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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#181

Post by manuelabeledo »

itsoktocry wrote: post #156
kstenerud wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in situations like this before. The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on. They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to pl…

> with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation. Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are…

> Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad?

It is if there is no objectivity to it. It wouldn't be the first time I get a bad review because I do things slightly different.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#182

Post by lupire »

kstenerud wrote: post #177
itsoktocry wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation. Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are…

It comes from life experience. I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs. That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when…

How would the dot system make it easier to hurt you?

The dot system would probably *help" here, because a sudden drop in ratings right after the incident would merit an investigation.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#183

Post by lupire »

itsoktocry wrote: post #180
kstenerud wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes from life experience. I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs. That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when…

> I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs. Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actuall…

Maybe, but somehow I doubt that the company would lay off an exec for insulting a peon at a party.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#184

Post by stuff4ben »

SilverBirch wrote: post #96

Honestly don't know what on earth this is trying to achieve. Running a software company is hard. Management is going to make choices and there are hard decisions. Not everyone you work with is going to be nice. >The failure of the Coinbase NFT platform Market forces. >The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure Name them. General "I disag…

Yep! This petition reeks of entitlement and naivety of how companies work. If they're so indignant, just find another job...

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#185

Post by jpgvm »

kderbyma wrote: post #143
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.

they hired the wrong engineers. they focused on infrastructure....no product

Tell me more about how they didn't manage to create a compelling streaming product that failed to gain any market share.

Oh wait. That isn't what happened.

Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.

The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.

The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#186

Post by andrew_ »

tomlockwood wrote: post #59

Sounds like those employees that took exit packages to leave after their "apolitical" pivot 2 years ago, got a good deal. There was a lot of congratulatory posting here then, about how the company was going to come out of that a lot better, and with less of the fat. Now it doesn't look like that really happened.

We can't possibly know that solely based on (what other comments have rightly pointed out) a vague, anon petition lacking nuance or details. This could just as well be a very small, vocal minority. We have no way of knowing without more information.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#187

Post by achow »

stuff4ben wrote: post #163

Oh for heaven's sake, just quit. Vote with your feet and walk them out the door to another job. The market is good (for now), best do it before that changes. When the people who do the actual work leave and they can't hire anyone due to their poor reputation because of the previously rescinded offers, they'll reap their own rewards.

What if they believe in the product, platform or the company?

I think that is what is happening here, they mention at the bottom - replace the current execs with people who are knowledgable about crypto world.

They want the company to succeed.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#188

Post by lupire »

DonHopkins wrote: post #127
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…

That's such a programmers story. "I was asked to do something and I hated it so much that I did it 150% out of spite and my manager loved it".

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#189

Post by kstenerud »

itsoktocry wrote: post #180
kstenerud wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes from life experience. I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs. That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when…

> I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs. Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actuall…

You don't "suddenly" notice that someone is an asshole. You just know it, and avoid them as much as you can.

If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.

When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.

If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.

Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#190

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

Is it that hard to imagine that some people enjoy working?
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