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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#111

Post by jcims »

highwaylights wrote: post #60
jpgvm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.

I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date. They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period. There are a lot of really h…

I'm curious why Zoom doesn't get more shine.

In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.

Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#112

Post by thrav »

phillu wrote: post #108
vianneychevalie wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, emotional work is work, and « positive energy » sums it up quite well. Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work , because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance. One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.

This sounds like a company I would never want to work for. No one is positive and happy all the time and having to fake it "as a job requirement" sounds wrong on so many levels.

I’m sure you already know this, but don’t ever do sales.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#114

Post by thematrixturtle »

neosat wrote: post #106
thematrixturtle wrote: post #25

This is a pretty vague and poorly thought out petition. It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable; and much of the phrasing like "the wisdom of the crypto industry" (lolwu…

>> It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g…

What I'm saying that even if Coinbase had become the market leader instead of OpenSea, the entire NFT market is rapidly collapsing. Of course you could argue that this outcome was obvious and Coinbase shouldn't even have tried.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#115

Post by ethanbond »

tenpies wrote: post #98
nowherebeen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> include values like positive energy There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.

For what it's worth, this is progress. The previous default is a 24/7 inquisition trying to find and destroy any co-worker not on the cutting edge of woke - whether outside of work or at work. A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.

Where was this woke inquisition happening that you saw directly? I’ve seen people complain about this much more than I’ve actually seen it happening.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#116

Post by nowherebeen »

koonsolo wrote: post #83
blocked_again wrote: post #38

Companies should only hire entrepreneurs and engineers who has proven track record as builders as execs. Hiring people from business schools and non engineers as execs is the stupidest thing you can do for long term sucess of the company. Hire builders. Not resume builders.

I think this theory is proven in practice. If you look at the major tech companies, they are all run by people who programmed at some point. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, ... . However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions) I think it's very hard for non-builders to really…

Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and an obsessive personality to product according to Walter Isaacson. I think those two things compensated for his lack of technical skills. Steve Wozniak is highly underrated compared to Steve Jobs and was a crucial factor to Jobs' early success.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#117

Post by donohoe »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #25

This is a pretty vague and poorly thought out petition. It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable; and much of the phrasing like "the wisdom of the crypto industry" (lolwu…

I came here to say this (but not as well put).

It’s poorly worded and broadly vague in most places.

If the criticism is valid but you’d never know it for lack of details. It just reads as disgruntled workers trying to stir things up.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#118

Post by ethanbond »

encrux wrote: post #91
samwillis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They way I had it described to me was that the optimal number of direct reports to one person is 7 (hence why military squads tend to be about 8 people). All companies go through growing pains as they reach ~7^n people and have to put in another layer of management. So about 7, 50, 340, 2400… In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000. I…

This seems surprisingly reasonable for my personal experience, so I'm gonna use it as a general rule now /s

Inquiry like this should be left to the people who experience it, and of course all they have is their personal experience and then opportunities to share their personal experience.

Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#119

Post by prepend »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #30
saurik wrote: post #20

I don't understand how there can be such a push for a vote of no-confidence in three C-level people with no mention of the CEO that ostensibly chose, managed, and retained them.

Probably because it’s nearly impossible to wage an internal campaign against a Founder/CEO with 60% voting power. https://www.afr.com/wealth/people/crypto-billionaires-fortun...

If the CEO has 60% voting power then this petition is extra useful without an appeal to the CEO.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#120

Post by ethanbond »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #53
thematrixturtle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, that compensation was in Coinbase shares and options at the IPO valuation of ~$320/share, meaning it's been slashed to under a fifth of that at the current $64, possibly less if the options are under water now.

Either way, if I ended up with $100 million ($600 million * stock crash) I’d probably retire. It’s mind boggling to me when people with such wealth want even more. Take the guy who stole tech from Google and went to Uber. Google gave him enough to live out his days doing whatever he pleaded for the most part. Yet obviously he felt like he wanted more - whether that was money, recognition, etc. and lost it all. It’s c…

Money is a highly visible, easily comparable, unambiguous “point system.” It’s not to feed their family or anything like that, it’s to prove that they can earn more points and that’s it.
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