"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"<p>Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.<p>The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...<p>> 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.
I've strongly disliked every team where this was the case. The people in those positions ended up being neither good managers nor good engineers.<p>YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.
Are they also held accountable for the code they ship? Are they added to the on-call rotation?
Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
My employer does that too and people don’t even read or review code anymore.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.<p>For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
No I'm not joking. That is the bullshit answer they give. But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML, just vague bullshit handwaving and AI customer service agents that lie about them "being on it" or some such and then your money gets returned when they're done squeezing it for interest.<p>Just a vague nonsense about compliance, that magickly aligns with padding their float. In reality they are using compliance and regulatory language as a shield to prop up their numbers. They are using KYC/AML to hold your funds hostage, as it's the most plausible explanation that also allows them to legally seize it under a legal sounding explanation. The fact that they do have to perform KYC/AML and there are penalties for not doing so just happen to make it a valid enough sounding excuse for when it's used overly aggressively because it lines up with other goals.<p>If they move the hair trigger to freeze funds 2x as often as they need to against the innocent false-positives to pass compliance checks, due to a hair trigger, then it falls under plausible deniability and even better when the regulator comes they can say some insane bullshit about how good their KYC/AML is. If they freeze it less often but instead just steal some for a little while and then return it, then it's more obvious a crime has been committed. It's obvious what they're up to.<p>Of course the KYC/AML/ regulatory officers are probably just pawns in this. The executives in the crypto and fintech space tell these people they need to set the sensitivity up to the 9s. They know damn well what that actually does is inflate their float, at the cost of a bunch of false positives. In theory that's satisfying AML because a function of doing so is you trigger more true positives, but in reality it's merely stealing money to increase floats not actually optimizing to meet the cutoffs to keep your license. But no one is actually going to come out and say this.
> - 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.<p>Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.<p>I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.<p>> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.<p>And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?<p>Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.<p>"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to.<p>> <i>Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.</i><p>People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.<p>Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.<p>The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
Haslem played 72 minutes the entire 82 game season. That's like the Engineering manager who ships a PR once a year.
And to continue with the analogy, he neither replaces the coach, nor the actual team players.
He just sits on the bench, paid for his - additional - role. Exactly the contrary of the Coinbase manager-IC, which is supposed to replace 2 jobs in 1.
Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.<p>Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.<p>I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.
I think the CEO was more talking in the line of Bill Russell or Maximus from Gladiator, not final-year Haslem
It happens, but these days is quite rare, and usually something reserved for a player is of Hall of Fame or close caliber, who has been an institution for the franchise, and is generally slated for a full-time coaching role post retirement.
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
In sports like Football where CTE is king, there's just not gonna be enough qualified personnel to coach.
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."<p>I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.<p>This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't.<p>E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.<p>You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.<p>And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.<p>Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.<p>Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.<p>The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
Employees should be cattle not pets.
what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though?<p>sounds stupid to me
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).<p>While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.<p>And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.<p>They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?
Oh yeah, AI is just an excuse to sell it to the public. But it's not about that at all. It's about bad leadership.
Isn't this what he says in the post? The first reason listed is market cycle not ai.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.<p>It would be slop, but the market would love it
Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).<p>They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs.<p>The competition is also stiff with decades of experience and network effects<p>The truth is these crypto shops have a pretty poor reputation in the traditional finance industry. Nobody in trading tech goes to work for them unless they offer insane salaries, because they (we) know it's an unstable place to be.
It's going the opposite direction. Those offering real world and tradfi assets are moving into the crypto space. That is going to eat Coinbase's lunch.<p>The worst part of using something like Coinbase is having to do yet another bank transfer, waiting for it to clear, doing KYC/AML yet again, etc etc for what most people is just to buy one or two single asset (BTC or maybe ETH probably). Instead just click buy in Robinhood or Schwab along with everything else.
The major prop shops and market makers are all over crypto, for sure. But they're only there because these markets are poorly regulated and there's a lot of retail juice to squeeze.<p>A friend of mine works for one of the major crypto firms and they're starting to deploy algorithmic trading bots on their own exchange.<p>The spreads on these markets can be diabolical
> 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<p>As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.<p>* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)<p>* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them<p>* talks to the folks who are staying<p>Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.<p>The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?<p>Time will tell.
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
This is just good writing, not a 100% proof of AI being used.
Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.<p>Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.<p>The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T<p>Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?<p>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
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
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.<p>They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?<p>Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.
How’s this actually going? I’m sure there are issues, but is it actually fruitful?
To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.
I keep seeing $x4% figures for layoffs. Is that right below the legal threshold for layoffs (e.g., 15%), or am I imagining patterns that aren't there?
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.<p>Experimenting or <i>cost-cutting?</i> 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?<p>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.
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.
Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?
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.
Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.<p>If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees.
By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.<p>They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?
"paring back", but I agree. The overextended like a lot of high-growth, volatile businesses do
They already had substantial layoffs in 2023 for that <a href="https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-founder-brian-armstrong-to-coinbase-employees" rel="nofollow">https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-foun...</a><p>It's because crypto goes in a cycle and now it's down. You should expect layoffs from them again in 2029/30.
Share price can and does go up because layoffs usually means opex goes down
That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.<p>I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
when we will see "we do not need CEO anymore. AI can do it better. we are sorry to let go CEO, we do not need him".
> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.<p>Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.<p>> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.<p>> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.<p>So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship<p>Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.<p>They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.<p>More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
Yikes. That's bad leadership at that top all around. But we already knew that when they announced layoffs. No good leader lays people off.
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship<p>Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off.<p>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.
"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."<p>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<p>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
"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.<p>It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"
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.<p>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.
Sure, I agree, not sure why you are downvoted for stating the facts, both have benefits, Europe in general is less flexible but employees are more protected with more benefits.<p>All I wanted to say was I don't find 4 months something particularly "nice" as European, though I am sure there are even some Europeans who would find it nice since they work for crappy companies in countries with less protection, so they are in lose lose situation, no US benefits (salary/taxes), no Europe benefits (severance pay/notice period).
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.
As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.
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
> as European I would say this is fairly standard<p>I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.
When I was laid off, I got only 2 weeks of pay (notice period).
well, everyone has different experiences, but just to make it clear, I was calculating ordinary salary during notice period into severance pay since in many companies it's essentially severance pay:<p>1. you get fired with 2 months notice period and they will tell you, you don't need to bother to come anymore = 2 months of severance, you can sit at home, look for job for 2 months with full salary<p>2. on top of this you will get also extra 2 months severance pay<p>so in total de facto 4 months of severance pay , but I understand shitty companies will expect you to work even during notice period (especially if they are firing you) and somehow expect you will be delivering same results, smarter companies know the reality when they are firing someone and just tell him not bother coming anymore, this was my case in last 1-2 jobs I've had more than 10 years ago when I was still employee (plus they wanted to give me 1 month severance pay, but I argued about years I worked there and certain operation practices which could be published, so got 2 months, unlike my less assertive colleagues), I'm nowadays contractor/freelance for companies outside Europe so no law protection for me<p>my wife is always employed as employee and got fired this winter under conditions I mentioned in point 1&2 and got 2+2 months after 1 year of work, two jobs ago she was fired without severance but didnt need to work during notice period<p>plus I've found funny mention of the 6 months COBRA as some benefit, you are covered by insurance in Europe regardless of your job status whether employed or unemployed you are always covered by universal healthcare
AI and crypto --- what could go wrong?
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code<p>With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Consider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged:<p>If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.<p>Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.<p>If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.<p>If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.<p>If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.<p>It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing.<p>Today, not a single mention in that email.<p>I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).<p>Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
Wait: Isnt NFT the next big thing anymore? :-D
All in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.
> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption<p>Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.<p>However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.<p>Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI <i>can't</i> do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
Apart from "AI" making us productive talk.<p>Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?<p>Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.<p>As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code<p>Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
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.
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.
If you joined when Coinbase was still giving 0.1BTC signup bonuses, it might be worth trying to retrieve the account
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.
Closing mine today
Given how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.
Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!
Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest
Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.<p>It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.<p>Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.
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.<p>Generally engineers are not well placed to be building UIs.
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
<i>Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.</i><p>And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.
> Leaders will own much more<p>Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
ok sure good luck. more like conbase anyway
To me that sounds like financial issues dressed in PR slop.
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.<p>As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
> 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<p>Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't <i>need</i> to do layoffs, they <i>want</i> to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.<p>> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code<p>What could go wrong?
Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
What is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
Coinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
Crypto in bear market, volume is down. Less money to skim. Layoff.<p>The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
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Lots of layoffs this year. The economy is in bad shape.
Everyone I know is barely holding on, markets doing well though but tbh it feels like a mad scramble last resort sort of thing
yeah, check reddit. now even front page is people talking how hard it is. everywhere.
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.<p>I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.<p>Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.<p>Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.<p>Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.<p>The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.<p>If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.<p>No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.<p>I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
I do understand the theory, none of what you mentioned is new to me or contradict my points. I do not believe things will be done right. It’s not only mission critical services that require maintenance and need to handle incidents. Internal services are as important to a company as their public facing ones, and once you get the ball rolling I do not believe we won’t see the same approach used for customer facing services. I also do not expect non technical people to understand differences between MCP servers, rest apis, direct db access, and other resources. If they do they are definitely technical… so it will be up to whatever they let the agent do. Which is the whole problem here, you need to be technical to understand and push back when agents are doing things wrong
> I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.<p>And due to this it deserves even more mockery.
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.