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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%

#701

Post by keiferski »

abi wrote: post #699
keiferski wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is lowering expenses now necessary? If we believed the press releases, it’s because AI blah blah. I’m suggesting that some legal requirement for being truthful about the reason would be beneficial.

What benefit would it truly provide? Companies would simply say they need to cut costs to maximize shareholder value, which is no different than what happened here.

Well, generally speaking I think it’s a better world if corporations are forced to not lie to people.

Presumably investors and those shorting the company would benefit from more accurate information about a company. So the market as a whole would be healthier and less prone to inflationary claims.

I also don’t think that excuse would really hold up under scrutiny: “we fired 14% of our workforce to maximize shareholder value” isn’t exactly a straightforward answer. Right now the answer seems to be latching onto whatever’s trendy and blaming the layoffs on that.

If there is an expectation that reasons will be investigated, then I think you’d just get more accurate information in the market, tldr.

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

#702

Post by at-fates-hands »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #641
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…

> Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team I'm not sure that's ever been true.

A majority of the big corporations I've worked at this was the typical developer track.

- entry level dev

- senior dev (start being groomed for management)

- senior dev/leader (take on 25% management duties)

- manager - management track.

Once you're on a management track, you essentially are taken off of any dev work and then depending on how well you've networked determines how fast you move up the management chain. Some companies like Target, they groom and move anybody up relatively fast who they see any potential in.

The only exceptions I've seen in my career are either startups or medium sized companies where there is no management track. You're a developer from the day you're hired until you either get fired, laid off or leave the company.

When I was an entry level dev, I left three companies because they wanted to start grooming me to move up into management. I was way more into being a developer and writing code then managing people.

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

#703

Post by harimau777 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #497
harimau777 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.

They can start their own companies though.

Not if they don't have the capital to do so.

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

#704

Post by CoffeeOnWrite »

mancerayder wrote: post #693
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…

You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing…

You're describing frontline management, not middle management. My 2 cents is that frontline management is the worst job in engineering, for the reasons you describe and more.

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

#705

Post by net01 »

danparsonson wrote: post #225
taldo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop

I've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...

Only bought monero for mullvad, it's the only crypto i would ever use.

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

#706

Post by mchusma »

kelnos wrote: post #515

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] 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. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…

I do think that if LLMs are the equivalent of more employees, then you'd expect people to do more managerial work and less individual contribution. Certainly, that's what I see in my day-to-day.

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

#707

Post by b0rtb0rt »

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…

i work on cutting edge c++ system programming and we are using codex for everything now, it’s pretty impressive honestly what it can do

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

#708

Post by t43562 »

mancerayder wrote: post #693
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…

You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing…

I was a technical team lead/line manager and I watched my team casually ask about what I did all day and then 10 minutes later call me up to spend an hour debugging their code for them. And then the next one called me up to work on theirs... :-)

On the other hand I've had managers just the same - cannot understand why anything is difficult and certainly wouldn't waste their time trying to help you.

It's just people, they're sympathetic or not. Determined or not. They care about the outcome for more than themselves or not.

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

#710

Post by panarky »

mchusma wrote: post #706
kelnos wrote: post #515

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] 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. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…

I do think that if LLMs are the equivalent of more employees, then you'd expect people to do more managerial work and less individual contribution. Certainly, that's what I see in my day-to-day.

When your job becomes managing a fleet of agents, with all the design, planning, coordination, supervision and evaluation that requires, is that "individual contribution" or "managerial work"?
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