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

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

#391

Post by moomoo11 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #271

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> historically speaking, efficiency has always won out Too bad AI is not about efficiency. It's about headcount reduction, which is exactly what Coinbase is doing here. AI just gives them plausible cover.

If it was about efficiency, they would be moving faster, not cutting headcount…

Surely there are some insanely smart people amongst the 100s of thousands of laid off supposedly god tier software engineers and adjacent who will start new companies maybe even spawn a new industry?

Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.

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

#392

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

machomaster wrote: post #198

ryanisnan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology. This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.

Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't. E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees. You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristic…

It makes plenty of sense. Player-coaches are a real thing, and in a realm where you're not worried about peak fitness then it's reasonable to demand the coaches become player-coaches.

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

#393

Post by illusive4080 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:59 AM UTC

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…

15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.

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

#394

Post by ghaff » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:03 AM UTC

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…

I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.

With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.

I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.

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

#395

Post by MeetingsBrowser » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:03 AM UTC

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

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.

As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences.

I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.

AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.

We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.

What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?

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

#396

Post by ambicapter » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

reillyse wrote: post #129

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…

[flagged]

Absolutely hilarious to optimize for having employees with no discernible edge whatsoever.

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

#397

Post by qingcharles » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #360

bix6 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you carefully read the agent's output you'll see why. It adds layers upon layers of workarounds and defences that hide serious problems, until the codebase reaches a point where the agent can no longer understand it and work with it. All the tests pass right up until the moment when adding a feature or fixing a bug causes another bug, and then nothing and no one can save the codebase anymore.

Maybe a year ago? Right now the LLMs I mainly use (GPT5.5, Opus 4.7) will intuit exactly what I need from my brief specs and universally go above-and-beyond in creating code that is not only extremely high-quality, but catches a ton of the gotchas I would have stumbled on, in advance.

Just a minute ago 5.5 looked at some human-written code of mine from last year and while it was making the changes I asked for it determined the existing code was too brittle (it was) and rewrote it better. It didn't mention this in its summary at the end, I only know because I often watch the thinking output as it goes past before it hides it all behind a pop-open.

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

#398

Post by qingcharles » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #127

Saline9515 wrote: post #35

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.

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

I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.

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

#399

Post by _heimdall » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

> - 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 is going to end poorly for them. The only good managers I've had over around 20 years in the industry were 100% people managers and had no IC type of role expectations.

I've personally walked away from multiple manager role interview loops when I ask about the split only to find that they expected managers to also take on partial roles with IC engineering work. I know I can't be effective in either when having to juggle two entirely different hats, and in my anecdotal experience I've never seen anyone else do it well either.

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

#400

Post by harimau777 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #119

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…

what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though? sounds stupid to me

The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.