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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%

#181

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.

I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI can't do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organized labor

History has always been kind to inefficient systems organizing together for protection /s

Efficient system is when worker does work of 5 people for the same salary and CEO makes billions.

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

#183

> - 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…

"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up." I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.

That is bonkers but I will enjoy calling my friends “biological units” from now on

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

#184

"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.

I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.

For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.

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

#185
post #127

The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect). While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.

They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did. It would be slop, but the market would love it

Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).

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

#186

If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.

Is there a different layoff email that would leave you satisfied and happy?

I suppose not getting a layoff email and instead getting it delivered face to face would be more human, but that's American capitalism for you in all its glory

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

#188

"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.

I've strongly disliked every team where this was the case. The people in those positions ended up being neither good managers nor good engineers.

YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.

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

#189
post #106
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too. And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-en…

This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?

If engineering ability actually became cheaper you would want more of it, as ideas that were previously too marginal became worthwhile.

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

#190
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

I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.

Go on, spill some more tea..
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