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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%

#661

Post by simonask »

pards wrote: post #629
arthurjj wrote: post #164

> 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.

For the non-US readers: > COBRA is the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. It gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and o…

Thanks. It’s wild to see people here express this as “generosity” when they are just covering a few months of what is in every developed nation considered absolute baseline, for life, regardless of employment status.

Americans are not remotely free.

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

#662

Post by parliament32 »

siren2026 wrote: post #561
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…

Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically. Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important. Before that the manager was essentially the be…

> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings

Hard agree. One-on-ones are one of the silliest fads in our industry lately. Why would you wait until a weekly scheduled meeting to bring something up? Your manager's job is to be available to you when you need something, not just once a week. And if they want to know how you're feeling.. they should ask, putting it on an agenda feels very disingenuous.

Me and my direct manager (a C-level) tried weekly 1:1s for a full year and ended up giving up on it because it was clearly unproductive cargo-culting.

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

#663

Post by Robdel12 »

abuani wrote: post #178
ericmcer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production? Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.

I'm looking forward to marketing folks doing oncall and support work for the features they're shipping.

How about a security leak (say.. Vercel) and having to run down all of these non-technical folks and getting them to rotate env vars? Or ask them to not do things on their personal account?

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

#664

Post by Sankozi »

friendzis wrote: post #633
ultratalk wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.

There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "sli…

You are contradicting yourself: either presentation is not important so LLM use does not matter (as long as core message is still there), or it is important and and LLM can change how the message is received (by improving presentation or making it worse).

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

#665

Post by threetonesun »

kuboble wrote: post #525
glaslong wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Genuine question. Let's say you are bad with words. If you ask AI to generate hundred different paragraphs and choose the one which best conveys what you actually feel and want to communicate. Is it is still a perfect nothing?

Why are you a CEO if you are bad with words. If a CEO's work can be reduced to picking the best option from AI generated text why do they make so much money, and why would anyone chose to invest in a company that could be led by anyone picking from a list of AI responses.

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

#667

Post by meindnoch »

nvader wrote: post #290
lokar wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now with LLM agents to help you…

I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.

Cool! I hope devs can use their own LLMs to attend these meetings for them too.

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

#668

Post by snapcaster »

pron wrote: post #655
tokioyoyo wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not managing fleets of agents. They’re not productive for our workflows yet. It’s usually a couple of CC CLIs running and going back and forth on specific tasks we closely control.

They're not productive for any workflow is my point because they don't produce sustainable software, yet that's exactly what Armstrong is calling for. They don't work, and people experienced with AI workflows already know that. If you review the code and tell the agent to revert when it gets things wrong (not functionally but architecturally) you're fine. That's not what I was responding to.

You're just wrong on this though, and I don't know why you aren't realizing it's a skill issue on your part

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

#669

Post by snapcaster »

daemin wrote: post #478
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…

People that manage AI agents are not engineers as they do no engineering but are instead just supervisors.

only dorks care this much about being an "engineer" or "artist". Who gives a shit if misanthropes on websites consider you a real engineer?

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

#670

Post by snapcaster »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #389
randallsquared wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a year or so Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.

> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter. I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://…

So nothing about the last 3 years has caused you to update your beliefs on this stuff? feels like bitter cope
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