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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%

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would you blame instead?

Anything that happened more recently? At some point, the "overhiring" excuse no longer holds water. Headline from 2050: "Big tech lays off thousands more, due to overhiring 30 years ago..."

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

#292
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 biology. Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also…

In sports like Football where CTE is king, there's just not gonna be enough qualified personnel to coach.

No. Few college or professional coaches weren't themselves college or professional players. Think of all those assistant coaches, QB coaches, DB coaches etc.--all players. Mike Leach comes to mind as a rare counterexample.

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

#293
post #248

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.

Being a great manager requires being good at a whole set of specific skills, and that takes effort and some natural talent. It can certainly overlap with what makes a great engineer, but not most of the time.

I think I am a better manager than engineer, not because I'm a shitty engineer but because I recognize the superior strength in my team and do waht I can to leverage the basic principle that if someone is better than you in many things, they should still specialize in the thing they are best at.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I don’t think I’ve heard of a single tech CEO resigning for massively fucking up. They only “take responsibility” to the extent of saying those magic words.

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

#295

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.

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.

You right, but there is a very real coordination problem above the team when you're doing bigger things. I've recently experienced an organization with approx. 25 teams of 5-8, and because of their organization they had way too many concurrent initiatives. It was very hard to effectively swarm multiple teams on fewer (bigger) projects.

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

#296

> 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.

"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.

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

#297
post #290
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice work if you can get it.

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

#298
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

or at Coinbase now apparently, prepare to complete 15+ annual reviews in your new role as player-coach!

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

#299

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.

Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You and I wouldn't because we're engineers. An executive with ulterior motives would want to call it production for "Marketing"
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