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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

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Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#371

Post by vgatherps »

robswc wrote: post #359
Alex3917 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out. Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.

I agree with your sentiment and I think you would agree with this, just wanted to get it out there. I've seen teams of 10-15 people that do absolutely nothing. Have 10 meetings about specs but space them out over a year, so that by the time the next meeting happens, everyone forgets the entire context of the project... so you have to cover everything again. By the end of year, its gone absolutely no where due to 2-3…

> Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem.

I've worked at a company where at an individual level people were quite talented, moreso than competitors who did better than them .... but getting anything done required Y different meetings with X different teams, satisfying N different gatekeepers who just want to push their own product on you, avoid stepping on the toes of persons X,Y,Z, etc etc.

Company multiplied in size a few times over the course of a few years and had just no idea how to handle it.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#372

Post by firstSpeaker »

hef19898 wrote: post #217
acdha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That little experience makes it hard to judge applicant quality well and means they probably aren’t answering questions accurately. It’s a dead tell of a company which has a shortage of experienced staff and is growing too quickly — very strongly reminiscent of the dotcom bubble where people had the same “number go up!” mentality & some would openly say they were just looking busy until the IPO.

The effect Amazon's Bar Raises have on its long term success is highly undervalued.

I agree, and my experience of interviewing in the big tech has been very varied. Amazon's was the most professionally conducted one.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#373

Post by red-iron-pine »

mclightning wrote: post #170
owenmarshall wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the boat on that by a year. What we should all be asking ourselves is “am I on payroll at my current job to act as ballast?”

What does it mean to act as a ballast? What are some signs? Is there a general terminology for this? Are you talking about "meat-shield headcounts"

Yes

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#374

Post by _fat_santa »

Alex3917 wrote: post #280
_fat_santa wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them last year and while I didn't get the job, looking back now I'm kind of thankful it turned out how it did. From my limited perspective interviewing there, it seems like they started branching out into all things crypto. One manager I interviewed with explained that they wanted to become the "Amazon of Crypto" where any service related to crypto such as wallets, NFT's, etc are all on Coinbase. I…

> You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out. Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.

It's a classic problem with big companies and software development. Say you worked for a Fortune500 company and they wanted you to build a TODO list app. The core app can be built in a week, but it ends up taking 3 months and a team of 10 engineers, why is that?

* Well we need to integrate it with our engagement platform, meetings required with engagement to determine scope and requirements.

* Well we need it to also integrate with our productivity API, another set of meeeting to determine scope of integration.

* We need deep reporting capabilities, please get with the reporting team to determine requirements.

* Also this app will need to integrate into EXISTING_TOOL_A and EXISTING_TOOL_B. App cannot be built in React and must be built in Angular with OLD_SOFTWARE_PKG_1 and OLD_SOFTWARE_PKG_2 in order for it to successfully integrate with these old apps.

* Hey we just signed a contract with CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y, we know you were using IN_HOUSE_PROVIDER_1 for your infra but now please modify the entire app to work with CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y.

* Oh and it also needs to be backwards compatible with IN_HOUSE_PROVIDER_1 because it needs to run in parallel while we onboard CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#375

Post by stusmall »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #289
_hcuq wrote: post #274

The one thing that surprises me in all this is that the BTC price has stayed at a stable 16k since mid October.

I don't see this discussed in enough HN threads. Everyone is quick to talk about FTX, Tether being a scam, etc but I rarely hear people discuss how the heck BTC is pegged at $16k this whole time, through it all.

My theory is that a lot of prices in cryptoworld is set more by "vibes" rather that analysis of value and fundamental utility. You often see crypto prices hitting whole number price floors on the way down. I think it is from traders picking buy order prices by their gut feeling which leads to more whole numbers.

BTC fell through a few of these whole number price floors on the way down, this is just the one that finally broke the momentum. If it is going to continue to fall then downward pressure will build up until it overwhelms these buy orders and it will crack down to the next floor. Kind of like the 40k to 30k fall, the 30k to 20k fall or the 20k to 16k fall.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#376

Post by danaris »

jefftk wrote: post #318
waylandsmithers wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..."and as a result I have decided to step down and hand the company over to someone more capable of navigating today's challenges" /s I think we'd all like to imagine a world where company's are run like sea faring ships- the captain gets paid the most to be accountable for the whole operation, and when things go wrong must be the last one off the ship. To the point where any selfish behavior by the captain in an em…

The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.

The amounts of money involved can absolutely spell life and death for people not lucky enough to have been born into the top 1%.

"White collar crime" generally has vastly broader effects than what we normally think of when we talk about crime; it's just harder to see because the effects are not as immediate or obvious. Livelihoods destroyed by layoffs to juice the stock price; land, water, and air poisoned by pollutants released because paying the fine is cheaper than actually cleaning them up; people dying because they can no longer afford the insulin they need to live after the price was raised absurd amounts purely to increase profits...

Just because the CEOs aren't physically on a ship where everyone's lives depend on making good decisions in times of crisis doesn't mean they aren't responsible for incalculable pain, suffering, misery, and death.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#377

Post by Aperocky »

lkbm wrote: post #358
radicalbyte wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.

I've seen hatred of crypto, constant insistence that it's 100% fraud, and claims that it's worthless and will collapse for many years now. In 2019, no one was saying it would crash in 2022; they were saying it would crash in 2019 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2020, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2020 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2021, they weren't sayin…

You are intentionally mixing up 2 types of prediction and belittling the one that's a more powerful driver than "it will crash on X date".

"it will crash eventually" is more important, it results in people staying away/getting out of this market, for good. It's much more powerful than oh it's gonna crash on this or that date.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#378

Post by rahen »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #289
_hcuq wrote: post #274

The one thing that surprises me in all this is that the BTC price has stayed at a stable 16k since mid October.

I don't see this discussed in enough HN threads. Everyone is quick to talk about FTX, Tether being a scam, etc but I rarely hear people discuss how the heck BTC is pegged at $16k this whole time, through it all.

You won't see this discussed on HN, there's an overall hostility toward Bitcoin. A few are interested or sometimes involved with it (whether with development or infrastructure) but don't bother enlightening the crowd since I think it's pretty hopeless here and they would be buried under downvotes.

I wonder if that resentment would have been the same toward the Internet in 1997. You know, that useless thing for hackers and scammers that only benefits crime and should be regulated like heck by governments for our safety.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#379

Post by jefftk »

deadbeeves wrote: post #354
jefftk wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.

Right. In a situation where people may die, the leader must risk his own life to protect the lives of those under him. In a situation where people may lose their livelihoods, the leader should risk his own livelihood to protect the livelihoods of those under him. How is this analogy inappropriate?

Lives and employment work very differently:

* People understandably put a very high value on their life continuing, and really don't want to trade it against other things.

* People vary a lot in how much value they put on their job continuing, and how much they are willing to trade off against it.

For example, many people would consider taking a 2x raise even if it increased their chances of losing their job in the next 3y from 5% to 50%, but you're not going to find many takers for a 50% chance of death in the next 3y no matter what you're offering.

You can have a culture where jobs are treated as sacrosanct as lives, who are nearly so. In a culture like that companies would be extremely cautious about hiring in a way that would make workers overall worse off, and startups with be much less practical. Europe is farther in this direction than the US, though not all the way to what I think you are proposing with your analogy.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#380

Post by Aperocky »

danuker wrote: post #344
_hcuq wrote: post #274

The one thing that surprises me in all this is that the BTC price has stayed at a stable 16k since mid October.

A lot of valuations show it's very cheap. Maybe hardcore believers start buying below this price. https://hcburger.com/blog/powerlaw/index.html https://twitter.com/DeFi_initiate/status/1576543256627724288... Of course, being historically consistent is not mandatory. The models may break, especially now that we have higher interest rates.

Betting against feds are fun! /s
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