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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%

#251

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

scottlamb wrote: post #213

> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they l…

No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.

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

#252

Post by colechristensen »

claytonjy wrote: post #216
zdragnar wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager. I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks…

I worked somewhere once where every once in a while we'd have to create a new deploy meeting because 1) our code was deployed manually over the course of hours and 2) every manager imaginable wanted to be in the meeting asking questions and directing people... you couldn't actually speak to anyone you had to talk through their manager.

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

#253

Post by lokar »

annjose wrote: post #193
azinman2 wrote: post #136

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

Are they also held accountable for the code they ship? Are they added to the on-call rotation?

IMO managers (and directors) should staff the large incident management rotation. Helping to coordinate response, freeing up ICs to debug and fix.

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

#254

Post by hluska »

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.

You’re giving legal advice based upon something you were lead to believe. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that proving damages would be difficult. The third is that you’re operating in a pay to play justice system.

Maybe you don’t have to make comments like this?

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

#255

Post by nickmonad »

upupupandaway wrote: post #72

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.

Yeah or anybody who can still actually read code.

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

#256

Post by yurylifshits »

just_once wrote: post #229
butterlesstoast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?

Gianluca Vialli won UEFA Cup Winners' Cup with Chelsea as player-coach in 1998

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

#257

Post by lokar »

mothballed wrote: post #244
kentm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.

If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true…

So you are accusing them of fraud without any evidence.

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

#258

Post by Refreeze5224 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #231
reactordev wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?

historically speaking, efficiency has always won out for example, the last obvious inefficiency i remember was sys admins. the most worthless, self aggrandizing group of people at any company. got wiped out mostly (the best work for the cloud engineering companies), and i think it was for the better! engineers today handle deployments, and it is far better.

> historically speaking, efficiency has always won out

Too bad AI is not about efficiency. It's about headcount reduction, which is exactly what Coinbase is doing here. AI just gives them plausible cover.

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

#259

Post by lokar »

willio58 wrote: post #210

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke. You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not…

But now with LLM agents to help you…

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

#260

Post by hluska »

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…

This is a whole lot of speculation masquerading as knowing what you’re talking about. You don’t have a clue what the CEO meant. If you did, you wouldn’t be talking here.
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