Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

151–160 of 842 posts

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

#151

Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.

Isnt that the most fair thing for them to do?

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

#152
Consider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged:

If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.

Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.

If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.

If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.

If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.

It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.

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

#153

> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their bio…

> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.

Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.

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

#154
post #68

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.

Share price can and does go up because layoffs usually means opex goes down

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

#155

> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their bio…

> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.

Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.

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

#157

"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...

Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.

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

#158

"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...

I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.

The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...

> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

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

#159
post #67
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, an…

It would be amusing but counterproductive to have a layoff email talk about how they’re firing their best and smartest employees.

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

#160
post #15

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code? I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder

My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.

Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?

Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.

Post reply on HN