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Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

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Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#421

Post by blharr »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #329
orochimaaru wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this? I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time. The job of 5 people being done with the…

> health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?

Many major markets outside the US have much stronger work-life balance. Isn't that the takeaway?

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#422

Post by strix_varius »

missedthecue wrote: post #274
chrsw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too. And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-en…

At this point, I truly do not believe there is anything that could happen that would convince HN that LLMs reduce demand for engineering labor hours.

Because the data shows exactly the opposite?

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#423

Post by strix_varius »

illusive4080 wrote: post #393
willio58 wrote: post #210

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke. You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not…

15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.

Span of control is quite different from direct report.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#424

Post by stavros »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #395
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses. We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.

As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences. I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review. AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improve…

Not the OP, but it might be that AI isn't as good at systems programming as it is at other domains, or it might be that you're using it differently than I am. I don't know which one it is (maybe AI just isn't good at writing the language you work with).

For things like web frontents/backends, though, it works beautifully. I ship things in days that would take me weeks to write by hand, and I'm very fast at writing things by hand. The AI also ships many fewer bugs than our average senior programmer, though maybe not fewer bugs than our staff programmers.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#425

Post by Rapzid »

cloche wrote: post #87
wiseowise wrote: post #41

> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their bio…

> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology. Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also…

Yeah. I'd agree with this if it were tech leads that were mostly just IC leaders.

But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:

> Facilitating for ICs.

> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#426

Post by jrumbut »

andriy_koval wrote: post #409
ghaff wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well. With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches. I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.

> With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches. not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.

To part of it, but chess is generally played one against one, there are well understood rules and a clearly defined goal, and every win is someone else's loss.

When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#427

Post by triceratops »

moomoo11 wrote: post #119
wiseowise wrote: post #41

> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their bio…

what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though? sounds stupid to me

No problem if you split the gains 50-50. 2.5x raise for the one person.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#428

Post by regexorcist »

fourseventy wrote: post #135
saos wrote: post #15

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code? I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder

My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.

I'm very much pro-AI but I'd quit your tech team on the spot if I were asked to review those.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#429

Post by randallsquared »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #389
randallsquared wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a year or so Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.

> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter. I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://…

If you'd told me 20-30 years ago we'd actually get the Star Trek computer in the mid-2020s and it still wouldn't be actually AGI, I would have thought that very strange and unlikely, so who knows?

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#430

Post by triceratops »

lkbm wrote: post #150
turtlebits wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package. Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.

> If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package. I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser." Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.

But what if was "Thanks for the hard work, here's your legal minimum severance" vs "You suck, here's a lavish severance so you don't ever come back"?
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