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

411–420 of 842 posts

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

#411

Post by zdragnar »

ern wrote: post #266
zdragnar wrote: post #188

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.

In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.

Everything but the AI bit are on my list of manager qualities too, but the best managers I've had weren't active programmers, and one had zero coding background.

Knowing what you don't know and knowing how to get qualified information from people around you makes up for a lot of not having a programming background.

If anything, the managers with technical backgrounds who weren't active programmers tended to significantly underestimate the difficulty of doing something because back in their day, things were different or some such nonsense.

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

#412

Post by thatmf »

saos wrote: 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

I'm sure this will turn out fine /s

But also the type of investor who is into crypto in the first place will probably love this

Crypto bros :handshake: AI bros

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

#413

Post by dwd »

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…

The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30.

He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.

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

#415

Post by s__s »

qingcharles wrote: post #397
pron wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dete…

Interesting that we’ve have such different experiences. I was working with both those models today and on several occasions it proposed some pretty poor solutions.

I also find I need to run an llm code review or two against any code it produces to even get to the point where’s it’s ready for human review.

In any case they served as an extremely valuable tool.

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

#416

Post by simpsond »

tverbeure wrote: post #404
827a wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

P/E ratios are usually based on last 12 months, so E = sum of EPS over last 4 quarters.

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

#417

Post by Refreeze5224 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #391
reactordev wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cars were more efficient horses. AI is not more efficient people. It's an excuse to reduce payroll. Capital is fundamentally antagonistic to labor, because labor is an eternal cost center that until AI, never had a solution.

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

#419

Post by sobellian »

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…

AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.

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

#420

Post by Rapzid »

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…

Crypto was always a clown show. Not saying everyone working the crypto/Web 3.0 was a clown just.. This tone-def message coming out of the waning crypto industry is nothing more than an eye-roll.
Post reply on HN