Coinbase employees petition to remove execs • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#121

Post by a4isms » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:28 AM UTC

thrav wrote: post #112

phillu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a successful retail and enterprise salesperson earlier in my career. I also suffer from lifelong depression.

I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.

That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."

I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#122

Post by bsenftner » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:30 AM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #47

jen729w wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fascinated by the idea that, once a company reaches a certain size – let’s say 100 – then it is, by definition, average. Any claims to be above average may be summarily dismissed. This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick. If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small. It is for this reason…

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.

Netflix has a strange technical management philosophy: they have zero interest in any technology other than their existing streaming infrastructure and traditional media production tools. I've had conversations with members of their tech management, and their ability to investigate new technology directions (such as a Netflix Game Service, or a Netflix Online University) are absolutely zero. One of their identified sources of success is a narrow focus, and they push that commitment.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#123

Post by atlasunshrugged » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:33 AM UTC

thrav wrote: post #112

phillu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strong disagree, I did sales (I would like to think successfully) for a long time as someone who struggled with depression and anxiety, there's far more to it than just having a fake smile plastered on; people like those who can empathize with them, understand their needs, etc. and sometimes a no-bs straightforward approach talking pros and cons directly instead of a fake used-car salesmanesque over the top approach is far more effective.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#124

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:37 AM UTC

asien wrote: post #43

sjtindell wrote: post #34

I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog,…

> I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products. You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even th…

There was a post here recently where a Netflix employee was proudly showing off their log processing system. Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#125

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:44 AM UTC

fathyb wrote: post #10

Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…

There are a lot of replies to this comparing Dot Collector to TV shows. Can we not judge these things on their own (de)merits with more nuance than just saying it reminds us of some popular media? This happens in a lot of tech discussions - usually using 1984 - to argue that a surface-level resemblance means something is bad. I agree that I don't want to work in a place like this but if this is an acceptable line of reasoning then it extrapolates to good-boy-points used for children being dystopian. Using stories whose morals we agree with as a gotcha enables the use of stories whose morals aren't agreeable or sensible - perhaps democracy reminds me of the senate from the Star Wars prequels so we should revert to feudalism?

There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#126

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:49 AM UTC

sjtindell wrote: post #34

I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog,…

>Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically

True but not fatal. Being equal to the first employees isn't a requirement: as long as the employee creates more value than they cost, it's worthwhile. Facebook is a simple premise that could be (and was) created with a skeleton team but it's still worth hiring the person to work on Linux's networking stack if that enables them to make it more efficient.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#127

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:55 AM UTC

fathyb wrote: post #10

Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…

Sounds like something that happened at Sun around 1990, which I described earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759

At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."

I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.

To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.

Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):

https://youtu.be/avJnpDKHxPY?t=13m24s

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#128

Post by tmountain » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:55 AM UTC

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #123

thrav wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Strong disagree, I did sales (I would like to think successfully) for a long time as someone who struggled with depression and anxiety, there's far more to it than just having a fake smile plastered on; people like those who can empathize with them, understand their needs, etc. and sometimes a no-bs straightforward approach talking pros and cons directly instead of a fake used-car salesmanesque over the top approach…

The most successful salesperson I know has a pretty flat affect but knows her product super well and is excellent at needs analysis. There’s definitely a lot more to sales than glad handing people with a smile.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#129

Post by z3c0 » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:56 AM UTC

alexjurkiewicz wrote: post #41

Is there any proof this was even created by Coinbase employees? It seems completely anonymous.

Its short interest has increased by almost 200% since April, now at about 20% of the float. So now that there's a lot of money riding on people hating Coinbase, I expect we'll continue seeing more articles like this.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#130

Post by wccrawford » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:57 AM UTC

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #123

thrav wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Strong disagree, I did sales (I would like to think successfully) for a long time as someone who struggled with depression and anxiety, there's far more to it than just having a fake smile plastered on; people like those who can empathize with them, understand their needs, etc. and sometimes a no-bs straightforward approach talking pros and cons directly instead of a fake used-car salesmanesque over the top approach…

I did non-commission sales for a while as well, and made no effort to appear more happy than I was. People appreciated my candor and knowledge, rather than being won over by my charm. I sold a lot of stuff, and there was even a time that a customer found out I wasn't in that day and decided to come back another day instead of dealing with anyone else, even knowing there were no commissions.

My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.