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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%

#611

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #568
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.

It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.

Expectations will be raised until they can't be met anymore. There is always a ceiling.

It is on every single worker to make sure that they don't please the system beyond what is reasonable. Often the problem is people who overwork themselves to please and set the bar over the reasonable amount of work. Still when the majority does not raise their output to an unhealthy amount that must be accepted as a ceiling.

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

#612

Post by Hendrikto »

cyberclimb wrote: post #222
vdnkh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is

> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. For sure this part screams LLM

> rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it

Wow. That’s my cue to never use Coinbase again.

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

#613

Post by tyyyy3 »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #601
saimiam wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re good at something, never do it for free…or something. Let OP make his “hire me and I’ll tell you why your AI first approach is bunk” market.

Exactly. I won't unless you hire me :wink: ---- edit ---- TBH I will post an article, I'm finishing it. But it won't be so doomy, but rather on what to avoid to not fail

I strongly believe increasing the rate at which one produces code misses the point.

If engineers already know up front with clarity what they need to build, and, the leadership are very focused and concentrate resources on doing a few things.. then increasing the rate at which LOC is written is not beneficial - because getting the product built right is what matters.

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

#614

Post by LightBug1 »

lkbm wrote: post #150
turtlebits wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package. Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.

> 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.

Quaint.

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

#615

Post by cjrp »

aboodman wrote: post #600
kelnos wrote: 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…

lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had. Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious. Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is: * Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement * Having the respect of the tea…

Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.

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

#616

Post by logicchains »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #395
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 improve…

>AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing,

Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are?

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

#617

Post by logicchains »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #395
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 improve…

>AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing,

Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are, not just for coding?

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

#618

Post by alt227 »

claytonjy wrote: post #224
tacker2000 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.

Yeah this sounds pretty reasonable really, like instead of using a CMS directly they’re having Claude file PRs to make the same changes. As someone who likes static sites and change control, it actually sounds like an improvement.

If as a developer all you want your job to be is checking ai generated PRs then this is a great step!

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

#619

Post by id »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #599
satvikpendem wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do systems programming. I'll stop you right there. AI is not good at systems programming, it's good at CRUD web development, which is where most people are seeing the gains.

>95% of software development is crud.

It's really not, though. As soon as systems have to scale, regulatory requirements come in, etc. it becomes more complex.

AI has solved simple CRUD, yes, but CRUD, was easy before.

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

#620

Post by maccard »

jedberg wrote: post #529
sobellian wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Except that he got good at his short game by the end. LLMs will get there sooner than we think.

I don’t think we will though. Because the “short game” is match the requirements of the agent operator. If we don’t care about the finer details that we let the LLMs infer, then we shouldn’t care if a human infers them (but yet we do).

I think LLMs are great, and I think people who can use them to get to the green in one and take it from there will soar, just like people who could identify a problem and solve it themselves did in the past.

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