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Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

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Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#51

Post by mooreds »

I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.

* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)

* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them

* talks to the folks who are staying

Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.

The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?

Time will tell.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#52

Post by wiseowise »

ravenstine wrote: post #10

> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs? We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to…

Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#53

Post by keybored »

> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.

As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#54

Post by wiseowise »

broof wrote: post #26
Markoff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA." 4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to br…

When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous

[flagged]

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#55

Post by wiseowise »

keybored wrote: post #53

> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day. As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduc…

And increase in their workload. Win-win!

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#56

Post by dgellow »

SamPatt wrote: post #30

Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen. I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future. Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.

Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#57

Post by wiseowise »

SamPatt wrote: post #30

Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen. I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future. Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.

> I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.

And due to this it deserves even more mockery.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#58

Post by coldpie »

b00mer wrote: post #49
coldpie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Co…

There's a law for that. If Coinbase did not require an external bank account to create the coinbase account, by law, they cannot require one to close the account. At least, that is what I have been led to believe. You could sue.

I have to admit I'm always baffled by these "you could sue over this trivial matter" replies. Do you think lawsuits cost no time or money? Obviously I'm not going to do that.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#59

Post by rvz »

conception wrote: post #6

Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.

Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.

It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.

Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#60

Post by dgellow »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #50
martypitt wrote: post #33

> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism. > Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. > Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.

> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??

I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
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