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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%

#261

Post by rowanG077 »

zdragnar wrote: post #188
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.

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.

For me this is all about team size. It works if you have small teams, maybe max 6 people. But anything above 8-10 this is a total no go. Because management tasks just are not able to be done well at that point.

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

#262

Post by darepublic »

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?

Pete Rose baseball?

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

#263

Post by stephenlf »

azinman2 wrote: post #136

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

This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.

> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.

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

#264

Post by claytonjy »

colechristensen wrote: post #252
claytonjy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.

Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.

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

#265

Post by scoot »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #251
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.

To be "AI native" (a la digital native) you have to have grown up with the technology.

I'm not sure exactly which children they're planning to replace all their staff with, nor how they plan to get around the child labour laws.

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

#266

Post by ern »

zdragnar wrote: post #188
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.

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.

In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.

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

#267

Post by atl_tom »

pishpash wrote: post #220
willio58 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I take this as a signal to remove the remaining amount of crypto I had on coinbase out. Fun thing for tonight!

What are the top alternatives? (And are they doing the same thing?)

Hardware wallet. Or just stamp the wallet and private key on a sheet of aluminum.

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

#268

Post by reverend_gonzo »

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…

I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.

I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.

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

#269

Post by drdaeman »

shell0x wrote: post #187
azinman2 wrote: post #136

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

My employer does that too and people don’t even read or review code anymore.

Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.

But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.

I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.

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

#270

Post by Banditoz »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #112
tmaly wrote: 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.

Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?

What would you blame instead?
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