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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#261

Post by robocat »

noahtf wrote: post #148
nowherebeen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine by me. I have never applied to coinbase nor intend to. I do agree I am a somewhat negative nick as well since I tend to comment on stuff I disagree with on HN. Thanks for the heads up though. I shall see if I can improve upon it.

I think the comment you are responding to was sarcastic and in jest at Coinbase's dystopian system.

Yeah: my idea of funny is often not funny. I would fail the Dunning-Kruger test.

I would like to say I occasionally write low quality comments to empirically test my personal self-judgement about my own metrics of reality.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#262

Post by gradschoolfail »

01acheru wrote: post #135
haihaibye wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exception proves the rule This is also a common English proverb

It comes from Latin: Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis . The last part (in casibus non exceptis) is usually omitted, giving it the meaning we have now. The original meaning was a little different.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exception_that_proves_the_rul...

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#263

Post by DonHopkins »

dimgl wrote: post #197
DonHopkins wrote: post #127

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'd love to read about this. Do you have anything I can read on the history of Solaris and its development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603

Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.

The Day SunOS Died

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee -- 
    Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html

For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695

There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu

Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:

"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...

https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/

I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203

The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186

That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.

Maybe Gumby can provide some more context!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c...

Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992

https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c...

The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2

Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.

Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.

To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#264

Post by koonsolo »

nemothekid wrote: post #209
koonsolo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos was a programmer?

https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/1058012110947373057?lan...

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#265

Post by shanusmagnus »

buttercraft wrote: post #232
shanusmagnus wrote: post #161

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?

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.

The same as with any data you'd collect about anything -- it's part of a larger ecosystem, and no reasonable person expects one number to be the ultimate fount of all wisdom.

I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.

Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#266

Post by xtracto »

peyton wrote: post #170
xtracto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that... there's the issue with stock options already bought: once the employee bought the stock then it wouldnt be possible to take them from her. And when do you "freeze" the stock amount of an employee? When they leave? There are lots of details that I thought about, and surely many others I didn't. That's why I'm still ruminating the idea in my head, until I feel it is complete enough to apply it.

What you’re describing is already standard practice. You have to shuffle option pools as you hire more people and raise more money.

No, when I was hired as a 1st engineer at a startup, I was given 2.5% of the shares.

When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected. So, I in a way I, as an IC with 2.5% of shares could push to hire more people to do more of the work I did without any negative direct impact to me (I know the impact comes as the company spends more money, has to raise more and then dilute the value of the stocks in theory, but that's something employees rarely see).

What I want is being able to sit down with say, the team of 10 people in the startup and ask them: Hey, do we REALLY need to hire this 11th person? we all are going to have to give X% of our share of the pie to him. And particularly, when starting the project, the first 5 or 6 should have a sizeable chunk of the pie, and not 2.5% ... ideally, a 1st employee would get to 2.5% once there are about a 100 people in the company (i.e. after hiring the other 97 people)

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#267

Post by pg_1234 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #244
Thr0wawayDocs wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

Isn't Bridgewater a very high performing organization? How has the company not completely collapsed at this point? Or is there a ticking time bomb coming that will end up destroying Dalio's supposed "reputation for excellence"?

Maybe it's only "high performing" according to it's own internal rating system.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#268

Post by junon »

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…

This sounds like you've never had to go through performance reviews.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#269

Post by pg_1234 »

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.

Even if you plan to leave, on the way out do what you can to take down toxic management to protect the colleagues you leave behind.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#270

Post by crypto420_69 »

vecter wrote: post #206
thinkharderdev wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Bezos an engineer? I thought he was a hedge fund guy before founding Amazon.

He studied Physics at Princeton and had a technical background from what I understand.

In a talk at Stanford he said that he coded up Amazon's original HTML website.
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