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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%

#751

Post by grayhatter »

shepardrtc wrote: post #734
dahart wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do,…

> uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker. I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock. I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and…

> I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock.

I could be this person that appears not communicate, but the reason is because I've never had a manager that could unblock me faster than if I didn't tell anyone and just did it myself. For the longest time, every manager I've ever had was mostly useless (for unblocking some issue), it took quite a few years before I got an EM that actually makes shit happen. Only then did it become a habit I had to break.

It doesn't make sense to tell someone who can't or won't help you that you're blocked on something. Eventually you just default to never asking.

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

#752

Post by grayhatter »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #374
pron wrote: post #310

> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people…

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.

> 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.

I've been searching for months for evidence of this kinda thing. Do you have receipts you can share? Or is it more of the same "just trust me bro"?

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

#753

Post by TheCapn »

anthonypasq wrote: post #691
keiferski wrote: post #690

It has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason. It almost makes we wish there were legal requirements for giving proof backing up the reason. It doesn’t need to be an actually good or noble one, but just in the sense of actually being accurate information being put into the world. I imagine this could be sold a…

??? the reason for every single layoff in the history of the world is to lower expenses, and that is obvious to everyone. not actually sure what other kind of explanation would satisfy you.

You're discussing layoffs.

OP is discussing firings.

And yeah, there's crossover but they're not 1 to 1. At the same time, if a company is taking two people of equal position and firing one, or keeping the other, the honesty in how they came to that conclusion through transparency has value. Was the decision one of seniority? Performance? Geographical relevance? Was it favoritism masked in another reason? The person receiving the pink slip deserves to know the truth, especially in cases where legal matters could be of question where a company may say one thing, but be acting on another.

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

#754

Post by siren2026 »

dahart wrote: post #672
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…

> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do,…

> But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own.

That's why historically having managers being strong IC contributors remove that need because they already KNOW the progress and issues on the field.

Modern BigTech created that artificial layer of managers that need to know about all the blockers and progress, just to report it to another layer of managers. That layer is so big that they need 8 hours of meetings to sync with each other. This is purely an organizational issue.

I'm saying a lot of the managerial work is busywork that got pushed as a need by BigTech need to empire building.

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

#755

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

kelnos wrote: post #522
ryandrake wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, that's really generous, given the cost of having to pay for COBRA. Either way, I'd still be shitting my pants. 16 weeks is not a lot of time to find another job in today's environment. I know devs who have been out of work for years and had to resort to stocking shelves at Home Depot to tread water.

I would sincerely hope that anyone making tech money has some savings put away and isn't living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Seriously.

Everyone should do their damndest to get 6 months worth of bills into savings. This should be easy for well-paid tech workers.

I've been making tech money ($200-250K) for about 5 years now, and my savings is enough that I could ride out a job loss for at least a full year with no change in lifestyle. With some minor belt tightening (I eat out WAYYYY too much), I could go 2 years before I had to start worrying.

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

#756

Post by siren2026 »

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.

That was true for the old school hard tech companies (Hardware chips, Intel, IBM, etc)

Google and other adtechs are not hard tech, that's why they have so many managers)

An underappreciated reason for this is empire building: Someone needs to be promoted to Senior Director and one way to do this is to add a layer of management: Adding 5 headcounts that essentially do busywork makes it easier to advocate for why your org is very important and why you should be promoted.

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

#757

Post by tomnipotent »

shepardrtc wrote: post #734
dahart wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. As a manager that does weekly 1:1s, I agree with that statement. But I do need 1:1s to check on progress, uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own, make continuous small decisions, offer support, assess performance, collect status information for my manager, and last but not least give employees the opportunity to share feelings frequently. They do,…

> uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker. I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock. I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and…

My personal experience is that programmers confuse what they can do today with what they can learn to do tomorrow.

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

#758

Post by siren2026 »

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…

Nobody is blaming the middle or frontline managers here. Those people are driven and genuinely want to do a good job

But what we are saying here is that they are essentially an artificial layer of busywork that adds very little value. This is what decades of empire building and organizational issues have created.

It's slowly changing and people are realizing a lot of the manager work is self-created and sustained.

My prediction is that most tech companies will go through flattening cycles now that we start realizing that adding managers adds a similar amount of busywork.

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

#759

Post by siren2026 »

dzonga wrote: post #713
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…

I have worked in big tech, venture funded scale up - series D etc and yeah early stage pre-seed. the places - where pure managers just existed i.e manager, senior engineering manager, director, vp etc - just added unnecessary overhead. places that flourished had a manager who was also an IC - who reported directly to the CTO which means I was 1 layer away from the CTO

Exactly my experience as well.

I worked in several BigTech that had managers excellent at talking and posturing in meetings but doing no or negative works.

The issue is that managers are hired and judged by other managers, not IC, not producers. This creates that managerial class that make themselves self-important.

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

#760

Post by siren2026 »

Centigonal wrote: post #739
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…

Crazy jeremiad here. This never existed as a norm across the industry outside pockets like Bell Labs. Office Space was not a film about Google's pioneering new management philosophy.

How old are you and how long have you worked in tech?

I have been employed before the 2000s and that was the norm before AdTech started to empire building around managers.

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