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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?

I think the movie Office Space might offer an example of the type of workplace OP is talking about.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?

It is absurd to reduce "happiness" to a single, one-dimensional value, as the sliders illustrate.

Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> cow-orkers Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.

I always thought cow-orkers was a Dilbert thing but apparently it's older, from Usenet.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#234
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 hell. I can't believe companies use such systems to manage their own employees. It tells a lot how bad managers do their work, which is basically know every employee and care for them.

A lot of what larger companies do is find ways to take mediocre or bad staff and make them more useful by giving them structure and tools that help them do their jobs even if they're bad at them.

This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#235
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…

You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together.

First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.

The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.

But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.

This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.

So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.

I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Almost every public company has a CFO and/or COO that has an MBA. It's not an 'in spite of;' financials get complicated as do business operations and those two things are what an MBA is for, other than networking.

Also, I know a lot of entrepreneurial people that do not do very well when the company gets beyond a certain size. They can't operate within a system of greater restriction and don't want to follow best practices for employees. Managers are often not good builders and builders aren't always good managers.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#237
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I highly doubt that any line employee is going to tell the CEO they did a bad job. These happy clappy "systems" usually fail to take into account (almost biological) realities of how power structures work.

The story I was thinking of was where a director sent him the criticism, and he shared the criticism within the company. From this summary of a TED talk Dalio gave in 2017: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-sent-hedge-fund-gian... I'm not familiar with other companies that have the same reputation of using a system like this the same way Bridgewater does.

That's a cherry-picked example by a person promoting himself and his own system. Not really a useful data point, more an example of an aspirational goal.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?

I think the movie Office Space might offer an example of the type of workplace OP is talking about.

And the Apple TV series Severance.

(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous. So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation. Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this…

> So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation. No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever). If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I…

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you've never worked in a toxic organization (or at least not noticed). My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review. I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager…

And if you manager had been regularly checking in with how you are feeling then this would have been... worse? I suspect that, given a manager with as poor people skills as yours has, your manager initiating the contact and asking you instead of you going to your manager may have instead made all the difference.

It doesn’t really matter. In a toxic work environment - any dissenters are immediately pushed out. This is because toxic work environments have no intention of changing and need everyone to be a yes man. If you are not a yes man - you are managed out or fired.

It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…

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