I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth.<p>Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance.<p>Devs seem a little more grizzled this time around, so I think this mindset is slowly becoming the norm. College grads seem skittish, but they always are.<p>People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable. It's probably true that no Armstrong, no Coinbase, and 10% of Coinbase is the prize.<p>EDIT: It's actually 14 weeks: <a href="https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-cofounder-brian-armstrong-578d76eedb12" rel="nofollow">https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-co...</a><p>Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible.
Go back and read the HN thread from the Coinbase DPO [1]. Their valuation was insane then, before the war in Ukraine, inflation, or Omicron. The top comments on that thread shock me. Even at that time I expected every other comment to be about how overvalued they were, but it just wasn't the case.<p>Wonder if people could've been made to see this then. I went full on Chicken Little [2] and mostly just got treated like I was yelling at children to get off my lawn.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275</a><p>2. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275&p=2#26812175" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275&p=2#26812175</a>
I don't understand why Coinbase is feeling such a crunch. They are just middleman in buying and selling. Their advantage is supposed to be that they make money whether crypto goes up or down. How can they screw this up?
Why would you ever run a company at this stage so close to the edge that a 10% reduction in payroll makes a meaningful difference to your bottom line even after adjusting for the immense morale and PR hit? Seems so wildly irresponsible. Did they really fail to plan for such an obviously plausible scenario as what we are experiencing now? Or was the explicit plan always "eh, we'll just throw some people overboard"?<p>Not to mention, what the fuck are you doing if you're not in an obsolete industry but each extra employee is not making you money?
Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly?
Being an employee in a high risk field like crypto is a tough business.<p>You are everyday one day away from a massive market crash or crypto heist to be let go.<p>(Yes, conventional companies too, but not to this extent)
the most ridiculous thing is: they tried to recruit me 8 months ago. it was all unicorn and rainbows and bullshit this is the future. so if just 8 months ago, the CEO who has a 110 MILLION DOLLARS house couldn't see 12 months into the future, and required 18% reduction in headcount because of some unforseen crypto winter, who really is at fault here?<p>what a fool that CEO is, and glad I turned the job down and feel bad for the people who were sold the cool aid.
Genuine question: At what point do we actually declare that we are in recession. Do we wait for GDP figures out these signs are enough to assume we are in bear markets now.
This prognosis was the final straw caused me to exit the market as it sounded like Brian wasn’t expecting a recovery in any reasonable time period.<p>Furthermore, I felt that other asset classes were overvalued when I got into crypto and I hardly think that’s it’s currently the same.<p>It also turned out to not be the inflation hedge I originally assumed it would be. Part of my current assertion is that cryptos value is tied to retail investors - the same who need to pull out of the market to deal with Very real expenses.<p>Let’s also give credit where credit is due. Brian may also be using the economy as cover. Give credit where credit is due - FTX came in and ate their lunch. Hats of to them.
I see they cut off access for staff before telling them. not an atypical move, but I wonder if they were actually able to revoke all access, given there's systems like Kubernetes where some auth. types can't be revoked once granted.
NPR has just aired a short interview with a former Coinbase PM. She is a founder of a crypto fund now and has never been that optimistic like now with crypto expanding, NFT, many more developers coming into crypto, etc.
hmm. looks like the total mentality of an entrepreneur changes when the company becomes public. with VC funds, the entrepreneur focuses on execution and builds and with IPO, its ok for entrepreneurs to lose vigor and can buy millions worth property and also lay off employees.<p>In the end, it has nothing to do with open society or for the people. its all about money and its just greed.
Would this be the Coinbase whose CEO just spent $133 million on a home?<p><a href="https://www.ibtimes.com/inside-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrongs-133m-house-10-bedrooms-13-bathrooms-3372510" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibtimes.com/inside-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrongs...</a><p>Capitalism is a harsh mistress.
No surprise, just like Uber , Airbnb etc..coinbase has been overstaffed ever since they raised a major amount of capital many years ago...<p>Hence , I don’t see what 5K people can be doing at coinbase since some startups in Europe are doing the same with like 100 people...<p>It’s been known for years : startups overhire and lay-off when recession comes up.<p>With the “nazi revolution” in the 50’ , most startups rely exclusively on “Social Darwinism” , to solve problems or improve products , by having them fight internally and let the best ideas come to executives. Of course only employees who know how to navigate corporate politics are able to reach them and win those fights..<p>Those 1000 were not part of it, but they will have no problem finding another position somewhere else.
Wasn't this guy one of Paul Graham's darlings? Weren't the "geniuses" at YCombinator invested in this pile of trash?<p>I would really like one of those "insightful" posts from pg telling us how to pick winners right about now.
In my opinion this is what greed does to people. Doesn't matter your background. Armstrong was here on HN pointing out his vision of free exchange of currency at close to zero rates. He wanted to fight "the big guys", including credit cards mafia and PayPal mafia. What A WONDERFUL goal.<p>What he ended up with, is obnoxious exchange rates @ Coinbase (triple what credit cards charge), hundreds of thousands of ruined lives, lots of suicides, and $100 million dollar mansion.<p>What A RECORD.<p>Don't get me wrong - I would love to live Armstrong's life (although I wouldn't be this shrewd), but as someone who believes in heaven and hell, I definitely would not want to die as Armstrong.
I honestly thought the pandemic would be the trigger for a recession. Clearly that wasn't the case (or at least it was a delayed effect). This doesn't seem to be a case where a single event triggered a recession (eg subprime in 2008). It seems to be a combination of events.<p>Inflation is a big one. This one is interesting because the two biggest factors (housing and gas) are completely artificial price hikes. Housing is a double whammy because we had artificially cheaper housing in the last 2 years because of the pandemic. That makes price hikes seem worse than they are (note: there still are significant price hieks in rents). There's pent up demand from the pandemic. There's some institutional buying of homes (which honestly should be outlawed). But really it's just price hikes "because we can".<p>Gas was triggered by Ukraine but that's just another "because we can" situation. The Biden administration could ban exports of refined petroleum products if they really wanted to apply downward pressure to gas prices. It's not that Biden has a bad energy policy. He seems to have no energy policy.<p>And then there's crypto. What a lot of people are learning is that the only thing holding up the crypto bubble was the collective belief in continued speculative gains. That's literally it, even for the (supposed) stablecoins.<p>I personally see crypto as a massive waste of energy (eg Bitcoin energy usage is about the same as Sweden's) for very little utility so I personally hoped the bubble would burst because crypto is such a massive example of a solution desperately searching for a problem. I can't say this was or is inevitable. Collective delusion can last a really long time. But I hope the bubble does burst.<p>Obviously this sucks if you work (or, rather, <i>worked</i>) for Coinbase. At least they're getting some severance. It may be a rough time for finding a new job, even for software engineers, for a couple of years, something that hasn't really been true for >12 years.