Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.

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.

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boshalfoshal 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?

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Banditoz 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What would you blame instead?

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dbgrman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Bitzscaling. Reid Hoffman's snake oil (thought piece). https://www.blitzscaling.com/

It has poisoned more than one company (especially startups). Its the "go big or go home" mentality. The "the market is ours to take if we just put more fuel to this fire" mentality.

was in a startup once (Reid was an investor). The CEOs bought into blitzscaling, told the whole company we're going to "blitzscale". Hired 2 directors (with 0 reports). They had amibitions of hiring 100s of engineers. Then reality struck. There was no revenue and no path to revenue (because early days of AI). The blitzscaling was "paused". The directors had 1 EM report to them each. You can imagine what happened in the months after that.

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ryandrake 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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..."

	▲	techblueberry an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If you create a problem and then do nothing about it, it’s still there years later.

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dawnerd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The CEO. No one else to blame, really.

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cloche 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They already had substantial layoffs in 2023 for that 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.

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transitorykris 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Share price can and does go up because layoffs usually means opex goes down

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apple4ever 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.

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djeastm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"paring back", but I agree. The overextended like a lot of high-growth, volatile businesses do

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tracker1 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.

I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.