> I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company.

It is not specific to a crypto company. But the element of it being a crypto company cannot be ignored. Crypto companies are not like ordinary businesses. They have very unique qualities to them. Same with crypto industry as a whole. Ever been to a crypto conference for example? I have read about and have seen the videos. These things have the highest concentration of the scammers and the gullible any one place.

Haslem played 72 minutes the entire 82 game season. That's like the Engineering manager who ships a PR once a year.

Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.

Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.

I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.

I think the CEO was more talking in the line of Bill Russell or Maximus from Gladiator, not final-year Haslem

It happens, but these days is quite rare, and usually something reserved for a player is of Hall of Fame or close caliber, who has been an institution for the franchise, and is generally slated for a full-time coaching role post retirement.

No. Few college or professional coaches weren't themselves college or professional players. Think of all those assistant coaches, QB coaches, DB coaches etc.--all players. Mike Leach comes to mind as a rare counterexample.

historically speaking, efficiency has always won out

for example, the last obvious inefficiency i remember was sys admins. the most worthless, self aggrandizing group of people at any company. got wiped out mostly (the best work for the cloud engineering companies), and i think it was for the better!

engineers today handle deployments, and it is far better.

It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company.

That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.

Saying they're being let go due to the amazing efficiency of AI juices the stock prices more though.

If engineering ability actually became cheaper you would want more of it, as ideas that were previously too marginal became worthwhile.

Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs.

The competition is also stiff with decades of experience and network effects

The truth is these crypto shops have a pretty poor reputation in the traditional finance industry. Nobody in trading tech goes to work for them unless they offer insane salaries, because they (we) know it's an unstable place to be.

oh they have too! came out a couple of months ago.

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

Nice work if you can get it.

> If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.

I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser."

Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.

Reminds me grok

"We’re not building Skynet, we’re cutting costs and putting the survivors on prompt duty"

Anything in that format gives that AI feel

Yep, it's 25+ years of corporate communications.

They'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.

I'm looking forward to marketing folks doing oncall and support work for the features they're shipping.

Yeah this sounds pretty reasonable really, like instead of using a CMS directly they’re having Claude file PRs to make the same changes. As someone who likes static sites and change control, it actually sounds like an improvement.

I was thinking the same thing. Advertising or the wording and layout of information on a website is a different level of complexity to monetary calculations that have legislated paths and outcomes, for example.

As difficult as it is to use CSS to centre a field, the stakes are in a different ball park.

Contrary to sentiment in this thread, I am seeing positive effects of designers and PMs using AI. Skilled designers can now own how their components look and feel with guardrails.

My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager.

I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.

In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.

Being a great manager requires being good at a whole set of specific skills, and that takes effort and some natural talent.

It can certainly overlap with what makes a great engineer, but not most of the time.

I haven’t had it turn out well with pure managers either, so I’m not sure how much the distinction helps.

They're still going to have upwards of 5 levels in their hierarchy, so this is obviously for the plebs who are front-line managers, not the several layers above them, as (for example) I'm not sure what a strong player-coach VP of Engineering would exactly look like. I got to Director and quit because it was impossible to be a true contributor at that level or higher. You can see this when you're in critical mode like downtime or a breach; senior management is useless.

For me this is all about team size. It works if you have small teams, maybe max 6 people. But anything above 8-10 this is a total no go. Because management tasks just are not able to be done well at that point.

Bill Russell, Boston Celtics, NBA national champions 2 years in a row, 67-68, 68-69 (first black head coach in NBA)

Most of the high profile basketball players you can think of do this - obvious ones are Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Lebron James - as I remember it Lebron has even written up plays from time to time during critical games (evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUkQbGQTdQ8, and famously erasing his coach's play: https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-changed-fina...)

There are definitely a tiny handful, which absolutely makes them the exceptions that prove the rule, and a terrible idea for Coinbase or anyone else.

Gianluca Vialli won UEFA Cup Winners' Cup with Chelsea as player-coach in 1998

There's successful actor-directors.

Reggie Dunlop, Charlestown Cheifs, they won the Federal League and it's hard to argue it wasn't all down to his coaching.

Pete Rose baseball?

George Halas - Chicago Bears

Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool FC, 1985-1990.

> This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.

And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.

You and I wouldn't because we're engineers. An executive with ulterior motives would want to call it production for "Marketing"

or at Coinbase now apparently, prepare to complete 15+ annual reviews in your new role as player-coach!

Hardware wallet. Or just stamp the wallet and private key on a sheet of aluminum.

The missing bit is that compliance is for governments and business partners, not for any end-users. For the purposes of KYC/AML process, end-users are objects, not subjects.

Your coins frozen with no reason given even internally except for "machine said no" - no one gets any slap on the wrist unless you sue real hard, happen to win, and most likely that'll be just a scratch that won't be noticed enough to change any attitudes.

The Man sees that someone they don't like transferring their coins through the fintech company - that's what those companies are really concerned about, because it would be a punch in the gut the company will feel.

Thus, the incentives. Current social design doesn't punish for false positives (until they hit really high levels), only false negatives.

No 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.

Anything 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..."

Start your own company. If you’re already doing everything yourself then you don’t need to do it for someone else.

Organized labor

Beatings will continue until morale improves

As a manager with 10-15 reports at a company you've probably heard of, I think the main question is how much they will need to contribute. I put up a PR or three a week, usually in non-critical path flows or system support, and its honestly fine. I could barely contribute to the productivity level of even one of my junior engineers, but I can debug production issues and ship code AND be a good manager (with a decent work life balance).

I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.

I think you'll have to work it out with your peers and collaborate... we here at $BigCo believe in individual ownership of the process.

Sure, I agree, not sure why you are downvoted for stating the facts, both have benefits, Europe in general is less flexible but employees are more protected with more benefits.

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).

you should always add salary during notice period if you are not expected to work anymore, it's essentially severance pay as well, though technically it's salary for no work

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

When I was laid off, I got only 2 weeks of pay (notice period).

well, everyone has different experiences, but just to make it clear, I was calculating ordinary salary during notice period into severance pay since in many companies it's essentially severance pay:

1. you get fired with 2 months notice period and they will tell you, you don't need to bother to come anymore = 2 months of severance, you can sit at home, look for job for 2 months with full salary

2. on top of this you will get also extra 2 months severance pay

so in total de facto 4 months of severance pay , but I understand shitty companies will expect you to work even during notice period (especially if they are firing you) and somehow expect you will be delivering same results, smarter companies know the reality when they are firing someone and just tell him not bother coming anymore, this was my case in last 1-2 jobs I've had more than 10 years ago when I was still employee (plus they wanted to give me 1 month severance pay, but I argued about years I worked there and certain operation practices which could be published, so got 2 months, unlike my less assertive colleagues), I'm nowadays contractor/freelance for companies outside Europe so no law protection for me

my wife is always employed as employee and got fired this winter under conditions I mentioned in point 1&2 and got 2+2 months after 1 year of work, two jobs ago she was fired without severance but didnt need to work during notice period

plus I've found funny mention of the 6 months COBRA as some benefit, you are covered by insurance in Europe regardless of your job status whether employed or unemployed you are always covered by universal healthcare

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

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

That'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.

I feel like this would just select for business leaders that take zero risk.

If you joined when Coinbase was still giving 0.1BTC signup bonuses, it might be worth trying to retrieve the account

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

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

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

I do understand the theory, none of what you mentioned is new to me or contradict my points. I do not believe things will be done right. It’s not only mission critical services that require maintenance and need to handle incidents. Internal services are as important to a company as their public facing ones, and once you get the ball rolling I do not believe we won’t see the same approach used for customer facing services. I also do not expect non technical people to understand differences between MCP servers, rest apis, direct db access, and other resources. If they do they are definitely technical… so it will be up to whatever they let the agent do. Which is the whole problem here, you need to be technical to understand and push back when agents are doing things wrong

This is a whole lot of speculation masquerading as knowing what you’re talking about. You don’t have a clue what the CEO meant. If you did, you wouldn’t be talking here.