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

aadrianmsmith about 3 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on twitter.com

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

conception•about 3 hours ago

Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.

itg•about 3 hours ago

That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.

coldpie•about 3 hours ago

Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.

b00mer•about 3 hours ago

There's a law for that. If Coinbase did not require an external bank account to create the coinbase account, by law, they cannot require one to close the account. At least, that is what I have been led to believe. You could sue.

Saline9515•about 3 hours ago

Given how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.

malfist•23 minutes ago

Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!

DaSHacka•about 3 hours ago

Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest

rvz•about 3 hours ago

Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.

It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.

Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.

kypro•about 3 hours ago

Depends on what they're shipping. We're doing this with UI work, as long as your backend is secure I don't see what the issue is personally.

Generally engineers are not well placed to be building UIs.

andy_ppp•about 3 hours ago

Frontend has plenty of security considerations.

Saline9515•about 3 hours ago

You are a npm import away from having big problems.

kypro•about 3 hours ago

You're definitely doing something wrong if that's the case at your company.

saos•about 3 hours ago

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T

Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?

I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder

mamonster•about 3 hours ago

This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.

They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.

andy_ppp•about 3 hours ago

"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.

ravenstine•about 3 hours ago

> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?

We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.

brk•about 2 hours ago

Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.

wiseowise•about 3 hours ago

Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?

philipallstar•about 3 hours ago

Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.

mhitza•about 3 hours ago

At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off.

What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.

Markoff•about 3 hours ago

"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA."

4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years

let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law

mhitza•about 1 hour ago

I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.

philipallstar•about 3 hours ago

As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.

broof•about 3 hours ago

When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous

wiseowise•about 3 hours ago

But hey! Guns and bigger salary, or something. And less socialism.

baal80spam•about 2 hours ago

> as European I would say this is fairly standard

I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.

infecto•about 3 hours ago

As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.

That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.

jqpabc123•about 3 hours ago

AI and crypto --- what could go wrong?

harisec•about 3 hours ago

This: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code

https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...

dgellow•about 3 hours ago

Fun read. Why would grok have access to a wallet? That sounds so absurd

bitfilped•about 3 hours ago

People still unironically use Web3 as a term, that's hilarious.

close04•about 3 hours ago

> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption

Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code

What could go wrong?

gustavus•about 3 hours ago

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.

As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.

sergiotapia•about 3 hours ago

Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!

jqpabc123•about 3 hours ago

Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.

And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.

spprashant•about 3 hours ago

I d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.

ablation•about 3 hours ago

"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"

fxtentacle•about 3 hours ago

This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.

ozgrakkurt•about 3 hours ago

It is weird to read this considering they should have enough money to employ enough software engineers.

Why would non-programmers need to ship production code in a financial context?

kaiwn•about 3 hours ago

Because it’s faster and cheaper, which are two very important metrics?