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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%

#582
The company I work in, collapsed in similar manner. Started with huge AI reductions, now we're barely coping. Managers vibe code. All fix production.

However, I understand rationale, as the money was not in-flowing enough.

---- edit ----

When reading about AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents, I shout out. Hire me. I will tell you why this won't work

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

#583
post #515

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] 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. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…

Also, why use the analogy of player-coaches? How many successful player-coaches are there in the big leagues? There's a reason it's very uncommon ...

Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...

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

#584
post #515

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] 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. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…

A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.

It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.

Hope they're well paid!

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

#586
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

My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.

I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.

[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.

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

#588

> 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?

This is the holy-grail in TradFI, not sure if it applies to fintech. It's not uncommon to hear from people who own an internal process only they know that's essentially their whole job security. The extreme being people that produce only one report a month and that more than justifies their income + bonus.

Simple, we make them use a company computer, log everything they've ever done then reverse engineer it

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

#589
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.

There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.

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

#590
post #14
post #2

At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off. What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.

"US 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." 4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to br…

Average EU unemployment rate is ~6% with some countries as high as 10%. I think many in the EU would just be happy to have a job to begin with.
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