Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 842 posts

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

#771

Post by TitaRusell »

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.

Yeah but in American corporate culture workers are entirely disposable.

Which ofcourse leads workers to treat their employers as disposable.

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

#772

Post by butterlesstoast »

just_once wrote: post #229
butterlesstoast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org. The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary... > 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.

Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?

Lol love all the responses

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

#773

Post by aboodman »

cjrp wrote: post #615
aboodman wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had. Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious. Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is: * Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement * Having the respect of the tea…

Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.

The most common split I'm aware of is tech lead / eng mgr. The eng mgr does "people stuff" like hiring/firing and cross-org negotiation, and tech lead does "technical stuff".

But the thing is this makes no sense. Tech issues always turn into people issues - when there is a disagreement, who adjudicates? How can a manager adjudicate something they don't understand. And how will engineers respect / follow the decision?

And people issues invariably become tech issues. How can you hire the right people if you don't understand the tech? How will you know when to fire?

This setup makes no sense to me and i have very rarely seen it work. It seems like it was a product of an earlier time when there was a lot of money floating around and provided a way to (a) shield senior eng from dealing with people problem they just didn't want to, and (b) provide cushy jobs to professional managers that didn't know much about the tech.

But it doesn't work. There's no way to do the shielding well and a person with hiring/firing power needs to know what the fuck is going on.

Really good eng leaders must be both good at tech and good at people. That's the job.

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

#774

Post by aboodman »

jychang wrote: post #606
aboodman wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had. Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious. Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is: * Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement * Having the respect of the tea…

This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards. It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.

I mean a branching factor of 50 vs a branching factor of 7 is a massive difference. A team of 50 can either be run by one manager and a two-level tree or like 8 managers (!!) and a three-level tree. Think about the difference in execution (and expense) in these two companies.

If you can do it w/ the first model why on earth would you not?

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

#775

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

mdavid626 wrote: post #555
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.

Shipping garbage.

We have zero Honeybadger errors, performance is acceptable for all our routes in the application, and all of our key stakeholders are ecstatic about what we've built.

Is there some other metric I should be measuring our code by?

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

#776

Post by scottlamb »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #535
scottlamb wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI. Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI. > I see AI-native as those who have embraced it That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent . If you learned to code…

I think this is just semantic drift (though I am broadly sympathetic to “boo semantic drift”). I see this business use of the term as treating the “mind attuned to being immersed in” and “habitually, automatically reaches for” sub-meanings as the relevant ones, which is (almost as you say, but skew) not quite the same thing as “proficient when the ability is actively engaged”. The more you're trying to navigate a dyn…

That's the most reasonable interpretation I've heard. I'm not assuming they're being reasonable, though. I have a deeply negative view of the crytocurrency industry including Coinbase, and they just wrote "non-technical teams are now shipping production code", so I'm more primed to assume they mean something unethical, short-sighted, unrealistic, and negligent.

Another somewhat reasonable interpretation occurred to me later: that they're using "AI-native" as a shorthand for "AI-native systems" aka systems designed with AI / to take advantage of AI from the start, and thus "AI-native talent" as a shorthand for "people talented in creating those systems", rather than the people themselves being AI-native. But again, given who said it, I'm not going to assume that's what they meant.

scoot's comment [1]: "I'm not sure exactly which children they're planning to replace all their staff with, nor how they plan to get around the child labour laws" sounds exactly right to me.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030120

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

#777

Post by storgendibal »

pm90 wrote: post #643
storgendibal wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "as do the founders of AirBnB." This resonates but I can't put my finger on why for the founders of AirBnB. Do you have examples? Obviously true for Elon. It seems like the previous generation of founders were always paranoid that their companies could/would fail in an instant, which led to the management styles of Andy Grove, Gates, Jobs etc (and I'd argue Larry and Sergey as well). That mindset meant they knew th…

Ah do you remember the whole Founder Mode trend? It faded just as fast as it started because it was meaningless. And it has had doubtful impact on the product itself.

Makes sense. Also remember him saying something like, the founder is always right, even when everyone else thinks you're crazy. Couldn't find the clip of him saying this, so hopefully not hallucinating it.

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

#778

Post by jychang »

aboodman wrote: post #774
jychang wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards. It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.

I mean a branching factor of 50 vs a branching factor of 7 is a massive difference. A team of 50 can either be run by one manager and a two-level tree or like 8 managers (!!) and a three-level tree. Think about the difference in execution (and expense) in these two companies. If you can do it w/ the first model why on earth would you not?

This is "Steve Jobs looking at someone on a fruit diet" and thinking "I can do it too" levels of reckless.

Hell, Dunbar's Number is 150 people, and you expect to have 50 directs? That's literally 1/3 of your 150 being occupied by directs. It seems clearly infeasible the more you think about it.

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

#779

Post by strken »

kuboble wrote: post #525
glaslong wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it isn't disrespectful, and neither is it respectful. A perfect nothing, not a thought or care involved. Like a 1-click eCard mailer.

Genuine question. Let's say you are bad with words. If you ask AI to generate hundred different paragraphs and choose the one which best conveys what you actually feel and want to communicate. Is it is still a perfect nothing?

The problem with AI is that it tells you to say things you don't think, and can't tell you to say things which are original to you. Some things you will only say because they were presented to you by the bot. Others you won't say because they only exist in your head.

If you are bad enough with words that you can't write an authentic message, you are also bad enough with words that you won't understand the options with enough nuance to know what you are saying. The bot will put words in your mouth that aren't true.

It is generally better to write poorly and from the heart than to outsource your heart to a really big algorithm. What you accidentally say from the heart will still echo your thoughts, while the AI will not. ChatGPT can't suddenly remember the time when you and your wife went to the beach together and saw a penguin, and she was worried it wouldn't be able to reach the ocean, and then it was totally fine and she got embarrassed, but you felt really in love with her because she cared so much.

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

#780

Post by strken »

friendzis wrote: post #538
strken wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful. I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.

> At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful There is ZERO CHANCE they have used ai unintentionally > also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you. By actively using ai they are stating that you are so much beyond them that even a personal "eff you" is not worth the time. One would have to actively try and poke some personally hurtful areas to come off more insulting than use of ai.

"Unintentional" was perhaps the wrong word.

There's a difference between your boss not caring about you (does any boss really care?) and your boss actively disliking you enough to call you a loser when they expect to gain nothing from it.

In the former case, disrespect is a side effect of laziness, while in the latter it is the whole point.

Post reply on HN