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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%

#61

Post by pluc »

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??

"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.

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

#62

Post by kypro »

dgellow wrote: post #56
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

No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.

Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.

Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.

The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.

If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.

No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.

I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.

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

#63

Post by baal80spam »

Markoff wrote: post #14
mhitza wrote: post #2

At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off. What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.

"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…

> as European I would say this is fairly standard

I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.

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

#64

Post by baristaGeek »

Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.

However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.

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

#65

Post by brk »

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…

Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.

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

#67

Post by prewett »

mooreds wrote: post #51

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…

> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.

Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.

The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.

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

#68

Post by tmaly »

Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.

If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.

They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.

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

#69

Post by dgellow »

kypro wrote: post #62
dgellow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, because you're misunderstanding how this works. Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra. Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems. The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of. If you're allowing non-tech…

I do understand the theory, none of what you mentioned is new to me or contradict my points. I do not believe things will be done right. It’s not only mission critical services that require maintenance and need to handle incidents. Internal services are as important to a company as their public facing ones, and once you get the ball rolling I do not believe we won’t see the same approach used for customer facing services. I also do not expect non technical people to understand differences between MCP servers, rest apis, direct db access, and other resources. If they do they are definitely technical… so it will be up to whatever they let the agent do. Which is the whole problem here, you need to be technical to understand and push back when agents are doing things wrong

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

#70

Post by m4ck_ »

sumeno wrote: post #46
kypro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely doing something wrong if that's the case at your company.

Like letting non-technical teams ship production code

But the claude/cursor/kiro/codex said my code was production ready, enterprise grade, and PCI/alphabet soup compliant.
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