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Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
- dbuser99 5mo agoNot sure i would trust coinbase with any cyrpto from now on.
- mhitza 5mo agoAt 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.
- jqpabc123 5mo agoAI and crypto --- what could go wrong?
- harisec 5mo agoThis: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-send-tokens/?__cf_chl_tk=Jl0otgdxRN_3thFmxROZXo4djaYGicxK3gMkhiqyMcY-1777905986-1.0.1.1-5s5kOEm04wtiPFmv.5F4W3dY0TGDTqg_P06KepaCl_g https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...
- Markoff 5mo 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
- philipallstar 5mo agoAs a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.
- infecto 5mo agoAs 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.
- Markoff 5mo agoSure, 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. 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).
- jbxntuehineoh 5mo agoofc a lot of the "innovation" in our tech industry is pointless at best and actively harmful at worst (adtech surveillance, crypto bullshit, prediction markets, outright gambling, etc. etc. etc.), so maybe the euros have the right idea? then again, their model doesn't make the Line go Up as much
- ablation 5mo ago"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
- fxtentacle 5mo agoThis 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 5mo agoIt 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 5mo agoBecause it’s faster and cheaper, which are two very important metrics?
- Yossarrian22 5mo agoI’ve never wondered if BoA is moving fast
- jqpabc123 5mo agoOver 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 5mo agoI d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dd8601fn 5mo agoThis goes for everyone. Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them. More reports for accounting? What?
- gustavus 5mo 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.
- conception 5mo agoLol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
- Saline9515 5mo agoGiven how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.
- itg 5mo agoThat 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 5mo agoVery 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.
- ravenstine 5mo 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.
- philipallstar 5mo agoWell, 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.
- wiseowise 5mo agoSeriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?
- orangecoffee 5mo agoWhat is the alternative
- darth_avocado 5mo agoBeatings will continue until morale improves
- vitaflo 5mo agoStart your own company. If you’re already doing everything yourself then you don’t need to do it for someone else.
- robocat 5mo agoStarting a company needs a lot more than those three skills. Plenty of people choose a pay packet with less stress. Many founders recycle into tech jobs after they discover exactly why failure rates of startups are so brutal. Apparently 15-25% of employees aged 30–39 at major SV companies have a failed or acquihired startup in their history. Golden handcuffs can appear very pretty after you've missed out on striking gold by yourself.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- saos 5mo 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 5mo agoThis 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.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoAre any of these fields hiring? - big institutional allocators - activists - the sellside - guys managing their private market allocations
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- big_youth 5mo agoI 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.
- phist_mcgee 5mo agoGo on, spill some more tea..
- fourseventy 5mo agoMy 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.
- sergiotapia 5mo agoEven his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
- close04 5mo 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?
- andy_ppp 5mo ago"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
- SamPatt 5mo agoMany comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen. I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future. 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.
- mert-kurttutan 5mo agoMany 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.
- dgellow 5mo agoWill 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
- kypro 5mo agoNo, because you're misunderstanding how this works. Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra. Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems. 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. If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right. 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. 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.
- dgellow 5mo ago
- bronxpockfabz 5mo ago> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
- taldo 5mo agoThis REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop
- danishanish 5mo agoAt least there’s positives there…
- danparsonson 5mo agoI've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...
- net01 5mo agoOnly bought monero for mullvad, it's the only crypto i would ever use.
- rvz 5mo agoCoinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
- martypitt 5mo ago> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism. > 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. So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
- StilesCrisis 5mo ago> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship 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??
- dgellow 5mo agoI 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
- pluc 5mo ago"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.
- alexandre_m 5mo agoThey'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. They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair. More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
- 5mo ago
- Saline9515 5mo agoThe 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). While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
- chrsw 5mo agoYes, 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. 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".
- henryfjordan 5mo agoThe 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. 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...
- jqbd 5mo agoThis assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?
- DocTomoe 5mo ago> Leaders will own much more Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
- BoggleOhYeah 5mo agoWhat is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
- wiseowise 5mo ago> - 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. 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. > - 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. 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? 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. "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
- cloche 5mo ago> 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. 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. 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?
- draftsman 5mo agoYour 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.
- mooreds 5mo agoI'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent. * explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement) * talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them * talks to the folks who are staying 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. 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? Time will tell.
- prewett 5mo ago> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent. 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. The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
- bombcar 5mo agoIt would be amusing but counterproductive to have a layoff email talk about how they’re firing their best and smartest employees.
- securicat 5mo agoSo just leave it out.
- blitzar 5mo agoIf you are really doing a reorg / restructure / reimagination you would likely be losing some good and some bad, some new employees and some people who have been there since day 0 (and everything in between). I think it would be productive to acknowledge that. But the reality is it is a standard MBA driven "bottom x%" cull dressed up with some 4d chess strategy.
- keybored 5mo ago> 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. As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
- wiseowise 5mo agoAnd increase in their workload. Win-win!
- baristaGeek 5mo agoOk I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot. 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.
- mandevil 5mo agoI 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. 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 can't 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.
- tmaly 5mo agoPublicly 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. If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees. They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
- cloche 5mo agoThey already had substantial layoffs in 2023 for that https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-founder-brian-armstrong-to-coinbase-employees https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-foun... It's because crypto goes in a cycle and now it's down. You should expect layoffs from them again in 2029/30.
- apple4ever 5mo agoThat'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.
- boshalfoshal 5mo agoIts been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?
- Banditoz 5mo agoWhat would you blame instead?
- ryandrake 5mo agoAnything that happened more recently? At some point, the "overhiring" excuse no longer holds water. Headline from 2050: "Big tech lays off thousands more, due to overhiring 30 years ago..."
- techblueberry 5mo ago
- upupupandaway 5mo ago> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code 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.
- upupupandaway 5mo agoBrian 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.
- swedishuser 5mo agoCould you link the post?
- upupupandaway 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264
- nojvek 5mo agoCrypto in bear market, volume is down. Less money to skim. Layoff. The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
- serial_dev 5mo agoWhy 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”.
- throwaw12 5mo agoApart from "AI" making us productive talk. Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape? Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
- blizdiddy 5mo agoI 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.
- alexandre_m 5mo agoYour sentiment should be redirected to the leadership team and execs, not the engineers themselves.
- blizdiddy 5mo agoNah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.
- alexandre_m 5mo agoThat's ridiculous. You're making it sound like they were working for Nazi Germany. Have some empathy for people losing their jobs because of upper management’s incompetence.
- blizdiddy 5mo agoI forgot that all criticism is reserved for… Nazis? Chill Have some empathy for the misled retail investor that gambled their savings to thieves?
- alexandre_m 5mo agoI’m genuinely curious what the hell you’re talking about. Did I miss some news where Coinbase literally stole people’s money, or at least did something that could reasonably be called evil?
- josefritzishere 5mo agoLots of layoffs this year. The economy is in bad shape.
- 5701652400 5mo agoyeah, check reddit. now even front page is people talking how hard it is. everywhere.
- smileson2 5mo agoEveryone I know is barely holding on, markets doing well though but tbh it feels like a mad scramble last resort sort of thing
- FerretFred 5mo ago>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 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?
- codeduck 5mo agoThat reminds me, I'll need to stock up on rum so I can cheer the more spectacular detonations.
- 5701652400 5mo ago[dead]
- 5701652400 5mo agowhen 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".
- archagon 5mo agoWhen tech workers finally unionize.
- kelvinjps10 5mo agoWhat 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
- paulbjensen 5mo ago3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing. Today, not a single mention in that email. 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). Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
- decimalenough 5mo agoAll in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.
- KellyCriterion 5mo agoWait: Isnt NFT the next big thing anymore? :-D
- VirusNewbie 5mo agoCoinbase 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.
- ejpir 5mo agoIsnt that the most fair thing for them to do?
- projektfu 5mo agoIt's better to do a hiring freeze before the RIF. Otherwise people have left jobs to come work for you and are now stranded.
- nijave 5mo agoPerhaps try to space out hiring and firing a bit more You know, hire, stop hiring, then start firing
- VirusNewbie 5mo agoyou don't even get a severance that way. People moved for a job, then got stranded without even getting a first paycheck.
- azinman2 5mo ago"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
- nothercastle 5mo agoWorse, 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
- mothballed 5mo agoMust 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.
- phist_mcgee 5mo agoI 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. For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
- mothballed 5mo agoNo I'm not joking. That is the bullshit answer they (note: crypto/fintech space in general, not necessarily Coinbase) 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 (yes no one cares about your $50 but they do when it's some fractional percent of millions of accounts getting triggered at any particular point in time.) You can check something like the customer support reddits of a variety of crytpo and fintech companies, it is always filled with people have their money frozen for some long period while conveniently no one is looking at it while it is sitting there drawing interest, then maybe after a month someone tells them they need to hop on one leg while reciting Deuteronomy chapter 1 with a passport booklet in their hand and blink their eye 3 times while turning their head and that is all they were waiting for all along (I'm embellishing a bit here but that seems to be what KYC checks are like nowadays when they pop up). 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. 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. 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 which does increase KYC/AML 'true positives' but the unspoken part is that money is now locked up into the company's accounts which creates a moral hazard in their fiduciary duty. 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. It will probably take a class action suite, which I have little doubt will eventually happen when someone comes out and admits one day that these regulatory compliance triggers were intentionally set on the sensitive side for non-regulatory reasons.
- orphereus 5mo agoIf I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
- sokoloff 5mo agoIs there a different layoff email that would leave you satisfied and happy?
- orphereus 5mo agoI suppose not getting a layoff email and instead getting it delivered face to face would be more human, but that's American capitalism for you in all its glory
- archagon 5mo ago"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."
- missedthecue 5mo agoI feel like this would just select for business leaders that take zero risk.
- archagon 5mo agoI don’t think I’ve heard of a single tech CEO resigning for massively fucking up. They only “take responsibility” to the extent of saying those magic words.
- missedthecue 5mo agoWell there's the several billion of severance expense. I mean do we want to hang someone every time there are layoffs?
- Ekaros 5mo ago
- varispeed 5mo agoTo me that sounds like financial issues dressed in PR slop.
- monksy 5mo agoConsider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged: 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. Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed. If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake. If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem. 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. 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.
- newobj 5mo agook sure good luck. more like conbase anyway
- arthurjj 5mo ago> 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 As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
- Sohcahtoa82 5mo agoInsanely generous. I got laid off 3 years ago and got a mere 2 weeks + 1 month of COBRA. It was a tech company, but not a big one.
- kibwen 5mo agoCompanies with less than 20 employees aren't federally required to offer COBRA. Companies larger than that are required to offer at least 18 months of coverage. I don't know how large your old company was, but Coinbase is large enough that this offer, rather than being generous, sounds illegal? https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/faqs/cobra-continuation-coverage.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
- tkzed49 5mo agoThey're offering to subsidize the cost that the individual would normally pay for COBRA coverage. They're only required to offer the coverage, but not to pay for it. However, I don't think this is that unusual in SV layoff packages.
- ryandrake 5mo agoIf so, that's really generous, given the cost of having to pay for COBRA. Either way, I'd still be shitting my pants. 16 weeks is not a lot of time to find another job in today's environment. I know devs who have been out of work for years and had to resort to stocking shelves at Home Depot to tread water.
- 5mo ago
- runjake 5mo agoI 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?
- iridione 5mo ago[flagged]
- willio58 5mo ago> 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 in a meeting with one of your 15 reports. Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
- lokar 5mo agoBut now with LLM agents to help you…
- nvader 5mo agoI've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.
- illusive4080 5mo ago15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoI never much liked Coinbase. I like them much less now.
- scottlamb 5mo ago> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination. I don't expect ethical conduct from crypto companies and will not be sad if they are sued into oblivion.
- CityOfThrowaway 5mo agoNo, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.
- scoot 5mo agoTo be "AI native" (a la digital native) you have to have grown up with the technology. 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.
- paulhebert 5mo agoThank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often
- reillyse 5mo agoI 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.
- 5mo ago
- carterschonwald 5mo ago16weeks plus week or so per year of service is pretty good
- londons_explore 5mo agoAI is the next big hype. Crypto was a big hype of last decade. Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase. Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.
- Cyclone_ 5mo agoI would have to agree. It seems like most of the new funding is going to AI at the expense of crypto.
- cmckn 5mo agoYeah, look on the bright side.
- sergiotapia 5mo agocrypto is not growing that's for sure.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoThey can always announce they work in AI now and change nothing. Or maybe they have to start designing shoes first, IDK.
- no_no_no_yes 5mo agoIt's amazing how the crypto-bro influencers became AI-bro influencers over the past 2 years.
- ghnbv 5mo agoBitcoin is down from its highs and the big boys are in. Tether collateral is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and moved to BFF Bukele's El Salvador. Previously the combo was Deltec Bank (CIA linked) in the Caribbean. The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-cryptocurrency-iran https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt... This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure. It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin. But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.
- mavelikara 5mo agoHow does the “flattening” affect equity grants. With fewer employees, does each get larger equity stakes?
- spuwho 5mo agoI have an announcement to make, using Claude I have now in development an AI model that can replace the CEO, the Board Chair, the CFO and CTO of any company on Earth. I was shocked at how easy it was to train and develop a model that can replace senior leadership in a company. The CEO was the easiest. I simply loaded the model with as much corporate jargon, double talk and the ability to talk down to people. The model nearly wrote itself. Then simply ingesting the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times and SEC 10-K reports and annual reports, I was able to compile the perfect CFO. It was able to spit out regulatory reports, answer questions on investor calls. Strangely, the component of the model I had write in house was the ability to give up part of their bonus to keep key people employed. Seems in all of those financial reports, there were no examples of anyome that the model could leverage.
- rbjorklin 5mo ago> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?
- mgfist 5mo agoDon't worry agents will take over job /s
- qingcharles 5mo agoIsn't that why you have processes to create documentation? I would forget half the processes I use if I didn't document them all religiously. The benefit now is that I can save myself significant time by having an LLM help me write the docs.
- ahmadtbk 5mo agoLol even if you spent all day documenting what you're doing it wouldn't be enough to transfer all the learning and context.
- henry2023 5mo agoThis is the holy-grail in TradFI, not sure if it applies to fintech. It's not uncommon to hear from people who own an internal process only they know that's essentially their whole job security. The extreme being people that produce only one report a month and that more than justifies their income + bonus.
- pron 5mo ago> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable. In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting. AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
- tokioyoyo 5mo agoI commented this yesterday, I’ll repeat it again - what do you guys think organizations that have heavily leaned into AI are shipping nowadays? Most devs aren’t working on cutting edge, low level, mission critical systems. AI is great for that. Every company I personally know have been fast shipping features that are being used daily by millions of people for the past 7 months. We have the same thing on my team, and we also understand the limitations of AI generated code. If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. I wouldn’t say the same thing in 2025 January, but it’s much different times now. Things are already working.
- pron 5mo ago> If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If you are writing it with fleets of agents, I would bet it's not evolvable; you just haven't reached the breaking point yet.
- kenferry 5mo ago> 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. What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here. I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities. Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that. (a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore? (b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.
- tootie 5mo agoGetting rid of middle managers has been the game plan for every headcount reduction for the last 50 years. They always seem expendable until a few months later when senior managers get overwhelmed and staff get confused and they end up making the same org they just destroyed.
- rohin15 5mo agoExactly, it's too easy to overlook the balancing that good middle managers do.
- palmegranite 5mo agoCompanies try to project strength especially when they’re vulnerable. Effectively this is sentiment control with the market. AI has given vulnerable companies the perfect thing for projecting strength when taking actions forced by weakness.
- voncheese 5mo agoTo put the 14% into some context, per Google, Coinbase headcount has had the following headcount each year + 2021 | 3,730 employees + 2022 | 4,706 employees + 2023 | 3,416 employees + 2024 | 3,772 employees + 2025 | 4,951 employees + 2026 | 4,250* *Estimated following May 2026 layoffs. So the reduction gets them closer, but still higher than where they were in 2024. Given the fact that the crypto business doesn't seem to be growing much over the last few years it can be argued that they over hired in 2025 and going back to 2024 numbers just makes sense. And as others have said in the comments, they haven't turned a profit so likely this makes business sense and the AI shine is trying to make the news less ugly for investors.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoEvery company is going back to pre-COVID employee headcounts because they all had to overhire due to all the turnover which has stabilized to pre-COVID era levels.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- goyim-uprising 5mo ago[flagged]
- Szpadel 5mo agohuge red flag > Non-technical teams are now shipping production code if you vibe code financial systems this cannot mean anything good for your business
- ulfw 5mo agoAnother dying business betting on AI to save them. Good riddance
- _heimdall 5mo ago> - 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. This is going to end poorly for them. The only good managers I've had over around 20 years in the industry were 100% people managers and had no IC type of role expectations. I've personally walked away from multiple manager role interview loops when I ask about the split only to find that they expected managers to also take on partial roles with IC engineering work. I know I can't be effective in either when having to juggle two entirely different hats, and in my anecdotal experience I've never seen anyone else do it well either.
- unethical_ban 5mo agoAt the first tier manager layer, an ideal manager has skills in their workers' domain. That doesn't mean their job should require participation in that domain. Requiring that signals they are somewhat desperate to run lean, which wouldn't be a red flag in a small company but does in a large one.
- whatever1 5mo agoHaving skills is not the same as be required to use them. If your manager is an IC he does not have the time to manage you. He will be trading off quality of his deliverables for your management. No rational person would opt to get fired.
- _heimdall 5mo agoI do agree I'd expect a manager of ICs to know the domain, my point was simply that I never expect or want them to be contributing directly to IC work.
- pm90 5mo agoFrom some of the previous decisions taken by Brian, and the quality of his discourse on twitter, it feels like he has succumbed to something that afflicts a lot of rich people with frail egos: surrounding themselves with yes-men, they rarely engage with the reality as-is and instead with a make believe one. Elon Must also suffers from this as do the founders of AirBnB. It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).
- storgendibal 5mo ago> "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 they couldn't afford to be surrounded by yes man and their egos were secure enough when challenged by their underlings. Despite the intensity of all three, you hear stories of how Gates only respected people who could credibly argue back against him, Jobs empowered his team, etc. The current generation of founders seem to believe their own mythical BS to such an extent that anyone who disagrees with them is culled from the organization, resulting in a natural selection effect of only the yes-men survive.
- pm90 5mo agoAh 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.
- storgendibal 5mo agoMakes 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.
- sandeepkd 5mo agoIts either of two things, either this person is going by market forces, saying whatever makes sense to please the market or the individual has not idea of what it takes to build software by self
- hnisforrtards 5mo ago[dead]
- goofy_lemur 5mo agoGuys I'm from Texas and I want to share something with you all, my friends I've made here on the internet from my heart. I think all of us are a bit sad now that AI has essentially removed what it means to be a coder. There will never again be the time like we had, the golden age of being a nerd. We nerds had it all, and then we destroyed it by making something too smart! As a Texan, it's kind of like cowboys. Coders were wrangling the computer, but now we have been replaced by industry and mechanics. Having read the twitter post, it was raw and honest, and I want to share some ideas about life that I feel are relevant. The first one is that when you work, you should always do something you believe in, because nobody can take that away from you. If you worked for the money, or because someone told you you could be a part of a cool team, your whole world falls apart when you get let go. But if you work because you truly believe your work is worthwhile, you will always be glad you did it. I feel that people on here continually complain about capitalism and how bad corporations are. I challenge all you all to check yourself and ask what are you doing to be a part of the system. If you go accept employment at a 9-5, you are part of the system and making it stronger. I have always refused to have a job. At age 32, I have only ever worked at one company as an employee, and that only for a short time, and the person was a genuine friend of mine. I ask each person here to quit working at a company. I think all of us should choose to only ever work at a nonprofit. Fundamentally Capitalism can't be defeated if we complain and then try to negotiate the biggest salary or benefits. It's logically stupid for us to be saying they are evil, when we do the exact same thing with a salary. Instead, each of us should work at a nonprofit, and we should NEVER accept a salary but instead ask them to give to us when they have something left over. Ultimately, friends, I chose to tell my boss one day (the guy I ended up being an employee at his small company for for a bit), that I didn't want a salary, just donate if you want. Ever since then, I have been happy. I hated life when I worked for money. But now, I love it. I have gotten to code on many fun projects, but for the first time I felt alive. It was terrifying with a wife, a kid and a mortgage to say that. But I am a true believer that the universe, or God has a plan for everyone, and that if you stop worrying and doing what you are told, and just go out and love people, it will all work out. What I found is that the pay you get working for free is better than the pay you could ever get with money. You can finally live with yourself when you just love everybody, every day. If you pay me, and I did great work, you will never know if I love you. But if I did it for free, for all of eternity, you will know that you know that I care about you. And that, to me, is worth more than all the money in the world. That's why I never accept a salary when I work. I just let people give as they feel fit. Yes, it is hard, and it doesn't always feel fun. But it is 1000X worth it. Thank you for reading, God bless you and have a great day!
- scubadude 5mo ago[flagged]
- _doctor_love 5mo ago"But don't worry, I assure you I still intend to personally become wealthy. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter!"
- InfinityByTen 5mo agoI'm still baffled how crypto is still around. How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?
- adithyassekhar 5mo agoAnyone else get a clouflare error 1035 when trying to visit the tweet?
- hggh 5mo agoYes. Alternative URL: https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/2051616759145185723 https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
- adithyassekhar 5mo agoThank you
- glaslong 5mo agoIt's fascinating to watch org managers decide that AI has made people management easy and cheap, instead of org management
- LaFolle 5mo agoCan't access x.com, getting "Invalid request rewrite". Has anyone else seen it?
- KingOfCoders 5mo agoSame here
- kelnos 5mo agoSame. Replace x.com with xcancel.com and it'll load there.
- johanyc 5mo agoDirect link https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/2051616759145185723 https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
- LaFolle 5mo agoIt started working after sometime but had hit this issue multiple times. Even my friend in AU hit the same error when he tried to open the same hn link.
- benj111 5mo agoYes. First time I've had that error.
- testemailfordg2 5mo agoThis problem has been talked about and answered as back as 500BCE. It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
- kelnos 5mo ago> 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 there... Even if they didn't have non-managerial work to do, 15+ direct reports is just too many. They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance. I think as layoffs emails go, it's a pretty good one (as the current top comment points out[0]), but boy, I would not want to be working at a company like what Coinbase is turning into. Non-technical teams shipping code to prod? No thanks. "AI-native pods"? No thanks. I do like the idea of one-person teams; I was at my most productive when I was in that kind of role (though I'm not sure my experience generalizes). I get that companies are still struggling to figure out how to adapt to LLMs, but... damn. Pretty solid severance package for the folks being laid off, though. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021843
- muzani 5mo agoThis jumped out at me right away too. What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? What now? AI is going to double the communication bandwidth with these reports and further double the free time they have? I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.
- CamouflagedKiwi 5mo ago> What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? Cheap money went away which caused companies to start asking hard questions about productivity and how much those dedicated managers were contributing.
- dormento 5mo agoThen there's the convenient answer of "AI made me do it", to which investors are somehow really empathetic... feels like every company CEO is operating on the mindset of "its gonna hit the fan any moment now", except they're the ones holding the fan.
- tianqi 5mo ago[dead]
- kunley 5mo agoThe behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
- blitzar 5mo agoI would love to see what IC Brian is doing. Print it all out and bring it to the meeting please.
- discordance 5mo ago“ I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. (MURMURING) All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault. I trusted them to get the job done. But that is the price of leadership. Thank you.”
- hansmayer 5mo ago> including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. The reads like typical MBA-efficiency-idiocy taken to the extreme. Clearly this guy is so deeply isolated from the actual work that he cannot even begin to comprehend just how utterly stupid this idea is. It's one thing to push for 100x engineering "output" with "AI", but something completely different to expect a single person to be 3-4 persons in one. Pure schizophrenia - but at least companies like Coinbase which adopt the AI-first illusion will burn themselves faster and leave the room for something new and genuinely innovative.
- stuaxo 5mo agoChanging much of their code to be AI written is not a good sign.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoThe company I work in, collapsed in similar manner. Started with huge AI reductions, now we're barely coping. Managers vibe code. All fix production. However, I understand rationale, as the money was not in-flowing enough. ---- edit ---- When reading about AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents, I shout out. Hire me. I will tell you why this won't work
- noman-land 5mo agoCan you tell us here?
- saimiam 5mo agoIf you’re good at something, never do it for free…or something. Let OP make his “hire me and I’ll tell you why your AI first approach is bunk” market.
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoExactly. I won't unless you hire me :wink: ---- edit ---- TBH I will post an article, I'm finishing it. But it won't be so doomy, but rather on what to avoid to not fail
- tyyyy3 5mo agoI strongly believe increasing the rate at which one produces code misses the point. If engineers already know up front with clarity what they need to build, and, the leadership are very focused and concentrate resources on doing a few things.. then increasing the rate at which LOC is written is not beneficial - because getting the product built right is what matters.
- fastasucan 5mo agoExactly. We all laughed at the cases where productivity was measured in lines of code. But now the whole world somehow optimize for it.
- grugdev42 5mo agoRecession signal.
- alansaber 5mo agoWeb3 cycle signal*
- mschuster91 5mo ago> 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. There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.
- lwhi 5mo agoIt's far better to frame this in terms of AI efficiency, than a dying crypto market.
- exabrial 5mo agoPlease stop calling it "AI First". Call it "we overhired, and bitcoin prices are in the tank" and be honest.
- muyuu 5mo agoThey overhired, and BTC prices not being actually in the tank won't save them.
- kmac_ 5mo agoBTC's price isn't the point. Crypto businesses are a shrinking niche (not counting cases like Binance, but those are exceptions), and VC money has moved on. Crypto had its shot but couldn't go mainstream. AI is a better bet now.
- yalogin 5mo agoFinally one ceo came out honestly and said ai is the reason for laying off people. It makes sense, no point in being obscure. It doesn’t matter if they over hired or not, AI is giving them the freedom to lay off. I would expect a lot more layoffs and more importantly the configuration of teams and nature of roles is going to change, has to change to be effective with AI
- keiferski 5mo agoIt has always annoyed me that companies can basically fire people for whatever reason they want, but more specifically that they can lie about that reason. It almost makes we wish there were legal requirements for giving proof backing up the reason. It doesn’t need to be an actually good or noble one, but just in the sense of actually being accurate information being put into the world. I imagine this could be sold as a part of financial transparency laws. Because as of now, it really seems like companies are using AI as a cover to fire people.
- anthonypasq 5mo ago??? the reason for every single layoff in the history of the world is to lower expenses, and that is obvious to everyone. not actually sure what other kind of explanation would satisfy you.
- keiferski 5mo agoBut why is lowering expenses now necessary? If we believed the press releases, it’s because AI blah blah. I’m suggesting that some legal requirement for being truthful about the reason would be beneficial.
- abi 5mo agoWhat benefit would it truly provide? Companies would simply say they need to cut costs to maximize shareholder value, which is no different than what happened here.
- keiferski 5mo agoWell, generally speaking I think it’s a better world if corporations are forced to not lie to people. Presumably investors and those shorting the company would benefit from more accurate information about a company. So the market as a whole would be healthier and less prone to inflationary claims. I also don’t think that excuse would really hold up under scrutiny: “we fired 14% of our workforce to maximize shareholder value” isn’t exactly a straightforward answer. Right now the answer seems to be latching onto whatever’s trendy and blaming the layoffs on that. If there is an expectation that reasons will be investigated, then I think you’d just get more accurate information in the market, tldr.
- ModernMech 5mo agoClassic CEO, making it first and foremost about how it’s difficult for them to make the decision. No doubt used ChatGPT to write the letter, even.
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoImagine seeing this headline in 2019. Heads would explode. Welcome to the actual future, where things aren't so rosy.
- durbatuluk 5mo agoThe same coinbase where my manager used # of commits as metric for praise. I'm so anxious to see how this will work out
- borroka 5mo agoDespite the proclamations of torment, suffering, and unwillingness to do it, but, they say, "such is life and this is what needs to be done", I often found in CEOs announcing big layoffs a quite visible undercurrent of joyful power-tripness. Also, it is clear at this point that thought tech leaders decide, probably over group chats mere mortals are not allowed in, on messages to deliver for a few days, urbi et orbi: introspection is overrated; the leaders-followers dichotomy; now, the disdain for "people managers," as if they were imposed by the Galactic Empire instead of being people whom their organization hired for years. And, like, what sort of message is, to be sent when announcing lay-offs: "from now on, teams will have not 14 but 15 ICs (whatever numbers), the new IC will be the manager, who will continue to be a manager but also will do some IC work"?. It is high-school all over again.
- person3 5mo ago> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated Given Coinbase is a financial platform this doesn't make me feel great. Hopefully they're contributing in areas that don't affect security or money.
- kwanbix 5mo ago"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." Terrifying.
- mattbillenstein 5mo agoCrypto was always sorta a casino - and there are just better casinos today - sports betting, prediction markets, etc.
- theuniverseson 5mo ago[flagged]
- zhouquanxi 5mo ago[flagged]