It's fascinating to watch org managers decide that AI has made people management easy and cheap, instead of org management
Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
501–510 of 842 posts
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI. I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such th…
I started with x86 assembler and Turbo Pascal (I still remember when I got documentation for Turbo Vision - this was groundbreaking!).
The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.
Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.
Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#503> employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
This is surprising about COBRA - I thought it’s always 18 months. Moreover it doesn’t make much sense to limit cobra - you are paying full price out of pocket anyway.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#504Earlier 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…
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.
Kenny Dalglish for Liverpool too, winning the double whilst a player-manager.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#505Earlier 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…
It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming. “We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunde…
Your categorization of math, logic and programming as "girly" is hilarious.
When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.
I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.
For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.
History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.
Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#506> - 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 rol…
At the first tier manager layer, an ideal manager has skills in their workers' domain. That doesn't mean their job should require participation in that domain. Requiring that signals they are somewhat desperate to run lean, which wouldn't be a red flag in a small company but does in a large one.
Having skills is not the same as be required to use them. If your manager is an IC he does not have the time to manage you. He will be trading off quality of his deliverables for your management. No rational person would opt to get fired.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package. I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser." Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.
The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful. I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
So it isn't disrespectful, and neither is it respectful. A perfect nothing, not a thought or care involved. Like a 1-click eCard mailer.
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#508Can't access x.com, getting "Invalid request rewrite". Has anyone else seen it?
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 improve…
I never touched kubernetes and in 1 week I have a few nodes running and i understand a lot of it. Not perfect but not bad.
That was the usual experience pre AI
Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI. I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such th…
As a "young" coder I am hesitant because I don't have decades of skills to fall back on.
It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.
Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.