several months of severance, even after he had found a new gig. Some companies/managers actually do care about you, and it seems like Coinbase is roughly in that…

I've been chatting with some friends whose company shut down recently, basically with no warning. They are getting recruited like crazy. In my opinion that's much preferable than to being left go as part of the 20% lowest performing employees. This reads like a "culling of the herd because we can use the alleged upcoming recession as an excuse" event. I'm not sure the generous severance makes up for the "you are not…

It has the appearance of companies trying to cause a recession instead of waiting for one to occur. Coinbase admits it can't predict the future but are being precautionary in case there is a recession? If their plan is to take a worst case view then why not just cash out the whole company and shut it down on the precautionary principle? If this is an attempt to put a scare into workers to keep wages low it may backfire since worker shortages seem to be large and other companies may easily absorb a lot of workers, making it hard to get workers back later (and it takes time to train new ones). It could encourage people to leave on their own if they start hearing of the better jobs others are getting after being forced to leave, and it shows zero commitment to workers (so workers should reciprocate). It might be necessary to actually destroy many companies before this fear tactic can have some generic effect. People who died in the pandemic, got long covid, retired, or felt abused are probably not coming back (though hopefully long covid proves not to be forever.) Lay off workers during a worker shortage and you had better count on not being able to get them back easily.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#364

Post by rglullis »

Arrath wrote: post #353
rglullis wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop at 100M? Why not 50M? Why not 10M? Why not 250k? Trying to control the amount of wealth one "should" have is misguided. We should have ways to limit the amount of power that can be concentrated. If we did that, we would have a better shot at having a more equitable society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

In that case we will need to decouple money from power, somehow. Starting by no longer equating giving money to politicians as an exercise in free speech would be as good a place as any to start.

There is a much easier way to do it [0], we just need to be willing to get rid of Corporativism.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#365

Post by shinryuu »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #336
jerry1979 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does tha…

Also, billionaires' wealth isn't parked in a vault, right? It's invested in companies, so it's working in the economy whereas it would otherwise go to the government. It's not obvious to me that the government is going to provide more value for the public in general than industry, but I would like for that to be the case (an easy solution for inequality that doesn't shrink our economy overall).

A lot of wealth is parked in shares of companies. I'm not sure to what extent that is actually productive...?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#366

Post by hintymad »

azemetre wrote: post #250
hintymad wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought people would have learned from Uber’s gross failure of overhiring by now and taken a few pages from Netflix’s playbook

What is Netflix doing differently? I know they had some internal struggles between different media faces (prestige content versus chasing the masses), are you referring to them paying high salaries but having a smaller workforce?

They used to have small teams to build great systems, like 4 people taking care of a very sophisticated monitoring infra[1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good...

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#367

Post by mrcheesebreeze »

ipnon wrote: post #84
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…

Billionaires are highly correlated with millionaires, which don't seem to be beyond the pale for critics of wealth inequality. Countries with billionaires rank much higher on quality of life than those without. It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts but the side effect of their wealth is companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society in terms of products and employment.

furthermore if many westerners woke up they would realize that many people envy them like we envy billionaires.

The average joe in america and many other places has more money in a month than many have a year, the average american or european has access to luxuries other people dream off.

We are rich by proxy of simply living in the states or in europe. Furthermore we also have more opportunities and the ability to become a millionaire too.

We are envied by many places worldwide, we need to stop being angry at what others have and be better.

I hate the anti-rich people talk because we could do far more productive things.

besides, to many people we are included in that rich category we talk own about.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#368

Post by rglullis »

pkulak wrote: post #361
rglullis wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop at 100M? Why not 50M? Why not 10M? Why not 250k? Trying to control the amount of wealth one "should" have is misguided. We should have ways to limit the amount of power that can be concentrated. If we did that, we would have a better shot at having a more equitable society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

Just because you can't immediately pinpoint where a line should be, doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist at all.

True, but my argument is that this is the wrong metric to be regulated.

I don't care that there are people richer than me, I care that there are people with too much power on their hands.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#369

Post by tomcam »

colinmhayes wrote: post #330
tomcam wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but in the USA it is precisely why we do not have a democracy. We have a republic in the USA. The Senate and electoral college help temper the intoxicating effects that a pure democracy would produce .

> we do not have a democracy Republics are a type of democracy.

In a taxonomy of government types, sure. Practically speaking, the difference between a pure democracy and a republic is enormous. The framers of the constitution were explicitly aware of this.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#370

Post by catsarebetter »

joering2 wrote: post #86

In my opinion this is what greed does to people. Doesn't matter your background. Armstrong was here on HN pointing out his vision of free exchange of currency at close to zero rates. He wanted to fight "the big guys", including credit cards mafia and PayPal mafia. What A WONDERFUL goal. What he ended up with, is obnoxious exchange rates @ Coinbase (triple what credit cards charge), hundreds of thousands of ruined liv…

Though my perspective is that you're taking some of this stuff really extreme, you are a talented visual writer and I enjoyed reading this comment a lot lol
Post reply on HN