> 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.
This 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.
> 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.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically.
Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there.
Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.
As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.
In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.
Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).
It is a terrible environment to work in.
I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.
Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.
>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
You can both be right. It depends on company culture, which depends on the experience, maturity, and attitude of senior management.
The two extremes of company culture are status cultures and service cultures.
In a status culture the product is the internal status hierarchy. External products are largely incidental goals, and customers and markets are only valued to the extent they create metrics that can be exploited by status seekers. Likewise employees.
In a service culture the goal is customer service through high quality output and employee development.
US corps lean far more to status culture than service culture. This is excellent for short termism, but the culture often becomes dysfunctional, if not outright abusive, and sooner or later it implodes, because status cultures aren't good at accepting reality, or at accurately reading it when they do accept it.
And status cultures tend to cargo cult management, where the C-suite is comparing its status to other C-suites, and copying apparent status-raising actions without thinking them through.
In good times a status culture will overhire, because hiring more employees looks like growth. In bad times status cultures will overfire because "cutting the slack" is lowest common denominator status management.
AI is the same on steroids. You get the promise of more growth with fewer employees, and that's hard to resist, even though it's entirely speculative and could easily be catastrophic. (Company results, and especially lasting company results, are orthogonal to whether some employees get good results with AI, because what actually affects results is how predictable the improvements are, whether there are likely downsides, and whether they're structurally in the right places.)
Whether managers should also be ICs is a side issue.
lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
* Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement
* Having the respect of the team, to settle disputes
* Solving problems when needed
* Hiring and retaining an excellent team
* Picking the right things to work on
... etc ...
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.
Expectations will be raised until they can't be met anymore. There is always a ceiling.
It is on every single worker to make sure that they don't please the system beyond what is reasonable. Often the problem is people who overwork themselves to please and set the bar over the reasonable amount of work. Still when the majority does not raise their output to an unhealthy amount that must be accepted as a ceiling.
I think you are mixing cause and effect in real life dynamics.
In real organizations people tend to raise their performance to the [often unreasonable] level of expectations, even when situation stops being sustainable long-term for the whole group.
Suggesting that people should simply avoid overperforming assumes a level of control they don’t really have.
What do you think will actually happen at Coinbase now? Is it more likely that people will start saying hard “no,” or that they would stretch to meet the new expectations despite the personal cost?
I'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?
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
One group are the ones who are staying. They lose teammates, they have to restructure work and fear whether there will be another round soon, which may hit them.
And then there are customers, investors, ... who need to be assured they are not dealing with a failing company.
The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful.
I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
> At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful
There is ZERO CHANCE they have used ai unintentionally
> also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
By actively using ai they are stating that you are so much beyond them that even a personal "eff you" is not worth the time. One would have to actively try and poke some personally hurtful areas to come off more insulting than use of ai.
You do get how that's worse, right? The person rather spends their time arguing with the clanker than thinking about the person and putting
those thought into words, however unstructured they are.
Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.
> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
+1 and the irony of this CEO-Idiot calling LLMs "intelligence" and putting people, the stupidest of which are 1000x orders of magnitude more intelligent than an LLM, in the second spot "aligning it", i.e. fixing the AI slop.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
I assume blaming AI is a way to soften the blow even if its not really a reason, it sounds hip and attractive to investors who want to hear that sort of thing.
> 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.
If 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.
I 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.
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.
Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.
I've been coding for 25 years now, and it's not that I see AI as evil, but more that it doesn't solve any of my problems or looking back, any problems I had at previous roles.
It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it in their designs ready for their next job role. I spend probably more time in meetings than doing coding.
Why can't I have an AI that takes my meetings for me?
I started with x86 assembler and Turbo Pascal (I still remember when I got documentation for Turbo Vision - this was groundbreaking!).
The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.
Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.
Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.
As a "young" coder I am hesitant because I don't have decades of skills to fall back on.
It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.
Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.
The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).
That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.
Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".
> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
I think this is just semantic drift (though I am broadly sympathetic to “boo semantic drift”). I see this business use of the term as treating the “mind attuned to being immersed in” and “habitually, automatically reaches for” sub-meanings as the relevant ones, which is (almost as you say, but skew) not quite the same thing as “proficient when the ability is actively engaged”. The more you're trying to navigate a dynamic environment rather than hiring for tasks well-defined in advance, the more that distinction matters in practice.
I think unethical and illegal activity is par for the course in most realms of American business. And I would replace “sued into oblivion” with mandatory arbitration and “appropriate settlement”.
It's a term of art that straightforwardly means people who embrace AI-assisted programming. As opposed to the very large number of engineers who actively don't like it, or have enough change aversion to have avoided it.
"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.
Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate:
{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."
{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."
{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.
> a relatively young company not staffed with a bunch of old people
1. What statistics support this assumption? (Either for Coinbase specifically, or "tech companies" in general.)
2. Nobody has to be a literal greybeard in order to be in the crosshairs of downsizing. Just look at Amazon's "make them quit before vesting finishes" pattern.
Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
Companies 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-a...
I think you misunderstood: Coinbase is offering to pay for the first 6 months of COBRA for the laid-off employees. They can still continue with it for the following 12 months if they want, paid out of pocket.
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.
If 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.
Yes but ... people will sign that paper for almost any severance. Consider the alternative (don't sign, get a lawyer etc) -- many folks will just sign to get whatever's on offer
This is surprising about COBRA - I thought it’s always 18 months. Moreover it doesn’t make much sense to limit cobra - you are paying full price out of pocket anyway.
> 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.
AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.
I don’t think we will though. Because the “short game” is match the requirements of the agent operator. If we don’t care about the finer details that we let the LLMs infer, then we shouldn’t care if a human infers them (but yet we do).
I think LLMs are great, and I think people who can use them to get to the green in one and take it from there will soar, just like people who could identify a problem and solve it themselves did in the past.
As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences.
I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.
AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.
We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.
What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?
This is definitely not true. But I doubt GP understand "most" of kubernetes too. They probably have a good working knowledge of the important commonly used features.
Not the OP, but it might be that AI isn't as good at systems programming as it is at other domains, or it might be that you're using it differently than I am. I don't know which one it is (maybe AI just isn't good at writing the language you work with).
For things like web frontents/backends, though, it works beautifully. I ship things in days that would take me weeks to write by hand, and I'm very fast at writing things by hand. The AI also ships many fewer bugs than our average senior programmer, though maybe not fewer bugs than our staff programmers.
In my experience ai has had far far more bugs than most of what i call senior engineers but far fewer than juniors.
The boost is for what are glorified crud apps which it 1000x the tedious work. However, the choices it makes along the way quickly blows up without cleaning. Seniors know how to keep their workstation clean or they should.
The only way you could possibly know that is if you're reviewing the code, which means you're not "managing fleets of agents". If you're not reviewing the code (and you wouldn't be if you're managing fleets of agents), then you have no way to tell what you're shipping.
It’s under-appreciated that a proper review takes at least as long as the actual work: it’s all the same time spent understanding the challenge and coming up with the best solution, minus the time spent typing in your solution (almost never a significant amount), plus the time spent understanding their solution and explaining how to get from theirs to yours.
Can you link to a changelog that shows the 5-10x feature increases? I keep hearing this, but I don’t see anything I use ever actually shipping like this, or people backing this up with any sort of proof.
I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know what might be wrong with the new one.
What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.
I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading
I 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.
> 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.
We’re not managing fleets of agents. They’re not productive for our workflows yet. It’s usually a couple of CC CLIs running and going back and forth on specific tasks we closely control.
Most of the people making this argument vastly overestimate the quality of engineering and discipline that behind the software powering most corporations. CRUD apps are likely to be the most prominent type of application across industries, and most of them are crud
If the code is really simple, it's cheap to read it. When people don't read it (and when they need to use "fleets of agents"), it's because it's not so simple, and then the people who trust the outcome are those who don't know what it is that they've committed into the codebase. Their logic is no more than: the system hasn't collapsed under the load of 50 (or 500) changes so it probably won't collapse under the load of the next 500 (or 5000). Because that's how engineered systems work, right? If they're fine under light stress, they're fine under heavier stress.
Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )
Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"
If you'd told me 20-30 years ago we'd actually get the Star Trek computer in the mid-2020s and it still wouldn't be actually AGI, I would have thought that very strange and unlikely, so who knows?
And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position.
The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.
I don't know how anyone who carefully and closely reviews their output could possibly think that. Much of the time their code is fine, but every now and again they make a catastrophic (though often well-hidden) mistake that is so bad that all the tests pass but the codebase will be bricked if enough of those go in. They make such disastrous mistakes frequently enough that a decent-sized codebase can't last for more than 18-24 months.
If the average programmer is this bad, then there must be better-than-average programmers reviewing the code. The problem with agents is that they can produce code at a far higher volume than the average programmer.
Anyway, I don't know how well the average programmer programs, but if you commit agent-generated code without careful review, your codebase will be cooked in a year or two.
It's not about caring how it works. It's about caring that it keeps working at all even after you add stuff to it for a year or three (and nearly all software written by companies is software they evolve).
If you carefully read the agent's output you'll see why. It adds layers upon layers of workarounds and defences that hide serious problems, until the codebase reaches a point where the agent can no longer understand it and work with it. All the tests pass right up until the moment when adding a feature or fixing a bug causes another bug, and then nothing and no one can save the codebase anymore.
Maybe a year ago? Right now the LLMs I mainly use (GPT5.5, Opus 4.7) will intuit exactly what I need from my brief specs and universally go above-and-beyond in creating code that is not only extremely high-quality, but catches a ton of the gotchas I would have stumbled on, in advance.
Just a minute ago 5.5 looked at some human-written code of mine from last year and while it was making the changes I asked for it determined the existing code was too brittle (it was) and rewrote it better. It didn't mention this in its summary at the end, I only know because I often watch the thinking output as it goes past before it hides it all behind a pop-open.
Interesting that we’ve have such different experiences. I was working with both those models today and on several occasions it proposed some pretty poor solutions.
I also find I need to run an llm code review or two against any code it produces to even get to the point where’s it’s ready for human review.
In any case they served as an extremely valuable tool.
I use GPT 5.5. Sometimes it does what you say. It certainly finds silly mistakes in my code better than I could. But frequently enough it makes catastrophic architectural mistakes in its own code.
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
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.
The way i look at it is: those users are going to ask differing questions than engineering that may lead to possibilities not considered, thought of, believed possible, etc.. which can be a good thing, when harnessed correctly*.
I'd love to hear more about the positive effects of designers and PMs using AI, especially more on the PM side, if you care to go into more detail
I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".
this is the worst. Dario pilled in all the wrong levels. but that is a crypto company no wonder they ride the worst ideas to get rich asap. ICOs and NFTs are the closest thing to what we re living right now when they say they solved coding
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
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".
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
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...
There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
This assumes you have more valuable ideas than you can implement. Which, at first glance, seems like something you can take for granted. But in my career over 15 years I was surprised to find it's not the case for most established businesses. The existing business acts as a constraint that limits the idea space way down, and the ability for owners and product managers to generate ideas is way lower than I ever expected.
Execution of unrelated ideas seems like a natural follow on, and having managed several such "labs" efforts, it's actually a good idea but it inevitably grinds up against the lack of will to continue investing in the face of headwinds, especially since the main business line is several orders of magnitude larger than anything labs can deliver in a foreseeable timeframe.
He's actually agreeing it reduces the need for engineers to produce the same level of output as now. He's making the argument that companies would then desire more output to capitalize on additional ideas/projects. I could see it going either way, but likely demand will fall.
If it were 2018 I would personally have hired at least 3 devs at my company in the last 18 months. The only reason I haven't is due to the existence of LLMs. Not budget, not covid overhiring. Not soft demand. I literally do not need more engineer butts in seats. It is not longer a bottleneck.
The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and not the buyer side of engineering labor. This means they have blind sides to the buyers view of the market (some sort of information asymmetry), and secondly they exhibit cognitive dissonance to protect their self-esteem as a seller.
Yeah AI is the perfect scapegoat for layoffs recently to soften the impact on stock price and investor confidence. Coinbase is obviously doing layoffs because they are strongly tethered to a stock market that is rattled by political conflict and economic uncertainty.
Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs.
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.
It's going the opposite direction. Those offering real world and tradfi assets are moving into the crypto space. That is going to eat Coinbase's lunch.
The worst part of using something like Coinbase is having to do yet another bank transfer, waiting for it to clear, doing KYC/AML yet again, etc etc for what most people is just to buy one or two single asset (BTC or maybe ETH probably). Instead just click buy in Robinhood or Schwab along with everything else.
The major prop shops and market makers are all over crypto, for sure. But they're only there because these markets are poorly regulated and there's a lot of retail juice to squeeze.
A friend of mine works for one of the major crypto firms and they're starting to deploy algorithmic trading bots on their own exchange.
That makes sense, thank you for explaining. TradFi already offer access (direct or ETFs) to major cryptos who have demonstrated some utility like BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL and a few others.
If interest in tokens and altcoins wanes, Coinbase may be in a weak position.
> - 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.
At 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.
Having 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.
> 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.
Getting 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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
> - 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"
> 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?
Not true. You often see it semi-pro soccer. Previously, you could see player coaches even in top-flight elite soccer.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
And to continue with the analogy, he neither replaces the coach, nor the actual team players.
He just sits on the bench, paid for his - additional - role. Exactly the contrary of the Coinbase manager-IC, which is supposed to replace 2 jobs in 1.
Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.
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.
We already have these in the industry. They're Staff+ Engineers and Architects. It's generally the norm to not be cranking out code at this level, but they make sure everyone is moving in the right direction, assisting managers, and mentoring juniors.
Good example but it still sounds more like a “tech lead”: this guy is still focused on tactical line level with other players than on handling the overall strategy, PR, plans, hiring, etc that a coach does
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.
I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
> With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.
To part of it, but chess is generally played one against one, there are well understood rules and a clearly defined goal, and every win is someone else's loss.
When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
The fact that there have been so few of them throughout history of sports shows that this is an exceptional, uncommon situation. A small number of athletes compared to the total. It requires that a single individual possess many qualities at the same time.
Bill Russell. Won 9 championships as a Boston Celtic under legendary coach Red Auerbach, and alongside Hall of Famers like Bob Cousy. Then became the coach and starting center for 3 more years and won two more championships.
I think Netflix started the sports team analogy for their hiring (and firing). But they don't put forth a "you're a part of the Netflix family". They're open about the work culture you're going to be stepping into.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
Your categorization of math, logic and programming as "girly" is hilarious.
When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.
I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.
For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.
History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.
Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.
I was being sarcastic (I at least hoped it was obvious). There is probably nothing as illogical as assigning a gender to a logic - or maths or science for that matter. I also find it pretty stupid how “girly” is considered an insult. I prefer girly to being thick.
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.
Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to.
> 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.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.
> 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.
You have to look past literally everything their leadership is saying and at the heart of the matter: This is a dying company, and they physically will not have the capital to pay paychecks if they don't do this. Everything else is window dressing to try to keep investors on-board, but they aren't buying it, and neither should you.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
The thing is that the former crypto gamblers have moved on to gamble in the prediction markets like Polymarket now. Not sure if COIN is coming back from this.
Now that I think of it, the last decade has just been wave after wave of techwashing the same old gambling. First it was sports betting, then cryptocurrency, then NFTs, then "prediction markets".
In the 70 and 80s ppl kept their lifestyle by having their spouse starting to work.
In the 90s and 2000s it was with credit cards. In the 2010s it was apps offering artificially deflated prices to corner markets. And now it’s gambling and buying burritos w Klara.
Ahh yes the next big thing! We had cloud, then crypto, then VR??? , then AI and now straight up gambling. I feel the next next big thing in computers should be porn.
Almost every "AI washing", except for the firms that are spending massively on data center capex (Microsoft, Meta), is coming from a company that is hurting.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
Previous cycles were fueled by retail, with an industry trying to legitimize itself.
This cycle is about max extraction and fraud - Legitimized by the presidential family cashing out billions in meme coins, insider trading and forks of existing protocols.
Hacks have also been hitting hard. North Korea has stolen 500m this year alone and 2b last year.
So… no thriving. On the opposite. Dying is a more appropriate word at this time. Some would call this an opportunity. I see more pain ahead.
No wonder Coinbase is laying off people with the excuse of AI. The reality is that volume is zero. At this stage only me and a bunch of other retail weirdos keep on buying bitcoin paycheck by paycheck…
Idiots who were getting fleeced by shitcoin pump and dumps are now getting fleeced by insiders betting on heads of state being assassinated.
That's the problem with building your castle on a quicksand whose fundamentals aren't in the same order of magnitude as the market cap you command. When all you truly offer is gambling, eventually a shinier casino will open up and eat your lunch.
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
This is sickening. People that don't realise that companies are made of people are in for a surprise. Once they go public, they forget that, and it shows.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes plenty of sense. Player-coaches are a real thing, and in a realm where you're not worried about peak fitness then it's reasonable to demand the coaches become player-coaches.
Player-coaches are a real thing, but noticeable because of how rare and unusual they are. The problem is that the analogy doesn't even hold up in the source its referring to.
Sure, there are good player-coaches, but there are also great pure leaders. There are also very bad player-coaches. A coach who is trying too hard and too deep to be a player when they are less "fit" (or skilled) has historically led to many problems in many cases
It's not a deep analogy. It's not saying player coaches are inherently better, but in their particular situation they want the managers to be coding.
There's not much equivalent to "fit" here, just skill, and they decided they don't want the pure leaders, they want ones that are knuckle deep in the sausage.
Good decision or not, that very basic analogy is completely fine.
Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)
These people should leave and start their own companies: 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.
Certainly not, I don’t think anyone would make that claim, seems a bit silly.
The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company.
They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation.
American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive practices, but working conditions will only deteriorate from here, with workers crushed between LLMs and offshoring.
A major problem with player-coach is that it makes the manager compete with the IC. If we solve that it'd be more workable, if not it'd erode teams from the inside.
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
> - 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 then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
I mean it doesn't really help the analogy when most of the examples in the Wikipedia link mention how it's either not done anymore for that sport or very rare nowadays.
Crypto was always a clown show. Not saying everyone working the crypto/Web 3.0 was a clown just.. This tone-def message coming out of the waning crypto industry is nothing more than an eye-roll.
Can I push to production anytime I want? I can run 10000 agents then no problem. I'll just move fast and break things and I'll get massive cheers because its AI.
I don't get it either. LLMs put the enshittification of software engineering into overdrive. The job is less fun (reviewing AI slop, sometimes even produced by entirely non-tech people like managers), the expectation of increased productivity, the expectation that we can now do the job of multiple people and salaries will decrease as well. I don't understand how so many software engineers I know cheer for this technology.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
> 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?
How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.
> 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.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.
delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
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.
Surely there are some insanely smart people amongst the 100s of thousands of laid off supposedly god tier software engineers and adjacent who will start new companies maybe even spawn a new industry?
Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.
Cars were more efficient horses. AI is not more efficient people. It's an excuse to reduce payroll. Capital is fundamentally antagonistic to labor, because labor is an eternal cost center that until AI, never had a solution.
>>> 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?
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
This 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.
Isn'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.
> 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!
> 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.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.
I'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.
> 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.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Starting 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.
I'm not arguing what defines inefficient in these situations, just that "if we group together we'll be okay" for tech workers will go about as well as 1960's longshoreman unionization
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
It 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.
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> 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.
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.
I worked somewhere once where every once in a while we'd have to create a new deploy meeting because 1) our code was deployed manually over the course of hours and 2) every manager imaginable wanted to be in the meeting asking questions and directing people... you couldn't actually speak to anyone you had to talk through their manager.
I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
I've experienced this as well. I call it the "better safe than sorry" strategy, and the issue is it ignores the very real cost of all the extra effort and work, from the literal costs to the slow releases to the loss of people who just can't take it anymore.
Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.
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.
Everything but the AI bit are on my list of manager qualities too, but the best managers I've had weren't active programmers, and one had zero coding background.
Knowing what you don't know and knowing how to get qualified information from people around you makes up for a lot of not having a programming background.
If anything, the managers with technical backgrounds who weren't active programmers tended to significantly underestimate the difficulty of doing something because back in their day, things were different or some such nonsense.
I think I am a better manager than engineer, not because I'm a shitty engineer but because I recognize the superior strength in my team and do waht I can to leverage the basic principle that if someone is better than you in many things, they should still specialize in the thing they are best at.
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.
You right, but there is a very real coordination problem above the team when you're doing bigger things. I've recently experienced an organization with approx. 25 teams of 5-8, and because of their organization they had way too many concurrent initiatives. It was very hard to effectively swarm multiple teams on fewer (bigger) projects.
> 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 has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
> 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.
what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.
Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.
I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.
Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
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.
Coinbase gave my confidential "AML" information to criminal extortionists-- I hadn't even had an account with them for a decade because I realized they were bad eggs long ago.
What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.
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.
> In the specific case of “Why did the bank close my account, seemingly for no reason? Why will no one tell me anything about this? Why will no one take responsibility?”, the answer is frequently that the bank is following the law. As we’ve discussed previously, banks will frequently make the “independent” “commercial decision” to “exit the relationship” with a particular customer after that customer has had multiple Suspicious Activity Reports filed. SARs can (and sometimes must!) be filed for innocuous reasons and do not necessarily imply any sort of wrongdoing.
> SARs are secret, by regulation. See 12 CFR § 21.11(k)(1) from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency...
The fact they may not be able to in one circumstance doesn't prove that they're merely following the BSA.
It's obvious when someone gets their money frozen for a month only to just have to perform a KYC check that even if the KYC check was legitimate, and these kinds of results are common over years, the delay was a result of a business decision that increased their float.
I think you're conflating the requirements with the BSA with how executives are using it in a hostile way against customers. They can make the deliberate decision to slow down KYC/AML officers and checks after a trigger, while putting them on a hair trigger, while citing secrecy under the BSA. That is the regulatory nonsense under which they are dressing up a business, non-regulatory decision. It's there to provide plausible deniability.
The compliance officer in this case is plausibly just following the law but in reality they're just running cover for increasing the float -- maybe even unwittingly.
> 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
They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.
If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true that regulation exists doesn't mean whatever is done under the flag of regulation was actually regulatory in nature it just means you have a more believable pile of steaming bullshit to tell the hysterical customer to make it sound like something closer to breaking the law is actually an attempt to follow the law.
Put otherwise, suppose I run a bank and you deposit your paycheck. I decide our reserves are a little low so I set KYC/AML triggers even more sensitive on a hair trigger so that an extra of 0.2% of innocent paychecks get held up an extra 4 weeks (I have also conveniently slow down / underhire customer service) which also causes me to catch 1 or 2 more real criminals. That's not KYC/AML even though that's the mechanism by which I claim to have held it. I'm not bound by the BSA secrecy in such case since the underlying trigger was for increasing the float rather than actually KYC/AML compliance.
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I am accusing fintech and crypto businesses in general of committing mass fraud through intentionally setting KYC/AML on an artificially sensitive trigger to increase their floats, yes.
I do not know if Coinbase specifically does that
-- my limited experience with them is they are one of the few fintech companies that hasn't fucked me over.
I have an absolutely massive body of evidence that leads me to that conclusion, through my own transactions and frozen funds as well as studying a wide amount of CS complaints that show evidence that KYC/AML checks on frozen funds are stalled for weeks to months without any plausible explanation of what is happening which is not a KYC/AML regulatory action but rather an intentional choice to raise floats for free interest and padding their numbers.
Of course what's extraordinarily ironic here is when fintech claims you violate KYC/AML then "law says we provide no evidence" but if you turn around and accuse them then the industry shills will scream "without evidence" while simultaneously saying your counterparty doesn't have to provide it! They are hypocrites! The very people accusing you without evidence betray their own sins accusing you of same! They were the ones that set the bar that they don't need to present evidence, not me.
The level of unwitting irony here is off the charts.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.
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.
Every 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.
"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
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
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.
ofc 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
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).
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
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
"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.
It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"
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
The European model will never be better than the U.S. one for productive workers like in tech. Tech workers in the U.S. have the same benefits as EU ones for three times the salary.
European model can be better for employees, maybe not so much for employers, in US vice versa, everyone has different preferences
sure you can earn more, but there are plenty of benefits coming from Europe, for instance how many days of vacation you have by law in US? what's the point of the more money in US if employer will work you to death with no work/life balance
I found amusing mention of COBRA for 6 months, that's in most of the EU permanent benefit of all citizens not given by employer, your stuff is just paid from the universal healthcare and doesn't matter whether you are employed or unemployed, in US you can end up in situation you don't earn enough to have good health insurance, but you earn enough to not be covered by insurance for low income people, no such thing possible in EU (thought his doesn't really affect IT field)
> 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??
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.
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Darkly funny that Armstrong's Twitter bio still reads "Creating more economic freedom in the world" when he has relegated humans to "the edge" of his own organization in favor of the pseudointelligent pseudogod.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
“ I'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.”
Consider 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.
From 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).
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.
This 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
Its 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
Companies 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.
I 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.
> 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.
Ok 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.
I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.
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.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
The behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
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.
I have to admit I'm always baffled by these "you could sue over this trivial matter" replies. Do you think lawsuits cost no time or money? Obviously I'm not going to do that.
You’re giving legal advice based upon something you were lead to believe. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that proving damages would be difficult. The third is that you’re operating in a pay to play justice system.
>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?
This 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.
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.
Bitcoin 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:
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.
I 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
I 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
Guys 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!
Many 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.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
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.
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.
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
> 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
This 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.
> 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.
Flattening is a management fad right now. Loser leaders want to be like Elon or whatever.
It is pretty stupid and pathetic tbh, but easier than making an effective organization.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.
Hope they're well paid!
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically. Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there. Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.
As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.
In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.
Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).
It is a terrible environment to work in.
I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.
Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.
>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
You can both be right. It depends on company culture, which depends on the experience, maturity, and attitude of senior management.
The two extremes of company culture are status cultures and service cultures.
In a status culture the product is the internal status hierarchy. External products are largely incidental goals, and customers and markets are only valued to the extent they create metrics that can be exploited by status seekers. Likewise employees.
In a service culture the goal is customer service through high quality output and employee development.
US corps lean far more to status culture than service culture. This is excellent for short termism, but the culture often becomes dysfunctional, if not outright abusive, and sooner or later it implodes, because status cultures aren't good at accepting reality, or at accurately reading it when they do accept it.
And status cultures tend to cargo cult management, where the C-suite is comparing its status to other C-suites, and copying apparent status-raising actions without thinking them through.
In good times a status culture will overhire, because hiring more employees looks like growth. In bad times status cultures will overfire because "cutting the slack" is lowest common denominator status management.
AI is the same on steroids. You get the promise of more growth with fewer employees, and that's hard to resist, even though it's entirely speculative and could easily be catastrophic. (Company results, and especially lasting company results, are orthogonal to whether some employees get good results with AI, because what actually affects results is how predictable the improvements are, whether there are likely downsides, and whether they're structurally in the right places.)
Whether managers should also be ICs is a side issue.
lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
... etc ...If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Email is a thing.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
I mean I have 7 reports right now and we're a startup. And fully remote. And I'm still contributing as an IC too.
Also, why use the analogy of player-coaches? How many successful player-coaches are there in the big leagues? There's a reason it's very uncommon ...
Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...
This ain't about sports.
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule
> They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
What needs? If you squeeze people hard enough there are no needs anymore, only responsibilities and urgent+important backlogs that have no bottom.
Welcome to 2026.
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.
Expectations will be raised until they can't be met anymore. There is always a ceiling.
It is on every single worker to make sure that they don't please the system beyond what is reasonable. Often the problem is people who overwork themselves to please and set the bar over the reasonable amount of work. Still when the majority does not raise their output to an unhealthy amount that must be accepted as a ceiling.
I think you are mixing cause and effect in real life dynamics.
In real organizations people tend to raise their performance to the [often unreasonable] level of expectations, even when situation stops being sustainable long-term for the whole group.
Suggesting that people should simply avoid overperforming assumes a level of control they don’t really have.
What do you think will actually happen at Coinbase now? Is it more likely that people will start saying hard “no,” or that they would stretch to meet the new expectations despite the personal cost?
I'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.
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.
Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.
There are other audiences, too.
One group are the ones who are staying. They lose teammates, they have to restructure work and fear whether there will be another round soon, which may hit them.
And then there are customers, investors, ... who need to be assured they are not dealing with a failing company.
> 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.
The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful.
I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
> At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful
There is ZERO CHANCE they have used ai unintentionally
> also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
By actively using ai they are stating that you are so much beyond them that even a personal "eff you" is not worth the time. One would have to actively try and poke some personally hurtful areas to come off more insulting than use of ai.
So it isn't disrespectful, and neither is it respectful. A perfect nothing, not a thought or care involved. Like a 1-click eCard mailer.
Genuine question. Let's say you are bad with words.
If you ask AI to generate hundred different paragraphs and choose the one which best conveys what you actually feel and want to communicate.
Is it is still a perfect nothing?
> Is it is still a perfect nothing?
You do get how that's worse, right? The person rather spends their time arguing with the clanker than thinking about the person and putting those thought into words, however unstructured they are.
Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.
But what if was "Thanks for the hard work, here's your legal minimum severance" vs "You suck, here's a lavish severance so you don't ever come back"?
Words are fake, money is real.
In Fire & Blood, it is said "words are wind, but wind can fan a fire," so be polite folks.
Quaint.
It's the only thing crypto folks care about, so idk, I think it's fitting.
If the main guy's email is written by AI, at this point we're actually in an invasion of the body snatchers scenario.
Who actually is required?
.. fundamentally, it's only the person collecting payment.
> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
For sure this part screams LLM
> rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it
Wow. That’s my cue to never use Coinbase again.
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
+1 and the irony of this CEO-Idiot calling LLMs "intelligence" and putting people, the stupidest of which are 1000x orders of magnitude more intelligent than an LLM, in the second spot "aligning it", i.e. fixing the AI slop.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
Yep, it's 25+ years of corporate communications.
This is just good writing, not a 100% proof of AI being used.
I assume blaming AI is a way to soften the blow even if its not really a reason, it sounds hip and attractive to investors who want to hear that sort of thing.
Of course it is. That's the reason it's getting pushed so hard. Their end game ideal would be to get rid of all the developers.
“Welcome to layoffemailreviews.com - your daily source of best and most honest layoff email reviews in the industry.
Is there a flood of talent leaving after this one? Major breaches? Only time will tell.
Buckle up, and don’t forget your pudding!”
> 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.
It would be amusing but counterproductive to have a layoff email talk about how they’re firing their best and smartest employees.
If 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.
So just leave it out.
The 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
Can you tell us here?
If 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.
Exactly. 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
I 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.
> 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.
Ai-native ... as in have never done anything without the assistance of an LLM.
This sounds suboptimal to me - probably the kind of employee I would avoid for as long as possible.
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Stop it. You are just making ceos like coinbase’s richer and right.
Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.
I've been coding for 25 years now, and it's not that I see AI as evil, but more that it doesn't solve any of my problems or looking back, any problems I had at previous roles.
It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it in their designs ready for their next job role. I spend probably more time in meetings than doing coding.
Why can't I have an AI that takes my meetings for me?
I started with x86 assembler and Turbo Pascal (I still remember when I got documentation for Turbo Vision - this was groundbreaking!).
The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.
Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.
Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.
As a "young" coder I am hesitant because I don't have decades of skills to fall back on.
It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.
Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.
I'm about the age where I need a walking stick and a cyborg arm to keep up with all these leetcode artists. AI couldn't come at a better time.
I've been around the block and I feel the same.
The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).
That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.
That's not what the word "native" means.
Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".
> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
I think this is just semantic drift (though I am broadly sympathetic to “boo semantic drift”). I see this business use of the term as treating the “mind attuned to being immersed in” and “habitually, automatically reaches for” sub-meanings as the relevant ones, which is (almost as you say, but skew) not quite the same thing as “proficient when the ability is actively engaged”. The more you're trying to navigate a dynamic environment rather than hiring for tasks well-defined in advance, the more that distinction matters in practice.
I think unethical and illegal activity is par for the course in most realms of American business. And I would replace “sued into oblivion” with mandatory arbitration and “appropriate settlement”.
No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.
I don't even know what "AI-native" even means. The term is sufficiently vague to shield any number of discrimination schemes.
It's a term of art that straightforwardly means people who embrace AI-assisted programming. As opposed to the very large number of engineers who actively don't like it, or have enough change aversion to have avoided it.
"There's nothing about being a non-native English speaker that prevents you from being proficient." This is the comment's point. We're talking about proxies and correlations here, not physical law.
Hold up, even before discussing the word "native", there's a weird logical-disconnect between the above two comments. I think paraphrasing is the simplest way to illustrate:
{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."
{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."
{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.
Sure, but we're talking about Coinbase, which is a relatively young company not staffed with a bunch of old people in the first place.
It's totally random to accuse them of using "AI-native" to fire old people.
> a relatively young company not staffed with a bunch of old people
1. What statistics support this assumption? (Either for Coinbase specifically, or "tech companies" in general.)
2. Nobody has to be a literal greybeard in order to be in the crosshairs of downsizing. Just look at Amazon's "make them quit before vesting finishes" pattern.
To 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.
Thank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often
What makes you think old people have inferior knowledge on AI?
Most likely indeed firing old people, but at coinbase that is probably like age 28+
> but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
Huh? If it came out this year then everybody had a chance to learn it this year?
Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
See also "digital native", a popular term which is absolutely about growing up after the technology in question was ubiquitous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
Quite a reach.
First as in that was the first thing they learned and can't really think in non-ai terms.
> 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.
Insanely 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.
Companies 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-a...
I think you misunderstood: Coinbase is offering to pay for the first 6 months of COBRA for the laid-off employees. They can still continue with it for the following 12 months if they want, paid out of pocket.
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.
If 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.
I would sincerely hope that anyone making tech money has some savings put away and isn't living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Yep, I also know of multiple devs going into nursing. It used to be the other way around!
i assure you they don't do that to be generous, they do it to get you to sign a piece of paper which reduces their legal risk profile
Yes but ... people will sign that paper for almost any severance. Consider the alternative (don't sign, get a lawyer etc) -- many folks will just sign to get whatever's on offer
This is surprising about COBRA - I thought it’s always 18 months. Moreover it doesn’t make much sense to limit cobra - you are paying full price out of pocket anyway.
I read that as they're going to pay the COBRA premiums for 6 months for the laid off employees.
> 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.
AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.
> But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game.
Except that he got good at his short game by the end. LLMs will get there sooner than we think.
I don’t think we will though. Because the “short game” is match the requirements of the agent operator. If we don’t care about the finer details that we let the LLMs infer, then we shouldn’t care if a human infers them (but yet we do).
I think LLMs are great, and I think people who can use them to get to the green in one and take it from there will soar, just like people who could identify a problem and solve it themselves did in the past.
I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses.
We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences.
I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.
AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.
We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.
What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?
> I do systems programming.
I'll stop you right there. AI is not good at systems programming, it's good at CRUD web development, which is where most people are seeing the gains.
I think antirez mentioned somewhere he considered it particularly good at systems programming.
>95% of software development is crud.
It's really not, though. As soon as systems have to scale, regulatory requirements come in, etc. it becomes more complex.
AI has solved simple CRUD, yes, but CRUD, was easy before.
>AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing,
Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are, not just for coding?
>AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing,
Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are?
I never touched kubernetes and in 1 week I have a few nodes running and i understand a lot of it. Not perfect but not bad.
I have recently learned Kubernetes without AI and one week is more than enough to understand most of it.
This is definitely not true. But I doubt GP understand "most" of kubernetes too. They probably have a good working knowledge of the important commonly used features.
That was the usual experience pre AI
Not the OP, but it might be that AI isn't as good at systems programming as it is at other domains, or it might be that you're using it differently than I am. I don't know which one it is (maybe AI just isn't good at writing the language you work with).
For things like web frontents/backends, though, it works beautifully. I ship things in days that would take me weeks to write by hand, and I'm very fast at writing things by hand. The AI also ships many fewer bugs than our average senior programmer, though maybe not fewer bugs than our staff programmers.
In my experience ai has had far far more bugs than most of what i call senior engineers but far fewer than juniors.
The boost is for what are glorified crud apps which it 1000x the tedious work. However, the choices it makes along the way quickly blows up without cleaning. Seniors know how to keep their workstation clean or they should.
It sounds like we have opposite experiences.
The only way you could possibly know that is if you're reviewing the code, which means you're not "managing fleets of agents". If you're not reviewing the code (and you wouldn't be if you're managing fleets of agents), then you have no way to tell what you're shipping.
It’s under-appreciated that a proper review takes at least as long as the actual work: it’s all the same time spent understanding the challenge and coming up with the best solution, minus the time spent typing in your solution (almost never a significant amount), plus the time spent understanding their solution and explaining how to get from theirs to yours.
Can you link to a changelog that shows the 5-10x feature increases? I keep hearing this, but I don’t see anything I use ever actually shipping like this, or people backing this up with any sort of proof.
Shipping garbage.
Does what you ship involve hundreds of lines of HTML/CSS by any chance? Do you care about accessibility?
Give an example.
I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know what might be wrong with the new one.
What's your example?
What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.
Ever notice how people making this claim never come with receipts?
Yes, it can. I do this regularly.
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.
I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading
What's an example of such a thing? Just curious
And your parents must be proud of you. You’re just another cog
I 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.
> 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.
We’re not managing fleets of agents. They’re not productive for our workflows yet. It’s usually a couple of CC CLIs running and going back and forth on specific tasks we closely control.
Most of the people making this argument vastly overestimate the quality of engineering and discipline that behind the software powering most corporations. CRUD apps are likely to be the most prominent type of application across industries, and most of them are crud
If the code is really simple, it's cheap to read it. When people don't read it (and when they need to use "fleets of agents"), it's because it's not so simple, and then the people who trust the outcome are those who don't know what it is that they've committed into the codebase. Their logic is no more than: the system hasn't collapsed under the load of 50 (or 500) changes so it probably won't collapse under the load of the next 500 (or 5000). Because that's how engineered systems work, right? If they're fine under light stress, they're fine under heavier stress.
> Because that's how engineered systems work, right? If they're fine under light stress, they're fine under heavier stress.
Isn't this wrong? I thought engineered systems meant something designed with limits.
Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
People that manage AI agents are not engineers as they do no engineering but are instead just supervisors.
What is the difference between supervisor and an architect in tech products area?
> In a year or so
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )
Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"
If you'd told me 20-30 years ago we'd actually get the Star Trek computer in the mid-2020s and it still wouldn't be actually AGI, I would have thought that very strange and unlikely, so who knows?
And if the trend doesn't continue? I understand that a company with Coinbase's performance has little to lose and not many options, but many companies are in a better position.
The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.
Even if the trend doesn’t continue, the current models are very very good. They’re better than the average programmer in the industry, already.
I don't know how anyone who carefully and closely reviews their output could possibly think that. Much of the time their code is fine, but every now and again they make a catastrophic (though often well-hidden) mistake that is so bad that all the tests pass but the codebase will be bricked if enough of those go in. They make such disastrous mistakes frequently enough that a decent-sized codebase can't last for more than 18-24 months.
If the average programmer is this bad, then there must be better-than-average programmers reviewing the code. The problem with agents is that they can produce code at a far higher volume than the average programmer.
Anyway, I don't know how well the average programmer programs, but if you commit agent-generated code without careful review, your codebase will be cooked in a year or two.
Maybe at some coding benchmark. Certainly not at actually shipping and maintaining production grade software.
Agreed! That will be an... "interesting" outcome, if so, for a lot of these companies.
> and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
This is how I feel. It’s building things for me that work. I don’t care how it works under the hood in many cases.
It's not about caring how it works. It's about caring that it keeps working at all even after you add stuff to it for a year or three (and nearly all software written by companies is software they evolve).
And who’s to say it won’t? It’s working now. I’m adding stuff and it’s still working. Why won’t that continue in year 3?
If you carefully read the agent's output you'll see why. It adds layers upon layers of workarounds and defences that hide serious problems, until the codebase reaches a point where the agent can no longer understand it and work with it. All the tests pass right up until the moment when adding a feature or fixing a bug causes another bug, and then nothing and no one can save the codebase anymore.
Maybe a year ago? Right now the LLMs I mainly use (GPT5.5, Opus 4.7) will intuit exactly what I need from my brief specs and universally go above-and-beyond in creating code that is not only extremely high-quality, but catches a ton of the gotchas I would have stumbled on, in advance.
Just a minute ago 5.5 looked at some human-written code of mine from last year and while it was making the changes I asked for it determined the existing code was too brittle (it was) and rewrote it better. It didn't mention this in its summary at the end, I only know because I often watch the thinking output as it goes past before it hides it all behind a pop-open.
Interesting that we’ve have such different experiences. I was working with both those models today and on several occasions it proposed some pretty poor solutions.
I also find I need to run an llm code review or two against any code it produces to even get to the point where’s it’s ready for human review.
In any case they served as an extremely valuable tool.
I use GPT 5.5. Sometimes it does what you say. It certainly finds silly mistakes in my code better than I could. But frequently enough it makes catastrophic architectural mistakes in its own code.
Maintaining software is like 80% of the job.
Because the API’s it uses will change? Nothing in tech is static. And that’s just going to get worse re: this whole AI thing.
> 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
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
Go on, spill some more tea..
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
Are any of these fields hiring?
- big institutional allocators
- activists
- the sellside
- guys managing their private market allocations
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?
Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.
I'm looking forward to marketing folks doing oncall and support work for the features they're shipping.
They'll use coloured pencils to design a Cortana avatar.
Your support will be provided by an AI bot almost as smart as Clippy because it was trained on the marketer's corpus of emails.
I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.
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.
If as a developer all you want your job to be is checking ai generated PRs then this is a great step!
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.
How’s this actually going? I’m sure there are issues, but is it actually fruitful?
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.
The way i look at it is: those users are going to ask differing questions than engineering that may lead to possibilities not considered, thought of, believed possible, etc.. which can be a good thing, when harnessed correctly*.
I'd love to hear more about the positive effects of designers and PMs using AI, especially more on the PM side, if you care to go into more detail
You just invented CMS.
I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".
I'm very much pro-AI but I'd quit your tech team on the spot if I were asked to review those.
this is the worst. Dario pilled in all the wrong levels. but that is a crypto company no wonder they ride the worst ideas to get rich asap. ICOs and NFTs are the closest thing to what we re living right now when they say they solved coding
I'm sure this will turn out fine /s
But also the type of investor who is into crypto in the first place will probably love this
Crypto bros :handshake: AI bros
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
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".
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
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...
There are diminishing returns to more engineers. Also hiring more is like investing with leverage. You might increase EV but also increase the chance of going bust if things go poorly.
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
Saying they're being let go due to the amazing efficiency of AI juices the stock prices more though.
This. Until we get regulations on AI-related layoffs, even the cheese making company will claim that their regular layoffs are to "invest more in AI".
This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?
If engineering ability actually became cheaper you would want more of it, as ideas that were previously too marginal became worthwhile.
This assumes you have more valuable ideas than you can implement. Which, at first glance, seems like something you can take for granted. But in my career over 15 years I was surprised to find it's not the case for most established businesses. The existing business acts as a constraint that limits the idea space way down, and the ability for owners and product managers to generate ideas is way lower than I ever expected.
Execution of unrelated ideas seems like a natural follow on, and having managed several such "labs" efforts, it's actually a good idea but it inevitably grinds up against the lack of will to continue investing in the face of headwinds, especially since the main business line is several orders of magnitude larger than anything labs can deliver in a foreseeable timeframe.
At this point, I truly do not believe there is anything that could happen that would convince HN that LLMs reduce demand for engineering labor hours.
He's actually agreeing it reduces the need for engineers to produce the same level of output as now. He's making the argument that companies would then desire more output to capitalize on additional ideas/projects. I could see it going either way, but likely demand will fall.
Because the data shows exactly the opposite?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...
If it were 2018 I would personally have hired at least 3 devs at my company in the last 18 months. The only reason I haven't is due to the existence of LLMs. Not budget, not covid overhiring. Not soft demand. I literally do not need more engineer butts in seats. It is not longer a bottleneck.
The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and not the buyer side of engineering labor. This means they have blind sides to the buyers view of the market (some sort of information asymmetry), and secondly they exhibit cognitive dissonance to protect their self-esteem as a seller.
Yeah AI is the perfect scapegoat for layoffs recently to soften the impact on stock price and investor confidence. Coinbase is obviously doing layoffs because they are strongly tethered to a stock market that is rattled by political conflict and economic uncertainty.
Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.
It's a nice spin. The AI is so productive that we can cut people. Not "revenue is down, so we have to cut people"
It sounds way better to investors than, we are in a dying business guys!
Oh yeah, AI is just an excuse to sell it to the public. But it's not about that at all. It's about bad leadership.
Isn't this what he says in the post? The first reason listed is market cycle not ai.
Yeah, but imagine if he had said that AI was the reason, and how wrong he would have been if he had said that.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
It would be slop, but the market would love it
I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs.
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.
It's going the opposite direction. Those offering real world and tradfi assets are moving into the crypto space. That is going to eat Coinbase's lunch.
The worst part of using something like Coinbase is having to do yet another bank transfer, waiting for it to clear, doing KYC/AML yet again, etc etc for what most people is just to buy one or two single asset (BTC or maybe ETH probably). Instead just click buy in Robinhood or Schwab along with everything else.
The major prop shops and market makers are all over crypto, for sure. But they're only there because these markets are poorly regulated and there's a lot of retail juice to squeeze.
A friend of mine works for one of the major crypto firms and they're starting to deploy algorithmic trading bots on their own exchange.
The spreads on these markets can be diabolical
That makes sense, thank you for explaining. TradFi already offer access (direct or ETFs) to major cryptos who have demonstrated some utility like BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL and a few others.
If interest in tokens and altcoins wanes, Coinbase may be in a weak position.
Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).
oh they have too! came out a couple of months 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.
At 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.
Having 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.
> 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.
Getting 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.
Exactly, it's too easy to overlook the balancing that good middle managers do.
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.
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.
Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?
What would you blame instead?
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.
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..."
If you create a problem and then do nothing about it, it’s still there years later.
The CEO. No one else to blame, really.
Share price can and does go up because layoffs usually means opex goes down
"paring back", but I agree. The overextended like a lot of high-growth, volatile businesses do
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.
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.
> - 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"
> 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?
Not true. You often see it semi-pro soccer. Previously, you could see player coaches even in top-flight elite soccer.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
Haslem played 72 minutes the entire 82 game season. That's like the Engineering manager who ships a PR once a year.
And to continue with the analogy, he neither replaces the coach, nor the actual team players. He just sits on the bench, paid for his - additional - role. Exactly the contrary of the Coinbase manager-IC, which is supposed to replace 2 jobs in 1.
Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.
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.
Hockey also has Captain (e.g. Mark Messier) and Alternate Captain roles, in addition to the Corey Perry types who aren't titled.
i like MLB catchers, but maybe that is just because future HOF manager Austin Hedges is out there ripping an 0.824 OPS, vibes but no vibe coding
We already have these in the industry. They're Staff+ Engineers and Architects. It's generally the norm to not be cranking out code at this level, but they make sure everyone is moving in the right direction, assisting managers, and mentoring juniors.
Good example but it still sounds more like a “tech lead”: this guy is still focused on tactical line level with other players than on handling the overall strategy, PR, plans, hiring, etc that a coach does
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.
I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
> With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.
To part of it, but chess is generally played one against one, there are well understood rules and a clearly defined goal, and every win is someone else's loss.
When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.
Armstrong did not mean chess players.
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
Big diff between RU and modern Western military (including UA) is officers on the field. RU has a very top-down hierarchy.
In the end, everyone is replaceable. But a king is a bit more difficult to replace, as historically shown.
Less fight, more be present on the battlefield as a show of confidence.
The only successful Player-Coach that comes to mind was Eric Cantona as player-manager of the France national beach soccer team after leaving Manchester United aged 30.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
The fact that there have been so few of them throughout history of sports shows that this is an exceptional, uncommon situation. A small number of athletes compared to the total. It requires that a single individual possess many qualities at the same time.
Bill Russell. Won 9 championships as a Boston Celtic under legendary coach Red Auerbach, and alongside Hall of Famers like Bob Cousy. Then became the coach and starting center for 3 more years and won two more championships.
Rinus Michels [1]. There are so many tho.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinus_Michels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
Kenny Dalglish for Liverpool too, winning the double whilst a player-manager.
And kicking the goal in the final match that secured the Premiership. Definitely counts as being a "professional" league.
Yeah. I'd agree with this if it were tech leads that were mostly just IC leaders.
But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:
> Facilitating for ICs.
> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".
I think Netflix started the sports team analogy for their hiring (and firing). But they don't put forth a "you're a part of the Netflix family". They're open about the work culture you're going to be stepping into.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
It’s funny when bunch of nerds try to mask the fact they have know idea what they’re doing by some lame allegory to sports, military, or some other discipline supposedly more manly and rugger than girly (yugh) math, logic and programming.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
Your categorization of math, logic and programming as "girly" is hilarious.
When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.
I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.
For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.
History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.
Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.
I was being sarcastic (I at least hoped it was obvious). There is probably nothing as illogical as assigning a gender to a logic - or maths or science for that matter. I also find it pretty stupid how “girly” is considered an insult. I prefer girly to being thick.
Player coaches would be redundant given that most sports already have captains, wouldn't they?
Captains can't decide to substitute/bench one of their teammates in the middle of a game.
Lebron James
In sports like Football where CTE is king, there's just not gonna be enough qualified personnel to coach.
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.
Let's be honest, this is a crypto exchange. "Line go up" is the only philosophy these people adhere to.
> 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.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.
Eh. Presumably there’s a ton more trading when the market is hot (and a somewhat lesser extent, when in a bi bear market).
Bi bears are not hot? I beg to disagree!
Ironically, if they adopted a Wall St boiler room culture instead of masquerading as an innovative tech company they'd probably be doing a lot better.
I fail to see how this is specific to a crypto company. You’re drawing a correlation that’s not backed up by any empirical evidence.
The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.
> 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.
Ever been to a crypto conference for example? I have read about and have seen the videos.
Actually, it sounds like you’re the one who hasn’t been to a crypto conference :)
You have to look past literally everything their leadership is saying and at the heart of the matter: This is a dying company, and they physically will not have the capital to pay paychecks if they don't do this. Everything else is window dressing to try to keep investors on-board, but they aren't buying it, and neither should you.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
I see $667M loss numbers in the press, but I also see a positive P/E ratio? How does that work?
Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.
I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.
P/E ratios are usually based on last 12 months, so E = sum of EPS over last 4 quarters.
The thing is that the former crypto gamblers have moved on to gamble in the prediction markets like Polymarket now. Not sure if COIN is coming back from this.
Now that I think of it, the last decade has just been wave after wave of techwashing the same old gambling. First it was sports betting, then cryptocurrency, then NFTs, then "prediction markets".
In the 70 and 80s ppl kept their lifestyle by having their spouse starting to work. In the 90s and 2000s it was with credit cards. In the 2010s it was apps offering artificially deflated prices to corner markets. And now it’s gambling and buying burritos w Klara.
Ahh yes the next big thing! We had cloud, then crypto, then VR??? , then AI and now straight up gambling. I feel the next next big thing in computers should be porn.
Almost every "AI washing", except for the firms that are spending massively on data center capex (Microsoft, Meta), is coming from a company that is hurting.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
what is happening to crypto that is causing this? I was thinking with the recent conflicts crypto would thrive, if anything.
Previous cycles were fueled by retail, with an industry trying to legitimize itself.
This cycle is about max extraction and fraud - Legitimized by the presidential family cashing out billions in meme coins, insider trading and forks of existing protocols.
Hacks have also been hitting hard. North Korea has stolen 500m this year alone and 2b last year.
So… no thriving. On the opposite. Dying is a more appropriate word at this time. Some would call this an opportunity. I see more pain ahead.
No wonder Coinbase is laying off people with the excuse of AI. The reality is that volume is zero. At this stage only me and a bunch of other retail weirdos keep on buying bitcoin paycheck by paycheck…
Idiots who were getting fleeced by shitcoin pump and dumps are now getting fleeced by insiders betting on heads of state being assassinated.
That's the problem with building your castle on a quicksand whose fundamentals aren't in the same order of magnitude as the market cap you command. When all you truly offer is gambling, eventually a shinier casino will open up and eat your lunch.
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
That is bonkers but I will enjoy calling my friends “biological units” from now on
This is sickening. People that don't realise that companies are made of people are in for a surprise. Once they go public, they forget that, and it shows.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
There’s also Yanis Varoufakis’ recent book, Technofeudalism.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
Analogies have to make sense, to be applicable. In this case it doesn't.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes plenty of sense. Player-coaches are a real thing, and in a realm where you're not worried about peak fitness then it's reasonable to demand the coaches become player-coaches.
Player-coaches are a real thing, but noticeable because of how rare and unusual they are. The problem is that the analogy doesn't even hold up in the source its referring to.
Sure, there are good player-coaches, but there are also great pure leaders. There are also very bad player-coaches. A coach who is trying too hard and too deep to be a player when they are less "fit" (or skilled) has historically led to many problems in many cases
It's not a deep analogy. It's not saying player coaches are inherently better, but in their particular situation they want the managers to be coding.
There's not much equivalent to "fit" here, just skill, and they decided they don't want the pure leaders, they want ones that are knuckle deep in the sausage.
Good decision or not, that very basic analogy is completely fine.
Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)
And it's telling that really good players are often terrible coaches / good coaches were not great players.
Like the guy who "just gets math" is often NOT a good teacher.
These people should leave and start their own companies: 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.
F these leaders.
Perhaps it is time to unionize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto...
Unions can't fix the fact that crypto didn't survive it's first real Flight to Quality and is suffering against gold.
Certainly not, I don’t think anyone would make that claim, seems a bit silly.
The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company.
They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation.
American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive practices, but working conditions will only deteriorate from here, with workers crushed between LLMs and offshoring.
Your comment seems to imply you thought unions would have fixed this specific situation, which is why I felt compelled to respond.
A major problem with player-coach is that it makes the manager compete with the IC. If we solve that it'd be more workable, if not it'd erode teams from the inside.
"I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology."
Well today is your lucky day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_player-coaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach#Player-coaches_in...
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
> - 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 then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
The player-coach analogy is very common in role definitions, and it is real concept in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach
I mean it doesn't really help the analogy when most of the examples in the Wikipedia link mention how it's either not done anymore for that sport or very rare nowadays.
If you don't like "player-coach", "quarterback" can be a better substitute.
> I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Experienced high IQ player in a team sport could also be considered player-coach. Players like Lebron James or Nikola Jokic come to mind.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.
Crypto was always a clown show. Not saying everyone working the crypto/Web 3.0 was a clown just.. This tone-def message coming out of the waning crypto industry is nothing more than an eye-roll.
Can I push to production anytime I want? I can run 10000 agents then no problem. I'll just move fast and break things and I'll get massive cheers because its AI.
You joke, but in a way this is the natural trajectory technology has been heading. AI has just increased the magnitude of it
I don't get it either. LLMs put the enshittification of software engineering into overdrive. The job is less fun (reviewing AI slop, sometimes even produced by entirely non-tech people like managers), the expectation of increased productivity, the expectation that we can now do the job of multiple people and salaries will decrease as well. I don't understand how so many software engineers I know cheer for this technology.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
> 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?
Exactly. People are too naive these days
> that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary.
The Marxist view of everything valuable being a product of a person's labor is tired and debunked.
How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.
But right now you also do the job of 10s compared to x years ago.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Bill Russell is (was) the guy you’re looking for and he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
> 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.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
Brian Armstrong is still a billionaire. So it's not like he lacks alternatives to destroying people's lives.
Aahahahaha yes the solidarity of the common memecoiner must not be broken.
what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though?
sounds stupid to me
No problem if you split the gains 50-50. 2.5x raise for the one person.
Why though? That’s wasteful. If I could run my business more efficiently for the same spend that’s great.
The profit from the employee reduction goes to the capitalists not to labor. So it is in the best interest of workers to resist reductions in the number of workers.
They can start their own companies though.
delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
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.
> historically speaking, efficiency has always won out
Too bad AI is not about efficiency. It's about headcount reduction, which is exactly what Coinbase is doing here. AI just gives them plausible cover.
If it was about efficiency, they would be moving faster, not cutting headcount…
Surely there are some insanely smart people amongst the 100s of thousands of laid off supposedly god tier software engineers and adjacent who will start new companies maybe even spawn a new industry?
Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.
Cars were more efficient horses. AI is not more efficient people. It's an excuse to reduce payroll. Capital is fundamentally antagonistic to labor, because labor is an eternal cost center that until AI, never had a solution.
Really? I mean to be honest you can do a lot more with less people now with AI.
I’ve worked with many mids but most people were really good. They’re all even better now.
In both technical and non technical roles.
I think people who are average skill at their jobs are about to be rocked if I’m honest.
>>> 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?
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
> health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market
That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?
Many major markets outside the US have much stronger work-life balance. Isn't that the takeaway?
> 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?
This 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.
Simple, we make them use a company computer, log everything they've ever done then reverse engineer it
Isn'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.
Don't worry agents will take over job
/s
> 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!
> 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.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
15 span of control is nothing for many managers in large companies. I’ve seen 30-45 before.
At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.
Span of control is quite different from direct report.
But now with LLM agents to help you…
I'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.
Not only for those but being able to nitpick jira tickets or github PRs.
Nice work if you can get it.
> 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.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
The kinds of people who really can do all three always have options. It means you end up with a lot of turnover in these types of teams.
Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?
What is the alternative
Start your own company. If you’re already doing everything yourself then you don’t need to do it for someone else.
Starting 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.
Organized labor
History has always been kind to inefficient systems organizing together for protection /s
Efficient system is when worker does work of 5 people for the same salary and CEO makes billions.
I'm not arguing what defines inefficient in these situations, just that "if we group together we'll be okay" for tech workers will go about as well as 1960's longshoreman unionization
Beatings will continue until morale improves
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
AI 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.
They can always announce they work in AI now and change nothing.
Or maybe they have to start designing shoes first, IDK.
I would have to agree. It seems like most of the new funding is going to AI at the expense of crypto.
crypto is not growing that's for sure.
Can't access x.com, getting "Invalid request rewrite". Has anyone else seen it?
Same. Replace x.com with xcancel.com and it'll load there.
Direct link https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
It 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.
Yes. First time I've had that error.
Same here
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
I've strongly disliked every team where this was the case. The people in those positions ended up being neither good managers nor good engineers.
YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.
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.
I worked somewhere once where every once in a while we'd have to create a new deploy meeting because 1) our code was deployed manually over the course of hours and 2) every manager imaginable wanted to be in the meeting asking questions and directing people... you couldn't actually speak to anyone you had to talk through their manager.
I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
I've experienced this as well. I call it the "better safe than sorry" strategy, and the issue is it ignores the very real cost of all the extra effort and work, from the literal costs to the slow releases to the loss of people who just can't take it anymore.
I haven’t had it turn out well with pure managers either, so I’m not sure how much the distinction helps.
Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.
Do you mean not an engineer at the same time as a manager, or never an engineer?
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.
Everything but the AI bit are on my list of manager qualities too, but the best managers I've had weren't active programmers, and one had zero coding background.
Knowing what you don't know and knowing how to get qualified information from people around you makes up for a lot of not having a programming background.
If anything, the managers with technical backgrounds who weren't active programmers tended to significantly underestimate the difficulty of doing something because back in their day, things were different or some such nonsense.
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 think I am a better manager than engineer, not because I'm a shitty engineer but because I recognize the superior strength in my team and do waht I can to leverage the basic principle that if someone is better than you in many things, they should still specialize in the thing they are best at.
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.
You right, but there is a very real coordination problem above the team when you're doing bigger things. I've recently experienced an organization with approx. 25 teams of 5-8, and because of their organization they had way too many concurrent initiatives. It was very hard to effectively swarm multiple teams on fewer (bigger) projects.
Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?
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
Reggie Dunlop, Charlestown Cheifs, they won the Federal League and it's hard to argue it wasn't all down to his coaching.
There's successful actor-directors.
George Halas - Chicago Bears
Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool FC, 1985-1990.
Pete Rose baseball?
Gotta be fun being a strong and active IC with 15 direct reports.
> 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 has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
> 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.
what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.
Are they also held accountable for the code they ship? Are they added to the on-call rotation?
IMO managers (and directors) should staff the large incident management rotation. Helping to coordinate response, freeing up ICs to debug and fix.
or at Coinbase now apparently, prepare to complete 15+ annual reviews in your new role as player-coach!
Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.
I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
Internal tools and help/marketing pages aren't generally considered production code.
What world do you live in internal tooling isn’t production code?
Internal tools keep the lights on and allow customer facing code to function!
Operational tooling also isn’t a sexy thing, but it’s vital for any company to function.
I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.
You and I wouldn't because we're engineers. An executive with ulterior motives would want to call it production for "Marketing"
> As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff.
Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"
Yep I take this as a signal to remove the remaining amount of crypto I had on coinbase out. Fun thing for tonight!
What are the top alternatives? (And are they doing the same thing?)
Hardware wallet. Or just stamp the wallet and private key on a sheet of aluminum.
My employer does that too and people don’t even read or review code anymore.
Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
It is very likely a lie.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
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.
Coinbase gave my confidential "AML" information to criminal extortionists-- I hadn't even had an account with them for a decade because I realized they were bad eggs long ago.
What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.
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.
> what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML
As far as I understand, they're often not allowed to disclose that. E.g.,
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
> In the specific case of “Why did the bank close my account, seemingly for no reason? Why will no one tell me anything about this? Why will no one take responsibility?”, the answer is frequently that the bank is following the law. As we’ve discussed previously, banks will frequently make the “independent” “commercial decision” to “exit the relationship” with a particular customer after that customer has had multiple Suspicious Activity Reports filed. SARs can (and sometimes must!) be filed for innocuous reasons and do not necessarily imply any sort of wrongdoing.
> SARs are secret, by regulation. See 12 CFR § 21.11(k)(1) from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency...
The fact they may not be able to in one circumstance doesn't prove that they're merely following the BSA.
It's obvious when someone gets their money frozen for a month only to just have to perform a KYC check that even if the KYC check was legitimate, and these kinds of results are common over years, the delay was a result of a business decision that increased their float.
I think you're conflating the requirements with the BSA with how executives are using it in a hostile way against customers. They can make the deliberate decision to slow down KYC/AML officers and checks after a trigger, while putting them on a hair trigger, while citing secrecy under the BSA. That is the regulatory nonsense under which they are dressing up a business, non-regulatory decision. It's there to provide plausible deniability.
The compliance officer in this case is plausibly just following the law but in reality they're just running cover for increasing the float -- maybe even unwittingly.
> 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
They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.
If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true that regulation exists doesn't mean whatever is done under the flag of regulation was actually regulatory in nature it just means you have a more believable pile of steaming bullshit to tell the hysterical customer to make it sound like something closer to breaking the law is actually an attempt to follow the law.
Put otherwise, suppose I run a bank and you deposit your paycheck. I decide our reserves are a little low so I set KYC/AML triggers even more sensitive on a hair trigger so that an extra of 0.2% of innocent paychecks get held up an extra 4 weeks (I have also conveniently slow down / underhire customer service) which also causes me to catch 1 or 2 more real criminals. That's not KYC/AML even though that's the mechanism by which I claim to have held it. I'm not bound by the BSA secrecy in such case since the underlying trigger was for increasing the float rather than actually KYC/AML compliance.
------- re: below due to throttling ---------
I am accusing fintech and crypto businesses in general of committing mass fraud through intentionally setting KYC/AML on an artificially sensitive trigger to increase their floats, yes.
I do not know if Coinbase specifically does that -- my limited experience with them is they are one of the few fintech companies that hasn't fucked me over.
I have an absolutely massive body of evidence that leads me to that conclusion, through my own transactions and frozen funds as well as studying a wide amount of CS complaints that show evidence that KYC/AML checks on frozen funds are stalled for weeks to months without any plausible explanation of what is happening which is not a KYC/AML regulatory action but rather an intentional choice to raise floats for free interest and padding their numbers.
Of course what's extraordinarily ironic here is when fintech claims you violate KYC/AML then "law says we provide no evidence" but if you turn around and accuse them then the industry shills will scream "without evidence" while simultaneously saying your counterparty doesn't have to provide it! They are hypocrites! The very people accusing you without evidence betray their own sins accusing you of same! They were the ones that set the bar that they don't need to present evidence, not me.
So you are accusing them of fraud without any evidence.
The level of unwitting irony here is off the charts.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.
Wow
> 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.
Indeed, I don't think that's the brag he thinks it is
AI-unfucker is likely to be a growth industry.
Yeah or anybody who can still actually read code.
To 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.
Every 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.
At 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.
"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
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
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.
ofc 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
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).
Average EU unemployment rate is ~6% with some countries as high as 10%. I think many in the EU would just be happy to have a job to begin with.
As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
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
"If you've worked for us for 24 months and we fire you, we'll pay you for 29 months and give you your next equity and pay for your insurance for 6 months" and "if we fire you we'll pay you an extra ~21% (plus your next equity and another month of insurance too) of whatever you earned" does indeed sound quite nice considering that a vast majority people who are terminated get nothing or next to nothing.
It'd be looking a gift horse in the mouth to whine about "well they get 22+% at XYZ"
When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous
> as European I would say this is fairly standard
I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.
When I was laid off, I got only 2 weeks of pay (notice period).
well, everyone has different experiences, but just to make it clear, I was calculating ordinary salary during notice period into severance pay since in many companies it's essentially severance pay:
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
The European model will never be better than the U.S. one for productive workers like in tech. Tech workers in the U.S. have the same benefits as EU ones for three times the salary.
European model can be better for employees, maybe not so much for employers, in US vice versa, everyone has different preferences
sure you can earn more, but there are plenty of benefits coming from Europe, for instance how many days of vacation you have by law in US? what's the point of the more money in US if employer will work you to death with no work/life balance
I found amusing mention of COBRA for 6 months, that's in most of the EU permanent benefit of all citizens not given by employer, your stuff is just paid from the universal healthcare and doesn't matter whether you are employed or unemployed, in US you can end up in situation you don't earn enough to have good health insurance, but you earn enough to not be covered by insurance for low income people, no such thing possible in EU (thought his doesn't really affect IT field)
AI and crypto --- what could go wrong?
This: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...
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.
when we will see "we do not need CEO anymore. AI can do it better. we are sorry to let go CEO, we do not need him".
When tech workers finally unionize.
> 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.
> 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??
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.
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.
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.
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
Yikes. That's bad leadership at that top all around. But we already knew that when they announced layoffs. No good leader lays people off.
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Darkly funny that Armstrong's Twitter bio still reads "Creating more economic freedom in the world" when he has relegated humans to "the edge" of his own organization in favor of the pseudointelligent pseudogod.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.
huge red flag
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
if you vibe code financial systems this cannot mean anything good for your business
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
This REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop
I've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...
At least there’s positives there…
I keep seeing $x4% figures for layoffs. Is that right below the legal threshold for layoffs (e.g., 15%), or am I imagining patterns that aren't there?
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
Could you link the post?
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
Your sentiment should be redirected to the leadership team and execs, not the engineers themselves.
Nah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.
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 forgot that all criticism is reserved for… Nazis? Chill
Have some empathy for the misled retail investor that gambled their savings to thieves?
I’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?
Not sure i would trust coinbase with any cyrpto from now on.
Changing much of their code to be AI written is not a good sign.
“ 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.”
Consider 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.
From 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).
> "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.
I'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?
This 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
It's fascinating to watch org managers decide that AI has made people management easy and cheap, instead of org management
Its 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
Companies 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.
Apart 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
I 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.
> 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.
Anyone else get a clouflare error 1035 when trying to visit the tweet?
Yes. Alternative URL: https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...
Thank you
Recession signal.
Web3 cycle signal*
Ok 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.
I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.
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.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
Isnt that the most fair thing for them to do?
It's better to do a hiring freeze before the RIF. Otherwise people have left jobs to come work for you and are now stranded.
Perhaps try to space out hiring and firing a bit more
You know, hire, stop hiring, then start firing
you don't even get a severance that way. People moved for a job, then got stranded without even getting a first paycheck.
3 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?
Wait: Isnt NFT the next big thing anymore? :-D
All in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
> 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.
How does the “flattening” affect equity grants. With fewer employees, does each get larger equity stakes?
The behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
16weeks plus week or so per year of service is pretty good
Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
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.
I have to admit I'm always baffled by these "you could sue over this trivial matter" replies. Do you think lawsuits cost no time or money? Obviously I'm not going to do that.
You could at least write a letter.
You’re giving legal advice based upon something you were lead to believe. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that proving damages would be difficult. The third is that you’re operating in a pay to play justice system.
Maybe you don’t have to make comments like this?
If you joined when Coinbase was still giving 0.1BTC signup bonuses, it might be worth trying to retrieve the account
Closing mine today
Given how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.
Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!
Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest
Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.
It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.
Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.
Depends on what they're shipping. We're doing this with UI work, as long as your backend is secure I don't see what the issue is personally.
Generally engineers are not well placed to be building UIs.
Frontend has plenty of security considerations.
You are a npm import away from having big problems.
You're definitely doing something wrong if that's the case at your company.
Like letting non-technical teams ship production code
But the claude/cursor/kiro/codex said my code was production ready, enterprise grade, and PCI/alphabet soup compliant.
That is your problem right there. Instead of PCI compliance you needed that sweet, sweet IBM MCA compliance.
Rookie mistake by your AI; otherwise it did a flawless job, and the glaze it's been giving you is 100% accurate. You are the bestest.
If one more AI calls me "insightful" or says that my question "really cuts through the noise" or "gets to the heart of the matter"...
You're totally right!
How did you solve supply chain security?
>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?
That reminds me, I'll need to stock up on rum so I can cheer the more spectacular detonations.
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
This 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.
It 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?
Because it’s faster and cheaper, which are two very important metrics?
I’ve never wondered if BoA is moving fast
> Leaders will own much more
Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
Over 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.
I d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.
This 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?
I never much liked Coinbase. I like them much less now.
I would love to see what IC Brian is doing.
Print it all out and bring it to the meeting please.
Bitcoin 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-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.
If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
Is there a different layoff email that would leave you satisfied and happy?
I 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
"As the CEO responsible for the asinine decisions that got us here, I am stepping down immediately, without severance."
Not to forget. "I am also returning all of my pay to company."
I feel like this would just select for business leaders that take zero risk.
I 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.
Well there's the several billion of severance expense. I mean do we want to hang someone every time there are layoffs?
"But don't worry, I assure you I still intend to personally become wealthy. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter!"
> 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?
> 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.
"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
> 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.
And increase in their workload. Win-win!
Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
What is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
Guys 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!
Another dying business betting on AI to save them. Good riddance
Coinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
ok sure good luck. more like conbase anyway
To me that sounds like financial issues dressed in PR slop.
Crypto in bear market, volume is down. Less money to skim. Layoff.
The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
Lots of layoffs this year. The economy is in bad shape.
Everyone I know is barely holding on, markets doing well though but tbh it feels like a mad scramble last resort sort of thing
yeah, check reddit. now even front page is people talking how hard it is. everywhere.
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.
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.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
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.
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.
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
> I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
And due to this it deserves even more mockery.