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

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

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Post by BoxFour » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #623

cloche wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not true. You often see it semi-pro soccer. Previously, you could see player coaches even in top-flight elite soccer. There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dol…

Specialization is very much a thing in US sports as well, even without relegation and even with profit sharing/etc.

The payoff to being elite at a valuable skill is enormous. Teams generally benefit more from combining players with distinct, elite strengths than from relying on broad generalists who are not truly elite at anything.

This isn’t always possible if you can’t afford to build a team of specialists, or those specialists don't exist at your level of competition. But if you have the resources and coordination (and in sports, the roster depth and cap space) to cover each specialist’s weaknesses, specialization is pretty much always the stronger composition.

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

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Post by triceratops » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #496

triceratops wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why though? That’s wasteful. If I could run my business more efficiently for the same spend that’s great.

Then you're going to get called a greedy bastard.

Not by me. I know you'll go out of business if you pay employees 2.5x your competition.

It will even turn out ok if the other 4 people find new work that pays the same. But if everyone fires 4 out of 5 employees because they're focused on "run my business more efficiently" to the exclusion of everything else...it's not going to end well for any society.

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

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Post by kakacik » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

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…

Anytime you hear such wild claims, imagine a typical code sweat shop (not just crud apps but templated eshops/business pages etc), not a system that will evolve for another 10-20 years beyond initial implementation and is backend cornerstone of some part of some corporation. That is in the case its actually true, there is tons of PR happening here, plus another gigaton of uncritical fanboyism like with any strong topic.

Now there may be an additional corner case or 20 where its still valid but they are not your typical software engineering work.

I also have your experience, even 100x code delivery improvement would barely move the needle of project delivery in our place. Better, more automated integration and end-to-end functional tests which reflect real world usage/data flows would actually make much bigger difference, no reason to think llms couldn't deliver this in near future.

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

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Post by pron » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #562

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.

Give an example. I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know…

If you carefully review the code then you're not doing what Armstrong was talking about. If you're not reviewing the code, then you don't really know what it is that the AI built. Of course it passes tests; that's not the problem. The problem is that the code is complicated and obtuse, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface, and after some rounds of evolution, the agents are no longer able to evolve or maintain the code.

The difference between it's working now and it will continue working in two years is exactly the problem with AI-generated code because the tests can't tell you that, and you don't know which one you have if you don't look really carefully.

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

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Post by pron » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #592

pron wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If…

We’re not managing fleets of agents. They’re not productive for our workflows yet. It’s usually a couple of CC CLIs running and going back and forth on specific tasks we closely control.

They're not productive for any workflow is my point because they don't produce sustainable software, yet that's exactly what Armstrong is calling for. They don't work, and people experienced with AI workflows already know that.

If you review the code and tell the agent to revert when it gets things wrong (not functionally but architecturally) you're fine. That's not what I was responding to.

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

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Post by malfist » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

broken-kebab wrote: post #607

siren2026 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically. Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important. Before that the manager was essentially the be…

The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.

They're not completely different fields. Staff engineer and above is unobtainable without some of the leadership skills a manager needs. There's a lot of soft skill overlap between high impact ICs and management.

I like to think of it as a manager isn't required to have technical expertise, it can help, I can hurt, but they have to be a leader. Junior and mid career are required to have technical expertise, but not required to have leadership, though it would certainly help them be high impact and thought leaders in their space.

The more senior I get, the more like a manager I am. Less hands on, more coaching, guiding, teaching and setting direction. Meetings and docs become my tools less than code. When I'm writing code I'm only increasing the output of one person, me. Everything else is force multiplication. I just don't have to do the bullshit performance management.

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

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Post by strix_varius » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #455

strix_varius wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the data shows exactly the opposite? https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...

If it were 2018 I would personally have hired at least 3 devs at my company in the last 18 months. The only reason I haven't is due to the existence of LLMs. Not budget, not covid overhiring. Not soft demand. I literally do not need more engineer butts in seats. It is not longer a bottleneck. The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and…

> The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and not the buyer side of engineering labor. This means they have blind sides to the buyers view of the market (some sort of information asymmetry), and secondly they exhibit cognitive dissonance to protect their self-esteem as a seller.

This is an interesting response when faced with concrete data that the buy-side of engineering is actively heating up in direct correlation with LLM adoption.

An alternative interpretation of your observation is that perhaps your company has particular traits that are helped more by LLMs than the average eng org. There's a growing SWE consensus that LLMs boost productivity by 10-20%. However, there are contributing factors that can make LLMs much more of a human replacement:

* Selling labour & services, rather than engineered software. ie an agency that builds customized versions of well-understood software, rather than net new capabilities.

* Selling software that has a low ceiling of complexity and a short half-life, such that LLMs can realistically architect & maintain it over its useful lifetime.

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

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Post by cmckn » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

Cyclone_ wrote: post #316

londons_explore wrote: post #219

AI is the next big hype. Crypto was a big hype of last decade. Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase. Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.

I would have to agree. It seems like most of the new funding is going to AI at the expense of crypto.

Yeah, look on the bright side.

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

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Post by elros » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

bluerooibos wrote: post #644

muzani wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This jumped out at me right away too. What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? What now? AI is going to double the communication bandwidth with these reports and further double the free time they have? I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.

Just curious if there's a reason you mentioned 8 or if that's an arbitrary number? Was 8 an industry norm/upper limit at one point?

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

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Post by aquariusDue » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

friendzis wrote: post #633

ultratalk wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.

There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "sli…

Totally agree. I don't understand why people are averse to working on their communication "soft" skills compared to other "hard" skills. People who find it hard to express themselves have my sympathy but at the same time I'm flabbergasted how they function in a team or in the workplace. Not to mention people for whom English is not the native language treating LLMs like the Star Trek universal communicator instead of helping with language acquisition.

And yeah, I know my tone is harsh and appears to lack empathy and I have only my writing skills to blame and a lack of time. That said I won't be the one to throw it in a LLM for "refinement" otherwise how would I improve? I'm not sure LLMs are to communication as are forklifts to lifting and moving stuff.

As a side note, the general advice regarding code review in my experience was not to take it personally and it's kinda funny to me for reasons I can't pin point how people (like me) have started giving unsolicited advice or criticism in regard to writing when in actuality both (code and writing) reflect personally on the human on the other side of the screen.

Anyway, I pretty much went off on my own tangent here with an apparent lack of empathy to boot but if we end up disregarding such fundamental human skills then what's to stop us from becoming dunces in a few generations? Sure, I'll add another abstraction layer even if it has a lot in common with reading tea leaves because it's not like I manually flip switches to input a program but I'll try my best to keep my individuality where it matters to me, specifically when it comes to expressing myself.

Thank you for coming to my TED rant.