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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%

#811

Post by dahart »

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…

Yes exactly! Devs resist asking for help when they need it, and this is why as a manager I have to insist on asking questions to discover blockers.

I can see why this happens, and I was (and still sometimes I am) guilty of thinking as long as I have a little more time, I can solve the problem myself. We are all capable of figuring out how things work, we all want to learn, and we all have fears that admitting spending time spinning our wheels might reflect poorly or reveal weaknesses, and/or might be used against us in reviews.

Part of making people feel comfortable surfacing blockers is making sure the environment is supporting that behavior. Devs need to be rewarded for working together, and rewarded for being proactive about telling their manager or the team they need help on something. If these highly paid engineers have had negative experiences in the past, they might have learned not to bring otherwise important issues to light. Occasionally there are also people who learn what they can get away with and will optimize for the minimum.

IMO, the environment also needs to allow devs some space to go slow for a while, solve unfamiliar problems, and learn new things - so for me there’s a certain amount of being okay with blockers, when people are still being proactive. I’d rather talk about them than not and make a conscious decision, but I do try to be sensitive to what I label as blocker.

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

#813

Post by snapcaster »

illusive4080 wrote: post #393
willio58 wrote: post #210

> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke. You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not…

15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.

The span of control for the CEO of my company is more or less 1000 people. His number of direct reports is 5

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

#814

Post by aboodman »

cjrp wrote: post #799
seattle_spring wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think hiring, prioritizing, planning, and cross-team negotiation are all tasks of a tech lead and not a manager, then what is the job of an engineering manager in your opinion?

IMO purely people management (1:1s, promotions, goal-setting, staffing/resourcing, involvement in hiring).

But how can you know who to promote, how to balance resources, or who to hire if you're not leading the project?

People management is about managing the company's resources to achieve goals. If you are not the one leading the implementation of those goals, you are not going to be able to:

  * reason about what the right about of resources should be
  * see opportunities for optimization
  * forecast future need
You will be completely dependent on a technical lead who does have that information. So then what is your independent role? Just to shuttle information between the technical lead and others?

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

#815

Post by paulhebert »

reillyse wrote: post #788
paulhebert wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often

I can't reply to the other comment because it's been flagged, but I just wanted to point out that I do not think employees should be treated like cattle. I was being sarcastic. I was using the language of tech bros to satirize the situation. I'm actually shocked that people could take my comment at face value and not realize it was obviously sarcastic. That is eye opening.

Yeah that’s fair.

I can see how it was sarcastic on re-reading. It can be hard to tell online!

Sorry for the misunderstanding

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

#816

Post by siren2026 »

dahart wrote: post #808
siren2026 wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

I’m not sure this framing is accurate. Companies have always had management. All large organizations have layered management; the Catholic Church has had layered management for two thousand years; your government has layered management; all militaries have layered management; Bell Telephone and Standard Oil had layered management for a hundred years before computers in business were a thing. This is purely a function…

I think what we are arguing is that yes management layers always existed.

But the state right now is that:

- those management layers are now more disconnected than ever from the actual work. Most managers are career managers that have given up on any actual technical work. Even if they used to be technical ICs, most bigtech actively discourage managers to do anything remotely technical. I still cannot understand this.

- There are way more managers per IC than there ever was (Last big tech I was in, my org had ~5 ICs per manager. I couldn't believe it and have no idea what those people actually did the whole day besides meeting each other!). This is directly because Directors decide to hire Managers and have a direct incentive to grow the amount of layers and amount of people in their pyramid. Even if they don't mean to, directors and VPs are managers as well and as such they have a direct belief and incentive that more management is better.

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

#817

Post by satvikpendem »

oytis wrote: post #628
satvikpendem wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do systems programming. I'll stop you right there. AI is not good at systems programming, it's good at CRUD web development, which is where most people are seeing the gains.

I think antirez mentioned somewhere he considered it particularly good at systems programming.

Depends what it's used for, generally I've seen that due to the paucity of C or Rust etc training data vs Javascript and TypeScript, LLMs aren't as good at the former vs the latter.

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

#818

Post by siren2026 »

dahart wrote: post #800
pbgcp2026 wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all your "progress updates" are in Jira and Git. Go and check. Ask questions if needed.

I do check, of course. As you can see from the comment you replied to, progress updates aren’t the only reason for 1:1s. But as far as updates go, questions are almost always needed, and face-to-face conversations are faster & easier for both parties, which is why we do a little bit of it each week. We cancel 1:1s when they’re not needed, and cut them short when we’re out of topics. Why do you assume not talking by d…

what you are describing is a team meeting.

Yes, have them. Once a week.

I will again say that most 1:1s are BigTech cargocult rituals where you talk about your path to the "next level" or "how are you feeling this week" but it's also a lot of project management and busywork that mainly exists because the manager is in the picture. Without so many managers most of those self-sustained meetings would go away.

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

#820

Post by FizzleOr5d20 »

siren2026 wrote: post #561
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…

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…

hmm, maybe, All Managers Are Bastards
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