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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#221

Post by Petersipoi »

mistrial9 wrote: post #168
jiggawatts wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time. to clarify could you say the same thing, in a different way?

For every minute that someone streams Netflix, 2 MB of data is logged. So if 1,000 people are using Netflix simultaneously, they're generating 2 GB of logs per minute.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#222

Post by coryfklein »

achow wrote: post #187
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people who do the actual work leave and they can't hire anyone due to their poor reputation because of the previously rescinded offers, they'll reap their own rewards.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.

Right? A lot depends on how much power these individuals have. If the folks running the petition hold a lot of sway in engineering then the petition could have a real impact; even if it's just forcing the leadership to pay more attention to folks working at the ground level.

On the other hand, if you're some random dude in the IT department with very little influence or stock ownership, and with little reason to believe the host of engineering and product is going to stand up behind you, then yeah I'd say the time spent organizing an effort like this is much better spent "shopping elsewhere".

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#223

Post by moron4hire »

lupire wrote: post #191
moron4hire wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a similar thing at Deloitte that they called "Scatterplot". There were questions like, "if the money were yours, would you give it to this person to work on projects?" They take your rankings from multiple people over time, plot them, then generate a trend line. The thinking is that, in an org like Deloitte, you'll end up working with so many people that any interpersonal friction will winnow out as noise. This i…

That makes sense, though, for the business. Consulting companies sell a brand image. If Justin Bieber's backup singer got more famous than Bieber, it would mess up the brand dynamics.

No, that analogy does not make sense. They weren't competent at their own marketing, so their own efforts weren't successful or a respected part of the industry zeitgeist. It'd be more like getting upset that one of the sound engineers that worked on the Rebecca Black's "Friday" was getting famous amongst sound engineers for talks on sound engineering. I didn't ask them to make me a part of their marketing. I just wanted to continue doing the talks I was already doing (mostly just local enthusiast groups), completely devoid of any of their involvement. Hell, we had even discussed these talks during my interview and they had said they wanted to encourage me to do more. They wanted me to get approval for all talks of any kind and once I got in they would not give approval for any.

Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#224

Post by seti0Cha »

jaywalk wrote: post #165
asien wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time. 2MB/minute is 33KB/second. How is that impressive?

I think it's impressive that they somehow found 33KB/second worth of data to log for each stream. I can't even imagine the amount of useless shit that must be logged to get to that number.

Detailed logging can function as an on-demand APM. Not a bad idea if you have the bandwidth and storage for it.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#225

Post by xiphias2 »

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,…

The worst thing in having too many people working on the product is increased code size / code change velocity.

Compile time per person and code understanding time per person grows linearly with the number of people (which grows exponentially as revenue grows), which means that the total time people are spending with understanding the code base & total compilation time for the code server grows quadraticly with number of engineers (+ exponentially with revenue).

Total code size should be kept under square root of number of engineers in an organization probably to keep product velocity OK, and engineers should spend significant time minimizing the number of changes in the code base after they have the first proof of concept.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#226

Post by andsoitis »

blocked_again wrote: post #42
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.

It's simple. The CEO is the founder and built the company from the ground up and has the most skin in the game. Execs keeps jumping between the companies for better resume and compensation and don't generally care about long term results.

If the CEO manages the three people and has the most skin in the game, this petition is actually a message to the CEO saying: you're doing a bad job / don't know what you're doing.

Not very strategic or well thought out.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#227

Post by dub »

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…

I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again.

It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.

When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#228

Post by blocked_again »

ameister14 wrote: post #142
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.

Sheryl Sandberg - Facebook COO - Harvard MBA // David Wehner - Meta CFO - Former investment banker // Zachary Kirkhorn - Tesla CFO - Engineer, but also Harvard MBA // Brian Olavsky - Amazon CFO - Carnegie Mellon MBA // Ruth Porat - Alphabet CFO - Wharton MBA

I think the fact that these companies are successful inspite of this shows how good their initial product market fit and founders(CEOs) were. Even after having non builders in key leadership position these companies survived and continue to thrive. Just think about it. Business school admissions are not given on the basis on how well you can run a company long term.

I think companies like coinbase can't afford to have non builders in leadership because they don't have a strong product market fit compared to Facebook, Tesla cars, AWS etc.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#229

Post by datavirtue »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #71
tsimionescu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.

To paraphrase the economics joke: Coinbase doesn't have any value(s). It has ten prices, none of which are correct, and it doesn't know the difference. Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy inste…

"Positive energy" to me sounds like: "you better not have a life outside of work."

We don't need you dragging yourself in to work after caring for your cancer patient family member or newborn.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#230

Post by antonvs »

flappyeagle wrote: post #133
ethanbond wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lived it. It sucked. Only the dumb ones got cancelled. The smart ones kept their heads down or got new jobs. The team was defined by mediocrity. Mediocrity in hiring, in execution, in quality. But oh were they ever so woke.

What kind of company was this? I do contracting and have worked a lot of places, big and small, but have never seen anything remotely like this.

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?

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