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Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

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Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#61

Post by alar44 »

Qworg wrote: post #29
xiphias2 wrote: post #16

While I'm sure that there's a lot of truth in this (and love the petition, as it focuses on shareholders, not the employees), the margins Coinbase was having for trading cryptocurrencies was unsustainable, and the company was overvalued. Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captur…

Why do you expect this? Bitcoin is supply limited, but you can take trading fees over and over forever.

Correct. If anything, Coinbase's value should be tied to the volatility of the crypto market. Doing a quick search of various crypto volatility indexes, this appears to check out, roughly.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#62

Post by abnercoimbre »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #37
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,…

I also found working in smaller companies more effective (worked in 20 people, 500 people and 30.000 people companies). DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams). This has been to my heart for years https://www.radicalsimpli.city/…

Do you believe we're favorably headed that direction already? Or would it require a lot more conferences highlighting this, getting mindshare buy-in, etc?

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#64

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Levandowski supposedly left Google for Uber because Kalanick promised him more resources to commercialize self-driving vehicles and make them a reality, but that’s probably a “principled villain” depiction of his crimes (as seen in Super Pumped).

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#66

Post by rgoulter »

paganel wrote: post #26
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…

Even on paper sounds dystopian, to be honest.

Bridgewater's approach sounds interesting, albeit not for everyone.

Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.

One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.

AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#67

Post by jpgvm »

highwaylights wrote: post #60
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.

I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date. They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period. There are a lot of really h…

Yeah I completely get why it happened it's just sad that it did.

Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.

TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas". Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#68

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #18
nowherebeen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> include values like positive energy There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.

I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down - unless I misread it - which is a lot less invasive or "ratty" than most employee review systems I know. I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.

> I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down

Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#69

Post by dropnerd »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #25

This is a pretty vague and poorly thought out petition. It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable; and much of the phrasing like "the wisdom of the crypto industry" (lolwu…

coinbase's nft marketplace has <0.01% of the marketshare. they launched without using their key advantage- custodial relationship with the customer. coinbase nft should have been a custodial marketplace. this is definitely on someone in product, though it's unclear whether it's on surojit.

Re: Coinbase employees petition to remove execs

#70

Post by bigpeopleareold »

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,…

I say I will agree with this first.

The worst company-level experience I saw in my career was seeing over-hiring only with a massive downsizing later on. It was during that time, that first employee I was directly involved in hiring was part of the layoff. A company that goes acquisition crazy and trying to boost staff rapidly seemed at first like a good thing. In my case, I saw sales staff grow a lot. However, executive leadership, with whatever responsibilities they have, will always have different agendas. Hiring sprees can probably build credentials for managers, whether or not it is a good investment in the first place.

Hiring sprees and acquisitions towards some business goal that doesn't match the current product goal can also cloud judgement on what can actually be delivered. If your product is optimized for a certain set of things, but it is being sold for other use-cases because "meh, we need to compete", you create a multi-year issue when that business plan fails (in an R&D perspective, since that's only what I am interested in.) I bet this is exactly going to happen to Coinbase. Just jumping on that NFT craze instead of developing out their core business more is probably an example that can be relatable (but I am speculating here.)

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