Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

321–330 of 842 posts

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

#321

AI is the next big hype. Crypto was a big hype of last decade. Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase. Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.

crypto is not growing that's for sure.

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

#322
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

This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first. They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.

[deleted]

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

#323

> 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…

> but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.

Huh? If it came out this year then everybody had a chance to learn it this year?

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to. > Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family. People don't work som…

I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company. You’re drawing a correlation that’s not backed up by any empirical evidence. The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.

> I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company.

It is not specific to a crypto company. But the element of it being a crypto company cannot be ignored. Crypto companies are not like ordinary businesses. They have very unique qualities to them. Same with crypto industry as a whole. Ever been to a crypto conference for example? I have read about and have seen the videos. These things have the highest concentration of the scammers and the gullible any one place.

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

#325

> - 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…

And it's telling that really good players are often terrible coaches / good coaches were not great players.

Like the guy who "just gets math" is often NOT a good teacher.

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

#326
> 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.

What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.

I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.

Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.

(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?

(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.

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

#327
post #217

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.

I haven’t had it turn out well with pure managers either, so I’m not sure how much the distinction helps.

Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.

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

#328

> - 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…

How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.

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

#329

> - 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…

>>> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this? I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time. The job of 5 people being done with the…

> health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market

That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.

That's ridiculous. You're making it sound like they were working for Nazi Germany. Have some empathy for people losing their jobs because of upper management’s incompetence.

I forgot that all criticism is reserved for… Nazis? Chill

Have some empathy for the misled retail investor that gambled their savings to thieves?

Post reply on HN