31 ms·

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and pur

• deeptote 4y ago
  • sillysaurusx 4y ago
    I do tiktok dances mostly, but weddings are fun too. The point is, I'm not sure there are any issues. People don't like change and uncertainty. But uncertainty is a fact of life. It's so much nicer just to accept it and move on. It helps you in the long run too.
    • john_yaya 4y ago
      My severance don’t jiggle-jiggle, it folds. Converted it to fiat, you really oughtta see it.
  • 5d8767c68926 4y ago
    What exactly is the issue? Company predicts that the market is not going their way, and they are tightening their belt. Sucks to be on the receiving end, but are they supposed to keep all employees forever, business conditions be damned?
    • deeptote 4y ago
      The issue is the complete lack of integrity. Crypto is a fucking scam in the first place, so obviously I don't expect the CEO to have any sort of integrity at all, but deliberately overhiring people when they KNEW what their burn rate was... it's a whole new level of scum. Armstrong went from just another crypto dipshit to actively ruining people's livelihoods while taking a massive golden parachute. Non of this is okay, it's not acceptable, and Coinbase (and the crypto industry as a whole) should be ashamed.
• tuckerpo 4y ago
  Anecdote: I had an old co-worker who was given 6 month's notice that he'd be let go from a previous job, and his manager at the time helped him look for a new gig + gave him shining reviews and references. After the 6 month period was up, they still gave him several months of severance, even after he had found a new gig. Some companies/managers actually do care about you, and it seems like Coinbase is roughly in that court. Getting laid off with zero warning and no severance can be a life-ruining event if it's at a bad time logistically in someone's life. It could be way worse. Always have your resume updated, and take interviews every now and again just in case.
  • hardtke 4y ago
    I've been chatting with some friends whose company shut down recently, basically with no warning. They are getting recruited like crazy. In my opinion that's much preferable than to being left go as part of the 20% lowest performing employees. This reads like a "culling of the herd because we can use the alleged upcoming recession as an excuse" event. I'm not sure the generous severance makes up for the "you are not in the top 80%" label.
    • higeorge13 4y ago
      Layoffs is never about underperforming employees. Whole teams or departments are usually laid off, including top talent.
      • aq9 4y ago
        Not always, and not if they are competently planned and executed. I will grant you that, in the current climate, that they are probably not competently planned nor executed.
    • rapjr9 4y ago
      It has the appearance of companies trying to cause a recession instead of waiting for one to occur. Coinbase admits it can't predict the future but are being precautionary in case there is a recession? If their plan is to take a worst case view then why not just cash out the whole company and shut it down on the precautionary principle? If this is an attempt to put a scare into workers to keep wages low it may backfire since worker shortages seem to be large and other companies may easily absorb a lot of workers, making it hard to get workers back later (and it takes time to train new ones). It could encourage people to leave on their own if they start hearing of the better jobs others are getting after being forced to leave, and it shows zero commitment to workers (so workers should reciprocate). It might be necessary to actually destroy many companies before this fear tactic can have some generic effect. People who died in the pandemic, got long covid, retired, or felt abused are probably not coming back (though hopefully long covid proves not to be forever.) Lay off workers during a worker shortage and you had better count on not being able to get them back easily.
• repomies69 4y ago
  In the end I care about the stock going up, and now it finally seems to be doing that. The point of a company is to generate wealth for the owners and nothing else. Employees need to negotiate with the contracts according to that.
  • SantalBlush 4y ago
    No, the point of a company is to provide a net value to society. This often (but not always) correlates with generating profits.
    • x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
      This comes up as excessively naive/idealistic and doesn't match up with the realities of the world.
      • SantalBlush 4y ago
        The comment I replied to was making a normative statement, not a descriptive one. If we were talking about the realities of the world (which we weren't), then I would have agreed with you.
• Johnny555 4y ago
  People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in?
  • dcow 4y ago
    If it's hard then it's still possible and where do you think the extra resources will have to come from to realize the new generation of billionaires?
  • oh_sigh 4y ago
    I'm just a run of the mill average joe, who has a rock that has been in my family for generations. Turns out some weird little cult likes my rock and wants to buy it for $1B. Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?
    • thefaux 4y ago
      Why is the rock yours? How did your family attain ownership of it? If the rock means little to you, why should you have it rather than the cult that actually values it? What if the cult wants to preserve the rock but you want to destroy it even though that will cause great pain to those who care about it? Why should you have permanent ownership of a rock just because your parents had it?
      • elefanten 4y ago
        You set the table to abolish the notion of property. It's hard to extrapolate what effects that would have on modern societies... it hasn't really been tried. I'm not saying it's an inherently bad idea, but the proponents of that kind of idea always seem to paint rosy visions based on extrapolations from inappropriate samples. Maybe you can say you don't have to fully abolish property. But it remains especially hard to predict what second order behaviors any particular implementation would bring about, and what steady state would result from them. Per your example, if the expected ruling of society would be that gp doesn't get to keep the rock because they don't "care" about it... well, maybe people in their position would suddenly find themselves caring about the rock very greatly. Not even cynically -- if the choice presented to you is "value or no value", the limbic system suddenly becomes very persuasive.
• subsubzero 4y ago
  Wow that severance is incredible! They reached out to me awhile ago but thought their whole platform being tied to crypto was extremely risky. Engineers need to save for bad times and have months and months of cash for downtimes as in 3-4 months there will be alot of people looking for jobs. Fun fact in 2009 I interviewed at google and the HM said that 500 people applied to the job I was interviewed at(onsite) and there were 3 others that were also brought onto the onsite, so 4 out of 500 getting a chance to interview, with only one making it. Lets hope it doesn't get that bad again.
  • pram 4y ago
    I mean, that was Google. In 2010 I got a Linux admin job from a 30 minute call so it's not like employment was an impossibility.
    • myth_drannon 4y ago
      Right, I got an incredible remote startup job in 2009 after two 30 minutes general phone interviews. It was my longest unemployment period ever of about 4 months. This time can't be as bad as 2008.
  • Shindi 4y ago
    > the HM said that 500 people applied to the job I was interviewed at As someone who interviewed candidates in big tech, this sounds like a lot but you have to understand most people who apply are truly not qualified in any way. About a third of people who get to the onsite fail really hard (I get people have off days). Especially when you have a brand like Google, people apply just to apply all the time w/o considering if the big G is a good fit at all.
• izzydata 4y ago
  I don't think billionaires should exist, but I also don't think these employees have been wronged. That is a pretty generous severance package.
  • tomcam 4y ago
    How much money should people be allowed to have?
    • djbusby 4y ago
      100x of the average net-worth in the 50km radius of their primary residence.
      • kube-system 4y ago
        You have invented maybe the best way to concentrate wealth even further than it already is.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • izzydata 4y ago
      There is obviously no exact dollar amount. I don't believe everyone should have the same amount, but there should probably be some lower and upper limit. Maybe it is possible to calculate the difference between the two. Perhaps the upper limit would be 10000x that of the lower limit. Just as an example. There being a lower limit also implies some kind of universal basic income. Theoretically partially supplied by the upper limits excess.
      • shrimpx 4y ago
        What happens to the excess is what’s interesting. And if it’s in volatile assets, how do you shave off the top? E.g. your stocks go way above the limit in a bubble but then crash by 50% right after you got taxed.
• ralston3 4y ago
  True. But I don't think it's so much the firing, as it is the Coinbase telling new hires "Offers won't be revoked". But then, not only revoking said offers, but then additionally firing 1,000+ people. They're experiencing a bit of a PR relations nightmare ATM. Curious to see if this might hurt them with hiring going forward.
• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  I think workers should organize and bargain collectively with their employer on their working conditions and policies for layoffs.
• at-fates-hands 4y ago
  > The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. Probably the best advice you can give someone in the tech industry. Even when I'm happy and content in a position, I'm still constantly looking and interviewing. I got burned pretty bad at two startups in a row where the founders were pitching rainbows and unicorns and one company just went bust and I showed up one day and they sent everybody home - no severance, no reference, nothing. The other scenario, one of the founders fled the country with the money and left everybody high and dry. Both were eye opening enough where now I have multiple backup plans, I network like crazy, I listen to what people are saying, I watch and see who's leaving the company. If you see higher executives leaving en masse, its a lot different then a few low level sales people. In both of the above situations, I missed a lot of red flags I would've caught today.
  • moneywoes 4y ago
    I’ll shoot my shot here, know of mid level remote backend opportunities?
• hiq 4y ago
  > I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. You could reasonably ask whether that should be legal at all.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  > The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. I find this a bit too cynical.., that said, it's also a good mental spot to not let your job define you define your job as much as possible. You try to make everything that you enjoy on a daily basis(hopefully you still have that possibility). Tasks that grow your skillset, new things, any reason.. so that if you're let go.. there's very few days you didn't profit.
• Apocryphon 4y ago
  Whether billionaires should exist or should be able to buy hundred million dollar homes aside, the timing just plain looks bad. As mentioned in the other discussion thread, the price of his home is "enough to give everyone who was laid off slightly a severance of more than $120,000". Obviously Armstrong was never going to give a dime of his personal net worth to an employee, much less a former one, but there are such a thing as optics and public opinion. The juxtaposition of that purchase with layoffs at his company just doesn't look good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31739997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31739997
• roflyear 4y ago
  For context, that is about $44m of severance that they are paying out as a part of these layoffs, if we assume about $150k average salary.
• nojito 4y ago
  Didn't they pay a CPO $600m+?
• staunch 4y ago
  > Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. Regardless of what one thinks of Coinbase, their decision to offer employees generous severance deserves massive praise. If you were on the fence about working at Coinbase, currently or in the future, it should be a major point in their favor. If nothing else, it shows competence. Too many incompetent CEOs (and their boards) wait too long and then do layoffs with little or no severance. Instead of the responsible thing and laying people off early enough to give them a proper severance.
• objclxt 4y ago
  > Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think [...] Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible. ...literally this is the minimum they can get away with in some jurisdictions. It's illegal in plenty of countries to conduct mass layoffs without either a consultation period or putting people on garden leave (i.e, severance).
  • kamikaz1k 4y ago
    Can you cite a few example jurisdictions? I am just curious because I've seen less before, even for companies with international presence.
    • georgeburdell 4y ago
      The WARN act in California is a good example [1]. They must give 60 days notice, but the way to get around this (it seems) is to lay off without warning and give 60 days pay. [1] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-termination/warn-act/ https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-termination/warn...
    • dabeeeenster 4y ago
      In the UK: https://www.gov.uk/staff-redundant/redundancy-consultations https://www.gov.uk/staff-redundant/redundancy-consultations
• kamikaz1k 4y ago
  Would you happen to know how RSUs are factored into this equation? Or is it just salary?
• ipaddr 4y ago
  If they start hiring around christmas they saved no money and would have been better off keeping the employees. It looks like we are in store for a long down period.
• zjaffee 4y ago
  The state of California requires that Employees are paid for 60 work days (8 weeks) if there is a layoff at this scale. I assume that's where the majority of these employees are located. They're offering an extra month/month and a half likely on the condition they sign some sort of NDA/Right to sue the company for wrongful termination.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
  there is no problem with being a billionare provided you do the near impossible and not hurt anyone to get it. Being rich isn't criminal, being criminal to get rich is.
• lumost 4y ago
  If there is a slight here, I suspect it's the belief that Coinbase was effectively a pump and dump on behalf of the founders and some investors - for which the employees were along for the ride. That Armstrong liquidated a large position and moved it into real estate, plus the lackluster stock performance compared to what coinbase was likely promising employees leads to this feeling. For a while, coinbase was competing with the top firms in the world on Compensation - the employees probably missed out by joining. But that's the breaks, I doubt many employees would have been happier if the founders and core investors in coinbase were taking a bath to.
• ausbah 4y ago
  >I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. sorry but this reads like you drank the whole bowl of US corporate kool-aid. the insecurity and stress the comes from not knowing if you'll have a job tomorrow in literal insanity. 14 weeks severance shouldn't be seen an some benevolent gift from a god-brain billionaire, it should be the bare minimum if they still have the right to fire me in a whim
  • babyshake 4y ago
    Even if doing huge amounts of hiring during good times and quickly pivoting to doing large layoffs during bad times is ethical, it sure does seem wasteful and not indicative of great leadership. Although it does seem to be the norm now, if recent years are any indication.
    • thethimble 4y ago
      Well it’s not clear that anyone could have predicted the timing of this downturn. Just a few months ago people were painting a very rosy picture for the future. In that context, metering investment can have a huge opportunity cost as well. I’m not advocating for CB - just suggesting that it’s harder to predict the future than you are implying.
      • TAForObvReasons 4y ago
        That's still a very employer-centric view. If the company reasonably expects a downturn at some point, it should be preparing with right-sized sustainable hiring. It's not "metering investment" but rather "building a sustainable business". Rushing to hire as many people as possible, then firing during a downturn, creates the impression that employees are cannon fodder.
      • synaesthesisx 4y ago
        We knew that rates going up was inevitable, and that crypto is essentially a sponge for excess liquidity. We knew that inflation was inevitable (to an extent) given the Fed's actions over the last two years. Upon observation of the current macroeconomic environment, it appears that either markets did not properly price in rate hikes, or there is something far worse happening that will ultimately trigger a valuations reset.
• kareemsabri 4y ago
  > The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. Best for what?
  • brailsafe 4y ago
    Making sound life decisions that bet on your continued employment at a company. It's rare that people think they'll be let go from a job amd indebt themselves as though it's impossible.
• yellowapple 4y ago
  > If you think billionaires should exist at all That's a big "if". It's pretty dang hard to amass that much wealth without robbing the people around you. That's indeed pretty generous severance-wise, but that $110,000,000 happens to be enough to keep each and every one of those laid-off employees on the payroll for another year (assuming $100k/year salary).
  • aetherson 4y ago
    Well, assuming $100k total cost of employment to the company. My guess is that the per-employee total cost of employment to Coinbase is at least twice that.
• triyambakam 4y ago
  I technically got 3 months of severance when covid started, however after taxes it reduced it to 1 month. That was so depressing.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nickstinemates 4y ago
  > Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible. Completely agree. Layoffs suck and I hope no one reading this ever has to go through them. But, it could have been done a lot worse than this, that is for sure.
• taternuts 4y ago
  I would love to get laid off with 3.5 months salary, what a dream
• brailsafe 4y ago
  Is that the guy who posted a Twitter rant response to some leaked grievance last week? That fucking guy has a $110m house!? Seems like an injustice to me, holy shit
• websap 4y ago
  If I have to be ready for a lay-off tomorrow. I'm basically going to be spending time leetcoding instead of actually working on the hardest problems or thinking about them. Being an engineer doesn't mean you work a 9 - 5 job, your work creeps up on you during off-hours all the time. Also, if I'm leetcoding consistently, I'm going to be switching jobs as soon as I get a large enough bump. This industry doesn't reward loyalty and you're recommending that engineers be ready to leave on any given day.
• elif 4y ago
  >The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. Can't disagree more. At my last job, I was in a senior position for 7 years, one of the earliest engineering hires. I loved my team, my CEO, the direction of our company, and advertised us to friends. Then, one Friday, a close coworker was let go without me having any warning or say over the matter. Not during a layoff, just fired one day. After that week, I was practically paranoid 24/7. My boss loved me and I was getting raises, but the anxiety of whether I'd be let go disabled my work progress. I didn't want to risk "fucking it up" so I became ultra-conservative with my code pushes, review cycles exploded, and I just kept putting off cutting out/replacing features. It was so stressful that I recognized my personal psychology was deteriorating weekly. My anxiety-driven depression further disabled my progress to a practical halt. I quit the job. The best work I did was when I was thinking about the actual work, not survival instincts.
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Well every one of us has earned $68 billion more than Elon this year. "Tesla stock is down roughly 44% year to date, causing Musk's fortune to drop from $270.1 billion in January to just $201 billion as of Friday." [1] [1] https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-mark-zuckerberg-market-crash-net-worth-loss/ https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-mark-zuc...
• fugalfervor 4y ago
  > I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. I'm going to be honest, it's pretty fucked up to tell someone who just got fired that they're fooling themselves if they feel slighted.
• vba616 4y ago
  Places I've worked, I'm not aware they ever had severance, stock options or RSUs, or free snacks. One job had free keurig cups, and one job had free coffee in the form of a couple of pots in the morning that got pretty burnt tasting later in the day. Government and government contractors have had zero free stuff - there's a keurig machine where I work if you want to buy your own k-cups. Then again, I've never been laid off. The most "office space" like jobs that pay the worst sometimes are aware that they can't easily hire people and so shrink by attrition over time. "Good times" mean a non-zero 401k match. Not so good times mean they remove the option of buying company stock in the 401k, because you might sue if it ruins your retirement hopes. I'm not saying this is all that terrible, because I don't think it is. It just puts the tech layoffs that get publicity in perspective. If you get laid off at a normal company, you might - gasp - have to file for unemployment! People who need stability do trade it for salary. The union where I work can't even strike, but our pay is up over 10% from a year ago.
• bmitc 4y ago
  > If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable. I highly disagree. The existence of these billionaires and their untold influence on the U.S. government and policies while being unelected persons is extremely dangerous to what little democracy is left and people at large. I view most billionaires as national security threats, and I think the government should as well.
• lifeplusplus 4y ago
  at a company which provides finance software where you buy/sell securities starts with B, i told manager i had covid and next thing she said, here is liz from HR and i learned i'm fired right then.. i knew i was under review for missing few deadlines, but didn't think i'd be let go right so abruptly and right after i had covid, mind you i used 3 my OWN PTOs, not even sick days.
• Markoff 4y ago
  > Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. 3-3.5 months resignation/notice period is hardly worth mentioning, pretty standard in Europe, 2 or 3 months being the usual minimum. Sure, no need to come to work and still getting salary is nice, but in the end you will get same money by European standards. And for mass layoffs standards are even stricter, so this seems like completely ordinary layoff by European standards. It's like saying 2 years warranty is extremely generous and great, while it's the legal minimum in Europe nobody would bother to talk about, heck even 3 years feels pretty mediocre nowadays. Half of my recently bought things like washing machine, headphones or hair trimmer have 5 years warranty (after registration). > I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. That just means you sign crappy contracts, have very low standards and don't value yourself, if any company does this to you after probation period. And it's possibly illegal even in United Slaveries of America. > Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible. 14 weeks ain't 3.5 months any way you look at it, at best it's a few days over 3 months. Originally mentioned 12 weeks are not even 3 months.