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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%

#371

Post by smrtinsert »

pron wrote: post #310

> 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…

Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).

There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.

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

#372

Post by harimau777 »

khazhoux wrote: post #133
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…

> 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. The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (…

Brian Armstrong is still a billionaire. So it's not like he lacks alternatives to destroying people's lives.

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

#373

Post by harimau777 »

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.

Sounds like we need to prevent companies from scaling or being too successful.

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

#374

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

pron wrote: post #310

> 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…

I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses.

We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.

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

#375

Post by zeroonetwothree »

atonse wrote: post #366
pron wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position. The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.

Even if the trend doesn’t continue, the current models are very very good. They’re better than the average programmer in the industry, already.

Maybe at some coding benchmark. Certainly not at actually shipping and maintaining production grade software.

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

#377

Post by titularcomment »

bix6 wrote: post #354
pron wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about caring how it works. It's about caring that it keeps working at all even after you add stuff to it for a year or three (and nearly all software written by companies is software they evolve).

And who’s to say it won’t? It’s working now. I’m adding stuff and it’s still working. Why won’t that continue in year 3?

Maintaining software is like 80% of the job.

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

#378

Post by nullc »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #184
mothballed wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.

I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated. For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.

Coinbase gave my confidential "AML" information to criminal extortionists-- I hadn't even had an account with them for a decade because I realized they were bad eggs long ago.

What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.

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

#379

Post by kenferry »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #347
brandall10 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What world do you live in internal tooling isn’t production code? Internal tools keep the lights on and allow customer facing code to function! Operational tooling also isn’t a sexy thing, but it’s vital for any company to function.

I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.

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

#380

Post by dbgrman »

Banditoz wrote: post #270
boshalfoshal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would you blame instead?

Bitzscaling. Reid Hoffman's snake oil (thought piece). https://www.blitzscaling.com/

It has poisoned more than one company (especially startups). Its the "go big or go home" mentality. The "the market is ours to take if we just put more fuel to this fire" mentality.

was in a startup once (Reid was an investor). The CEOs bought into blitzscaling, told the whole company we're going to "blitzscale". Hired 2 directors (with 0 reports). They had amibitions of hiring 100s of engineers. Then reality struck. There was no revenue and no path to revenue (because early days of AI). The blitzscaling was "paused". The directors had 1 EM report to them each. You can imagine what happened in the months after that.

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