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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%

#281

Post by Terr_ »

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.

Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate:

{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."

{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."

{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.

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

#282

Post by ryandrake »

tkzed49 wrote: post #247
kibwen wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies with less than 20 employees aren't federally required to offer COBRA. Companies larger than that are required to offer at least 18 months of coverage. I don't know how large your old company was, but Coinbase is large enough that this offer, rather than being generous, sounds illegal? https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...

They're offering to subsidize the cost that the individual would normally pay for COBRA coverage. They're only required to offer the coverage, but not to pay for it. However, I don't think this is that unusual in SV layoff packages.

If so, that's really generous, given the cost of having to pay for COBRA.

Either way, I'd still be shitting my pants. 16 weeks is not a lot of time to find another job in today's environment. I know devs who have been out of work for years and had to resort to stocking shelves at Home Depot to tread water.

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

#283

Post by duzer65657 »

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.

They're still going to have upwards of 5 levels in their hierarchy, so this is obviously for the plebs who are front-line managers, not the several layers above them, as (for example) I'm not sure what a strong player-coach VP of Engineering would exactly look like. I got to Director and quit because it was impossible to be a true contributor at that level or higher. You can see this when you're in critical mode like downtime or a breach; senior management is useless.

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

#284

Post by conradfr »

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?

There's successful actor-directors.

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

#285

Post by CryptoBanker »

jr3592 wrote: post #273
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.

> 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. This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.

> This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.

And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.

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

#286

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

fourseventy wrote: post #135
saos wrote: 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.

I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".

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

#287

Post by missedthecue »

archagon wrote: post #201
sokoloff wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."

I feel like this would just select for business leaders that take zero risk.

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

#288

Post by duzer65657 »

claytonjy wrote: post #264
colechristensen wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

I've experienced this as well. I call it the "better safe than sorry" strategy, and the issue is it ignores the very real cost of all the extra effort and work, from the literal costs to the slow releases to the loss of people who just can't take it anymore.

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

#289

Post by brandall10 »

simonbw wrote: post #275
azinman2 wrote: post #136

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

There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.

Internal tools and help/marketing pages aren't generally considered production code.

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

#290

Post by nvader »

lokar wrote: post #259
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…

I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.
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