Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 842 posts

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

#301

Post by strken »

cloche wrote: post #87
wiseowise wrote: post #41

> - 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…

> 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…

Player coaches would be redundant given that most sports already have captains, wouldn't they?

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

#302

Post by rbjorklin »

> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?

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

#303

Post by themafia »

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.

> As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff.

Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"

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

#304

Post by mgfist »

rbjorklin wrote: post #302

> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?

Don't worry agents will take over job

/s

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

#305

Post by jdbiggs »

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.

I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."

So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!

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

#306

Post by paulhebert »

claytonjy wrote: post #221
paulhebert wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sad way to think about other people

It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company. That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.

Employees are people. Not cattle or pets. It doesn't mean you don't ever fire or lay people off. But you treat them as humans.

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

#307

Post by paulhebert »

scoot wrote: post #265
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often

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

#308

Post by abnercoimbre »

ryandrake wrote: post #282
tkzed49 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, I also know of multiple devs going into nursing. It used to be the other way around!

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

#309

Post by nikcub »

lxgr wrote: post #185
nikcub wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

oh they have too! came out a couple of months ago.

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

#310

Post by pron »

> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.

No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.

In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.

AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.

Post reply on HN