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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%

#401

Post by willio58 »

illusive4080 wrote: post #393
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.

At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.

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

#402

Post by spopejoy »

wayeq wrote: post #353
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insanely generous. I got laid off 3 years ago and got a mere 2 weeks + 1 month of COBRA. It was a tech company, but not a big one.

i assure you they don't do that to be generous, they do it to get you to sign a piece of paper which reduces their legal risk profile

Yes but ... people will sign that paper for almost any severance. Consider the alternative (don't sign, get a lawyer etc) -- many folks will just sign to get whatever's on offer

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

#403

Post by qingcharles »

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?

Isn't that why you have processes to create documentation?

I would forget half the processes I use if I didn't document them all religiously. The benefit now is that I can save myself significant time by having an LLM help me write the docs.

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

#404

Post by tverbeure »

827a wrote: post #334
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…

You have to look past literally everything their leadership is saying and at the heart of the matter: This is a dying company, and they physically will not have the capital to pay paychecks if they don't do this. Everything else is window dressing to try to keep investors on-board, but they aren't buying it, and neither should you. The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter…

I see $667M loss numbers in the press, but I also see a positive P/E ratio? How does that work?

Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.

I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.

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

#405

Post by doitLP »

draftsman wrote: post #91
cloche wrote: 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…

Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.

Good example but it still sounds more like a “tech lead”: this guy is still focused on tactical line level with other players than on handling the overall strategy, PR, plans, hiring, etc that a coach does

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

#406

Post by paulcole »

scottlamb wrote: post #387
paulcole wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first , as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native . You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business. See also "digital native", a popular term which is absolutely about growing up after…

Quite a reach.

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

#407

Post by pm90 »

From some of the previous decisions taken by Brian, and the quality of his discourse on twitter, it feels like he has succumbed to something that afflicts a lot of rich people with frail egos: surrounding themselves with yes-men, they rarely engage with the reality as-is and instead with a make believe one. Elon Must also suffers from this as do the founders of AirBnB.

It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).

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

#408

Post by hadlock »

ChaseMeAway wrote: post #356
hadlock wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions can't fix the fact that crypto didn't survive it's first real Flight to Quality and is suffering against gold.

Certainly not, I don’t think anyone would make that claim, seems a bit silly. The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company. They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation. American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive…

Your comment seems to imply you thought unions would have fixed this specific situation, which is why I felt compelled to respond.

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

#409

Post by andriy_koval »

ghaff wrote: post #394
cloche wrote: 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…

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.

> 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.

not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.

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

#410

Post by noisy_boy »

paulcole wrote: post #323
scottlamb wrote: post #213

> 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?

First as in that was the first thing they learned and can't really think in non-ai terms.
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