Update on Hiring Plans
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
This was for a relatively senior position, not a fresh grad. Going to be hard to get a new job considering most of the other places have hiring freezes and I chose Coinbase over other offers (mostly from FAANG), these offers have probably been out for over a month now doubt i can resuscitate them.
On top of that most of the other offers were for SF, and my partner already has a job in NYC on this basis.
Nothing but pain. As much as I appreciate the severance, the damage being done here is immense.
This is simply not true, from CASH, to Gemini and Kraken (even Binanace) have not had this level of continued 'shadyness.'
Just because they appeal to the lowes common denominator and have a large presence in the US and out doesn't mean they are the least shady by a large extent: I still argue BTC-e was the most honest and upfront exchange which got taken out by the FBI despite operating in an entirely different justification (RU).
With that said, we need to shift to decentralized exchanges: BISQ is where people should be by now.
The fees are higher than the aforementioned exchanges, but this is what is being built out, and I have now problem with that at all as an early adopter.
0: https://protos.com/square-bitcoin-jack-dorsey-fintech-cash-a...
1: https://electrek.co/2022/05/26/tesla-delivers-megapacks-bitc...
Unfortunately that's not saying very much!
Harsh, but that is what happens when you lie with dogs: you tend to get fleas.
With that said, you're better off not going there and can now use the severance as run way for your next role.
Let this be a lesson, anyone wanting to deal with CONbase this the type of standard they have, and their customer/userbase has been leaving in droves for a reason.
Their IPO was probably the last gasp of that rotting corpse.
Just so others are aware, this is not true. One can have multiple visas issued, but you may only enter the US on one of them. It is very common for people to have 10 year B1/B2 visas and then also get an F1/J1 visa issued later on to be a student which allows you to work on campus. I don't know the OP's situation, but one can also get multiple TN visas issued to work for multiple companies at the same time. This is how nurses from Canada are able to drive across the border and work for different hospitals.
> [...]
> And at the end of the day, I think you’ll be proud to have helped Coinbase navigate this next part of its journey.
If my eyes could roll any further they would fall out the back of my head
"Although I've accepted your offer, I'll be starting employment elsewhere. And at the end of the day, I think you’ll be proud to have helped dymk navigate this next part of dymk's journey."
This continues to happen over and over again in the industry, and is the reason why I always advise people who get exploding offers from companies to just accept them and then back out later if they need to. Loyalty and respect cannot be a one way street. There's so much propaganda around "burning bridges" that keeps prospective employees in line (and it also extends to stuff like negotiating wages, discussing salaries at work, job hopping and more). Look out for yourself out there, no one else is going to do it. Certainly not the HR department.
Rescinded offers are an extremely rare occurrence. If I had not one, but two offers rescinded I'd start wondering if maybe employers were discovering something they didn't like during routine background checks: Unflattering social media posts, something on your record, and so on.
Maybe it's purely coincidence, but if this becomes a pattern I'd start looking more closely for potential issues in your public profile or public records.
If Amazon gives me an exploding offer, I shed no tears for Bezos by rescinding. You might perceive this as rare depending on where in your career you are, but going through this has fundamentally changed my perspective on job hunting.
There is a power imbalance. If I rescind, a normal company will survive. When I was rescinded on, I had to completely change my life plan, apply for unemployment (unsuccessfully), and re-interview while studying for finals. In a twist of irony, I ended up rejoining the company that rescinded my offer a year later (it's a good gig, what can I say) and it spread that some interns had their offers rescinded that year -- bloodboiling. Companies will literally not care, and I will not either.
Right To Work states are indeed mostly in the South.
It sounds like a death spiral with the lack of backfilling.
...
Describes quite a few tech companies to be honest.
When else are you going to be able to take time off so easily? Rescinded offers are pretty rare to waste such a good opportunity
What a mess!
On top of all this, you also lose unemployment benefits if you quit your job and the new one has rescinded their offer. As far as the states are concerned, you voluntarily quit your previous job, and never started a new one
Given that companies are almost always choosing to leave people high and dry, the rational response is to not let yourself get into that situation by not giving your employer advanced notice
Anyone who had had the rug pulled under them knows how immense the dollar cost can be, especially when you have already arranged a relocation.
No, don't do this in a professional developer job.
These rescinded offer stories are rare. That's why they make headlines. It's a newsworthy event, not a common occurrence.
Don't compromise your reputation and burn bridges on the way out the door just to compensate for the remote possibility of being subject to an outlier event like this.
Leaving on a good note and maintaining positive references is far more valuable than hedging against perceived downside risk of having an offer rescinded.
If you’re in an area with few employers, don’t want to move, _and_ don’t want to work, then maybe don’t give notice, otherwise you’re just leaving value on the table for people who only like you when you leave value on the table
Used to be rare.
This happened to plenty of people I knew personally during the covid layoffs and I see no reason it won't happen again (in fact we're discussing a pretty well known company doing it right now in these very comments).
> Don't compromise your reputation
Your reputation with who? I've never considered working for a previous employer in my entire career and never, ever known hiring managers at one company to have influence over another.
I used to feel very safe when leaving a role but it's unfortunately just not the way things are these days. Same goes for "ghosting". I used to think it was repulsive for candidates to ghost a potential employer during an interview, however I've been on the receiving end of companies ghosting a shocking number of times.
I wish we lived in the world you are describing, but we don't.
If you haven't quit your job and the offer is pulled but they pay you out a month or two..
Plus you get the added bonus of an additional two weeks pay.
Young people might not even realize, but back in the olden times of non-"unlimited vacation" employers were required to payout your unused vacation time when you left (usually leaving you with a fair bit of extra cash).
Unlimited vacation means that you no longer get this even though you probably take the same amount of leave, so you have to figure out a way to make up for this yourself.
I've heard stories of people working two remote jobs to double their income, but based on my experience of just two weeks overlap the stress induced from secretly having two jobs indefinitely seems to outweigh the financial benefit.
Same here. I read about this happening, but can't imagine wanting to deal with that kind of stress and anxiety personally.
You aren't accepting to an industry, you are accepting to a hiring manager. And it's just rude to act this way. Exploding offers aren't great, and if you have a problem with them, then simply don't accept them. You miss some opportunities this way but you feel better when you look in the mirror. Regardless, as others have noted, Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem. They seem to be handling this as well as can be expected given those problems.
Why wouldn't I behave exactly the same way if another company offers me 1.5x the salary?
edit: Since I can't delete my comment now, I just want to apologize that I read your message too quickly and missed the 50% salary difference part. Come on, there's ethical and then there is crazy, of course you leave and take the other offer if it's 50%, that's common sense and any hiring manager should understand it. But that's not really commonplace and you can handle it in a professionally ethical way.
Don't let profit driven corporations brand themselves as "family", or any other concept which deserves moral consideration.
I'm joining a business, not the Knights Templar.
I hear this a lot but the job market indicates the opposite. Given sufficient skill and availability everyone is hireable. In your world Jacob Applebaum is giving back rubs to Damore under a bridge somewhere pulling on two ends of a food stamp.
Shrug. I could be wrong, I'm terrible at these things sometimes.
IOW, do you really think that Damore is the exception to the rule?
I additionally think that trying to compare someone rescinding an offer with Damore and co is irrelevant when the actions are nowhere near equal, and therefore the reactions would also not be anywhere near the same.
The point that was being discussed was whether or not "bad reputations are hard to repair". GP argued that this is not the case and did use an example of someone who got a bad reputation and (to my understanding) has not managed to establish himself in a prestigious position as the one he had.
It's Damore. And he's working, as far as I know.
As for "bad reputations": at Google, and I assume at most modern companies, if an applicant came in who worked somewhere you worked at the same time, you got an automated email asking you to rate that person. I don't think I'd even call that a "backchannel."
How much influence did that have? Don't know.
I always knew when the bonuses had gone out at Oracle, because I'd get a flood of reference questions for people trying to leave Oracle.
Thanks, fixed
Stepping out of an offer isn’t something that most people will bother telling anyone about. The bar seems to sit somewhere around setting a server room on fire.
Ah yes, literally burning the bridge (if the servers utilize a network bridge).
"Burning bridges" are very exaggerated.
For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
Most people who worked at one FAANG also eventually work at one more during their careers. So if you screw over one FAANG, you'll have a hard time at 40% of FAANG.
It doesn't stop there. God forbid you live in the Bay Area, and you and I perhaps cross paths at a party, Burning Man, or any other event. And for crying out loud, you better not be connected to me on Linkedin, because people will be reaching out for backchannel references for the rest of your career.
The tricky thing about all this is that you'll never know. People will just magically stop responding, when you felt that things were going great. In my career of 20 years, I've probably been professionally disappointed in something like 4 or 5 people, and I can definitely think of 2 who have resurfaced in my life one way or another.
Tech is a huge space when you're starting out. But as your career accelerates and you end up gaining more visibility, that same space becomes very small very quickly. I would not mess with my reputation, as a matter of principle, but also as a matter of prudence.
Well, see, I don't even need to work with you to know I wouldn't enjoy it :). Spiteful much? And guess what, I bet the tech industry is big enough that it will never happen, so cheers.
1. Most people never gain any amount of visibility in their lives, and that's fine. But why prevent that from at least being a possibility? What if it turns out that you have something interesting to say and there's a ton of people who want to hear it (eg: you become a VC or an expert in something). Not being able to benefit from having a personal brand should the opportunity present itself would be a hell of a bummer. You'll notice that I am being very careful with my own identity when giving unpopular feedback.
2. Sure, in 2022 it would be hard for a startup in Iowa to learn that you screwed someone over in Florida. But do you really want to bet that the same will be true in 2042? In the last 20 years, we went from no social graph at all to a social graph in every slice of our lives. What are the odds that in the next 20 years we won't see continued progress towards transparency and accountability?
Reputations have never mattered more, and will only do more so in the future.
Even if this individual or this company was exceptionally vocal about your betrayal, do you really think it would "prevent having visibility into your life as a possibility?"
The arguments for this are all over the spectrum, but I think _Most_ people fall into a moderate stance of, if you accept and offer and something substantial and unexpected changes your situation (an incredible competing offer, an unexpected opportunity, health or spousal related issues) then you should do what's best for you and not let loyalty to a business and a people that you don't even have an established relationship with yet have a negative impact on you.
As evidence by the Post here - Companies will make the same decisions when exceptional circumstances arrive.
I would also argue that anti-corporation/anti-business sentiment in the USA has never been more prevalent with r/antiwork in the spotlight, ridiculous inflation, a new outburst of unionization (e.g. starbucks) and CEO's under fire (Elon/Bezos) that a reputation for making tough decisions for yourself and not exhibiting loyalty where its not deserved might gain you more fame. Especially if some "SV Startup CEO" corroborated your story for you.
I guarantee there's at least one person per FAANG who never wants to work with me again. Probably a dozen others in different companies.
... And yet, here I am making seven figures and receiving a request or two per day to interview with various tech companies. If one won't hire me, 3 dozen others will. I have a pool of 100+ colleagues who would be happy to provide a glowing reference.
I do not think it matters nearly as much as you think, unless you live in a smaller city and limit yourself to only working locally.
There are better ways to deal with adversity in the world than to go on the attack and threaten people’s livelihoods. Even if their decision impacted you adversely, it doesn’t give you the right to fuck someone over in retaliation.
For every you that wouldn’t hire the parent posters, there are hundreds of managers that will.
No part of the hiring loop at major tech companies for ICs that I am aware of involves checking references. We definitely don’t do that as part of the loop. Our entire hiring process is based on how well you do in the interview.
That being said, especially with the acceleration of remote work (I live on the opposite coast) Opportunities are vast.
Do you have a "burn book" of people who have wronged you or something? How would you even realize it's the same person a decade down the line? Why would you even care?
But let's see if the inverse is true as well. If you deeply deeply deeply cared about your job (eg: it's your startup and you have exactly 12 months of runway, but it takes 4 months to source, vet, hire and onboard someone), would it matter to you that someone cheated you out of a third of your runway?
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. That should answer why someone who is likely to reasonable care about their job and would likely experience a serious setback in their work would be really upset about the OP's actions.
In short, while you say that now, I highly doubt it actually would be the case were this hypothetical a reality. You'd have to be incredibly thin-skinned and vengeful to carry this much weight to something so minor.
"Feeling a bit less wronged" is one thing, "making sure that everyone knows how I feel about you" is quite another.
- we're looking for new members for our camp and this guy shows up.
- a female friend meets him on a dating app and tells me about him.
- this guy is being considered for a lateral move within his next company, and the hiring manager is a friend of mine.
- we're on the fence about keeping this guy or letting him go.
- etc, etc.
But regardless if founder or employee, I don't see why we should lie about people misbehaving. If I know someone is a bad apple, I am not going to lie about it - especially if I can prevent someone I care about going through the same ordeal. I also don't know why I should change my mind about someone just because some time has passed. People don't change.
It's frankly pretty appalling that I have to spell this out to you. I suppose you didn't think much of the Me Too movement? While clearly not on the same scale, the fundamental societal mechanics that justify outing perpetrators of sexual harassment are the same ones that justify outing people who break contracts. The society would be a much better place if people knew that karma is real.
It’s a double-edged spear. Eventually someone you dislike will have a VC deal pending; if your defamatory comments cost them the deal (or even appear to have had a role), that person will end up owning everything you have and everything you ever will have after a massive court judgment.
And on the flip side, VCs dislike investing in people who are in litigation or who have faced it. You will have to do a lot of explaining about why you were sued, and if there was a judgment against you, it’s hard to imagine your professional judgment not getting questioned.
It takes an average of 58 days to hire an engineer in the US. [0] Add to that another two months to onboard them. [1]
> Offer them half your company if that's what it takes.
Wait - so someone accepts a job, implying that the comp was fair. And then quits a week before a start date without any notice (OP's story). Were you recommending that founders should pre-emptively give away half of the company on top of the original offer just to prevent the possibility of any one random person acting dishonestly?
[0] https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/recruiting-kpis [1] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-onboard-a-sof...
And if circumstances change, so does that implication.
I am not implying that there are no good reasons why someone should bail out after accepting. But you should have a very good reason for doing so. Someone else's offer that's $5k higher is not one of them.
Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less. There's a certain amount of common decency that can be expected from both sides - if not for ethical reasons, then at least for practical reasons of not destroying your reputation.
In this light, yeah, that's a reasonable take. Except, frankly? Workers know that this isn't the case generally. "Common decency" isn't. And folks with power have the primary obligation; that would be employers.
I wouldn't bounce from a company over a $5K delta, but I would absolutely expect employers (most of them--I'm quite happy working where I do, where I don't feel that way) to take that low-hanging fruit at my expense the second something gets tight; expecting folks not to take that account is asking them to stick their neck out for the notion of a "professional reputation" that most people don't care about.
Now if it is a random person easy to replace giving away 1/2 would be crazy.
58 days is under two months and a startup could hire someone within a week. I've seen someone apply, the owner chat with them a bit, hire them and they were driving across country the next day. Not every founder has those abilities to sell the candidate and have the judgement and believe in themselves to hire on intuition. If you can't do that you might fail where others succeed.
I engaged with you on a good faith basis that you're genuinely curious about the point I am trying to make. The above comment makes it clear that you're just trolling.
> and a startup could hire someone within a week.
The act of hiring someone _can_ take far less than a week. But it shouldn't. You also shouldn't be driving cross-country for any random startup you just met yesterday. If you haven't yet realized that hiring is not a competition in expediency, I doubt I can change your mind in a single HN comment.
People want things both ways. They want the flexibility of at-will so they can drop someone immediately, but they also want the employee whose work will make them very wealthy to be “committed” and “in it for the long haul.”
I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest. No salaried employee (where I live at least) signs a contract agreeing to work for any specified period time and I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
It truly is for one very simple reason - you accept and the hiring manager tells all other candidates that the company is going with someone else. If the person then flakes out, the company is in a difficult spot because the best candidates have several offers and as soon as you're out, they confirm with their next best option.
> I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
There are reputable and less reputable companies. What Coinbase is doing is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer. Again, a shitty thing to do, but even so, you'll notice that they were not contractually required to pay anyone anything for rescinding the offer, and yet they are going to do that. Why? Because reputation matters.
I still think you aren't fully taking into consideration the lack of symmetry of power in the employer-employee relationship and are expecting too much from employees while guaranteeing them so little.
Whining about talent shortages gets annoying. In every case, I ask if they’re recruiting outside the region, recruiting employees from HBCUs and women’s colleges, considering candidates with non traditional backgrounds, etc and the answer is always “no.”
Your shortage is self-created more often than not.
StillI agree with many others here on: don't back out on a whim, only for a very good reason. Life happens.
I'm not taking sides here, but am curious to see your argument.
What, you’ll be so personally slighted that this person made a business decision that you’ll ensure to disrupt everyone else’s time at burning man/a party/ any other event?
And what appears to be a "business decision" could be a serious setback for the person on the other side of this transaction. Granted, as a startup founder, I am more exposed than someone at FAANG, but don't fool yourself - either way, someone wasted a lot of time and money on giving you a shot, and more importantly, they declined all other candidates. It really is such a selfish thing to do, and while sometimes you have no choice (health, etc), I didn't get the feeling from the OP that he felt particularly bad about it.
So to get back to your original question - no, I wouldn't give you a pass because you showed your dirty side in a business context. And if I thought you were dishonest, I would assume that your dishonesty extends across all facets of your life, and I would think I'd be doing my friends a favor by letting them know.
But there are three caveats:
1. That last statement is only true because most of the people who start or join a startup don't see a material increase in the value of their equity. But a little known secret in the startup world is that you only have to be right once. It doesn't matter one tiny bit if your previous 5 startups failed, if the 6th one ends up finding the product market fit. My batting average is pretty poor, and even so I am way ahead of anyone I grew up with. You only have to be right once.
2. People think of startup success as this all or nothing thing, where you're either super poor or super rich. In reality, if you give it your best and do a decent job, even if you end up failing you'll be getting calls from people who you would have never met in any other way. For example, I failed with a startup about 10 years ago and ended up at Square only because of that exact same failure. There's no way in hell it would have happened any other way.
3. Most startups are run by first-time founders, and most first-time founders are still early in their learning process. A direct consequence of that is that they are cheap. But every once in a while you come across someone who's had one or two big exits, and I guarantee you that they are thinking differently about comp. In PG's words, Apple could have given Steve Jobs 95% of their equity to lure him back, and it still would have been a great deal for them. Experienced startup founders know that, and they have levers that FAANG doesn't. There are two senior people in my current startup that I poached directly out of FAANG.
2. Sure, startups are a fine place to hone your talents, show your worth, and network. Same as any other type of workplace. Who's to say you wouldn't have met someone else at a big company who could've gotten you into Square?
3. For every serial entrepreneur who truly has a knack for it and truly learned along the way, there are those who are persisting in error. You're combining your first and second caveats here, describing the possibility of networking one's way into working for a quality experienced founder who will be your lottery ticket.
Nothing wrong with startups, but this is just another set of hoary old truisms more optimistic than the previous one.
Let's do the math. YC has had 378 exits out of 4314 investments [0], so roughly 9% so far. Most investments have been made recently enough that those companies are still baking, so let's double that number to 18%.
The only other number of you need is how likely you are to get into YC. Their overall acceptance rate is 1.75% per application[1], so if you apply three times with the same startup, you get to 5.25%. That figure includes literally everyone and their grandmother, so let's assume you're deciding between a startup and FAANG. Well, FAANG's acceptance in late stages of interviews is around 15% [2], so your YC acceptance chances are around 33%.
Combine 33% and 18%, and you get 6% per lifecycle of a startup. If you try that with four startups, you're at 24%.
Is 24% a good deal? Well, it depends on the upside and the opportunity cost. Let's assume it took you 16 years to build 4 failed startups. In that time period, you could have earned around $5m at FAANG ($300k/year). Of course, things could have also gone wrong (bad manager, your screwed up, layoffs), so let's peg that chance at 80%, which gives the opportunity cost of $4m.
The average YC exit is $24m (not taking into account the whales, which ballooned the overall YC portfolio to over $300B) - the $24m seems like a pretty conservative take [3]. That yields almost $6m upside, not including dilution. Hard to guess what the average dilution is, but I bet you it's higher than 33%, which would have been the breakeven point. Darn it, startups suck! :)
[0] https://www.cbinsights.com/investor/y-combinator
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/investors
[2] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Whats-fangs-interview-selecti...
[3] https://www.shawnngtq.com/projects/y-combinator-startups-ana....
If I join any of the BigTech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft), as a mid level developer, I’m guaranteed to get a $1 million+ four year offer and I don’t have to wait on an exit and pray for a successful exit. I can sell my RSUs at every vesting event. The average startup takes 7 years to exit. I would have also been hypothetically missing out on one of the greatest bull markers and seen my earlier grants more than double over the last five years.
I left out Netflix because even before the stock tanked, it should have never been grouped with the 1 trillion+ BigTech companies.
> Capital One / Eng NewHere1
> 23 Comments
> How many people interview vs get the job ?
>
> My guess /estimates (avg company wide)
> ...
Or some other post behind the login wall?
A bad reference is probably worse than no reference.
So for me personally, I don’t have time to risk on startups when I can be certain that my RSUs will be worth something when they vest and I can sell them and diversify. Even if they are down 25% year to date.
On the other hand, I mentored an intern last year, who got a return offer of $150K and can live anywhere in the US - right now he is staying at home rent free. This already puts him in the top 10% of income earners in the US.
In three years, he can be making $250k- $275K. Three years after that, he can be making close to $400K-$500K. But he will need to switch from an IC if he doesn’t want to switch from consulting.
Because of the time value of money, it makes much more sense to make as much money as possible while he is younger and avoid startups like the plague unless they can offer as much in cash as he is getting in cash+RSUs.
You are looking at things from the founders side. I am looking at things from the employee’s end. It’s your company. You should be passionate it about. From our end it’s a job.
As far as finding “product market fit”, how often has a company found product market fit, and a larger more profitable company came in, put a department on duplicating the effort and crushed the upstart?
We saw it in the 90s with Microsoft and we see it today with Facebook. Even Netflix isn’t immune. It’s being outcompeted by Warner Bros and Disney.
Everyone likes to point to Apple and Amazon. But they are the exception not the rule.
You can easily let someone go any day of the week? Well, I can also leave any day of the week. If you don't want this sort of liability you can hire me with a contract.
You call me dishonest, I call you hypocrite.
Yeah, sucks, that's life, if that triggers you emotionally you have no business running a startup.
Small companies may hold it against you and you may never have a chance to work their again but what are the odds they have a matching role and would you ever apply again.
The industry keeps getting bigger. I have never run into anyone I ever worked with in any other company.
I don't think it really matters.
The chances of seeing someone at a party or burning man or a ghost reference (they want your opinion on someone you never worked with?) is literally 0.
If you told everyone/everywhere it would make people question you.. why doesn't this great candidate (you wanted to hire them) decide to back out. What is wrong with this manager/team.. bonus is if you are successful impacting their career they can personally sue and take everything you own.
If you were to do that it says more about you than the person in question and would not look positively on you.
With an attitude like that, I guarantee that you've burned plenty of bridges yourself.
Attorneys love actions like those active career sabotage “revenge” tactics you’re describing, and sooner or later, someone employing them will learn the hard way.
If they’re lucky and get smarter, they’ll end up just having to write a public letter of apology they share with the world (including those they defamed the former employee to). It will have a negative impact on their own career and probably sink their chances of ever raising money again.
If they’re less lucky or unwilling to address an attorney’s letter, they’ll end up having to pay a fat seven figure settlement, attorney’s fees, and a letter of apology. VCs will be most unimpressed.
And in some cases, if they’re willing enough to go to court, they’ll be facing having their communications subpoenaed, their professional network subpoenaed and deposed about the comments, and will end up with a seven or eight figure judgment including punitive damages. VCs won’t even reply to their communications, and anyone deposed will associate the angry would-be saboteur with legal trouble.
- Immigration / relocation issues
- Partner / significant other (can't find a job, doesn't like the location. etc.) issues
- Health issues
- <Received a better offer but used one of the above reasons> issues
I've had candidates not show up on their first day and email in that regretfully they won't be able to start. Everyone was bummed, but no one wrote down their name in a list and shared it.
welp, this one's mine now. thanks :)
>In the light of all his burning bridges, Vimes slipped his hand back into his hip pocket.
Off topic but I wonder if current state of the art AI is able to come up with such metaphors. Or if there's research in that area.
I've been on both ends of this, as an employee a few years ago and now an employer. I'm not sure if assuming the worst in all employers and putting in the bare minimum/acting unethically to avoid being "taken advantage of" is the optimal way to act.
It pushes away the good companies that will reward loyalty and drive, and attracts unethical companies who have an adversarial relationship with their employees.
Same goes for relationships - if you assume that the person you're going to marry is simply going to take your house and kids and build your relationship about minimising feeling stupid if/when it happens, you're not going to have a good time.
Which are these companies that "reward loyalty"?
I can't name a single one in the US market. Every single company cares about one thing only: its bottom line.
They will retain any employee as long as it's good for their bottom line. Once it's not: adios.
I've never heard of a company retaining an employee due to their "loyalty". Maybe it was a thing in the previous century?
I assume they hired me because I could help make them money. If one day that assumption isn’t met and they need to lay me off (been there done that), I call my wife, I call my network to tell them I’m in the market. There are no hard feelings.
But also don’t trust your employer. Require important stuff in writing and contracts, don’t expect your employer to give anything extra for hard work / overtime (unless it’s in contract), don’t rely on “promised” benefits or rely on your employer to do anything they don’t have to.
And also, if you get another offer which pays 200% after accepting, or one which requires you to quit immediately, you might want to break loyalty. IMO this should go both ways: the company and employer should expect the other party to “betray” them if there’s a huge bonus like that. In fact all of this goes both ways and company/employer should have a decent, “loyal” relationship to an extent, but never put too much trust into each other.
* the other exception is toxic workplaces where your boss is being an asshole to you. Although in that case you should be trying to leave ASAP
Is that mercenary? Yes. Do I like it? No, not really. But in the USA where I live it's virtually universal policy with private employers.
In general I agree with this, but the situation described usually happens when offers have expiry windows. I'm sorry, but a job offer is a major life step for me, and when a hiring manager frames it like a TV infomercial with a countdown timer, he's dealing on a lower moral plane. After all the time we both invested in this process, I don't deserve a slick sales maneuver. It's like how I would not stab anyone either, but when you raise a block of wood overhead and menace at me, it's self defense. I have my long term career arc to preserve, including opportunity costs: unsolicited hostile negotiating tactics thrown at me will meet a defense.
But when I play poker, I lie and deceive as well as I possibly can, without remorse or hesitation. That’s because lies and deception are part of the game.
Likewise, when I engage in an employment relationship with a business, I play by those rules.
It is complicated, and to a degree it certainly makes sense to act as though you have a commitment beyond what money paid has bought… but just like all companies do, when enough is at stake, you should recognize that it’s a business relationship and it may not be to your advantage to pretend a higher level of commitment exists between you than really does. It’s a tough call. Burning bridges you don’t have to is not good. Neither is playing the sucker for very long.
Edit: Yikes, I should have presented my poker analogy differently to be more clear!
Lying and deceit is good in poker, but definitely not in business, IMO.
In business the rule is something like this: Pretend that every sentence making claims about the future ends with "... assuming, of course, we either have a signed contract to that effect or nothing significant changes between now and then." That goes for your own statements and the other party's. I think you will do well acting truthfully with those caveats assumed (and avoiding those that don't act truthfully within those caveats).
A reply put it like this, which I like: present your "future-perfect-best self" and expect your employer/potential employer to do the same.
Are really people so asinine to believe that hiring managers aren't lying through their teeth the entire time they talk to you? I guess HN is full of people who are naive or have malicious intent.
If anyone here thinks their manager truly cares about them (and you work in SV) - you're naive.
Your advice is not universal. Consider broadening your sample size.
In my case, I have always acted with the highest personal standards of Ethics and Integrity. Frequently, the favor has not been returned, and I have had to learn to deal with it.
I will say that my Integrity was directly relevant to my career. I worked for a Japanese corporation, and they knew they could trust me. My employees also knew they could trust me.
It's entirely possible to live in the corporate world, without surrendering your moral backbone.
I talk about this with my son. A long reputation for consistent, ethical behavior is difficult to get, easy to lose, and impossible to over-value.
When it comes to being “default alive” there is _zero_ consideration for the human impact. I could not agree more strongly that there’s all sorts of social mores around employee behaving well but virtually zero around executive behavior (you put an exclamation after CEO as if it should be surprising, when the opposite should be).
I’ve read these CEOs brag about “generous severance” that turns out to be 3 weeks.
WSJ reported less than a week ago Coinbase execs netted BILLIONS in PERSONAL profits to execs in the last year. Think any of that money could have been used as a rainy day fund to not fuck over people who resigned from their last job expecting to start at Coinbase?
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/coinbase-leaders-net-1-2-bi...
The amount of apologism for tech execs who act so selfishly over and over again, while the cogs are held to these insanely high standards of behavior, is infuriating.
Call a spade a spade. Brian Armstrong is a selfish piece of trash who dumped hundreds of millions of his company stock for his own profit while reneging on people who took his company’s word for what it was and put their financial health in his hands.
I’ve never been a cog. I simply refuse to. I take jobs where I’m valued and treated well, and I leave those I don’t. This is entirely possible if you make it a high-order goal. There’s nothing naive about it; I’ve made a good living this way for 30 years.
That's an incredibly privileged position. Sometimes, people resort to various tactics, including embellishing and ghosting to get ahead, especially when they feel like they have no other choice.
That doesn't excuse it, but it happens anyway.
What's important to remember is that the power wielded by the company and the employee is not symmetrical, so they have to be treated with a double standard. A company will always be better equipped to lose an employee or handle a rejected offer after a round of interviews than an employee in the reverse position.
Often it is also position that was earned by hard work and delayed gratification. You make it sound like OP is in such position purely due to luck but he obviously made some right choices along the way.
To be honest, I don't understand why any competent manager would lie; any high-performing individual you hire is going to bounce as soon as they realize they've been lied to. Always be honest about the current state of your team and you'll get people who want to help you succeed.
So, when they ask you for the budget, do you give them the highest possible comp numbers in your budget?
I don’t naively believe all or most companies do this. But I have been a hiring manager at two that do.
This is easy, honest, transparent, and gets both parties off to a good start. If I do my research well the range is pretty close to the market for what I need. If the candidate wants more they can either argue with me, or say goodbye and find another position.
Do you put in transparently (after all we're talking about being honest and transparent here) in the job description so that candidates know beforehand how they'll be judged?
Do you let the candidate apply again a year later? if they have grown and learned a lot then there's certainly no reason not to hire them this time.
If so then yes, your process is honest and transparent.
All the rest of it, absolutely yes. I don't hold a grudge if someone fails an interview, unless they're truly an asshole, or dishonest, both of which are exceptionally rare.
Has no one ever been a manager? Have you never worked with managers who had to do these things? I've known many managers who admit to having to do all of these things. Some of them are proud that they did it - some are ashamed because they didn't want to but ultimately had to otherwise they would've gotten fired.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you do it because you enjoy it or because you have to - what matters is that you're doing it and someone is on the receiving end.
Genuinely - how many of you have ever done hiring while searching for a new company yourself? HN is truly full of the self-indulgent and self-righteous to think they're not doing this themselves or that this is wonderful to be around.
There are circumstances where this is ok and others where it isn't. Is it ok to hire for a company that you're retiring from? How about one where you can't continue to advance but you think is a great environment? What if you were at a startup that got acquired by a megacorp and you focus on hiring people who enjoy a big company environment?
IMO, so long as you are transparent about the pros and cons of the position, it's perfectly ethical and reasonable.
How often are people genuinely leaving companies because they think it's a great environment but it's just not for them? How often? 80%? 50%? 1%? (I'm guessing closer to 1% than 50%)
But at this point in my career I'm likely much more deliberate than average about making sure a role is giving me what I need as well as more deliberate than most managers about trying to find good all-dimension fits for my positions.
The rest who want to stay are only there because they're making incredibly high amounts of money thanks to being at the company just before it went public. (They joined 5+ years after the company was founded - hardly part of the original gang)
A human relationship with your manager with mutual care is possible.
The thing to understand is this: your manager is not the business.
Unless you're working in a truly tiny company, they operate under their own set of constraints and will have to make decisions they're not really happy about. If that means firing you or low-balling your salary, then sure, you may not care much for that distinction in the hurt of the moment. And maybe they really are out to get you.
But if you treat your manager like an antagonist, don't be surprised if they end up doing the same to you.
(HR is a different story)
The unspoken rule is that things can change dramatically in a few hours and each party should deal with it - which means it's also totally ok to back out of the offer you received and move on.
Replace companies with jobseekers.
Some jobseekers don't do this sort of thing. That others do doesn't justify making this sort of choice with every jobseeker.
I've talked to recruiters who have been rude to me for refusing to "give a number" as in my expected salary/wages. I also do not recommend accepting offers and then backing out. However, I submit that there is no company, even if you founded it yourself, that deserves your loyalty forever.
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean things like knowingly lying beforehand, but if circumstances drastically changed, I would 100% expect companies to rescind outstanding offers, so I similarly wouldn't hold it against a candidate for rescinding their acceptance if their circumstances changed significantly. It's reasonable to expect both companies and candidates to act in good faith, but it's unreasonable for them to face significant hardship just to honour an offer if their situation changes.
Startups have "aspirational" speaking where they say they're using revolutionary "AI" and yadda-yadda to do such and such - even if they don't have any of that and there's nothing actually on the roadmap for it. It's a lie. You may want it but you don't.
If I say I have a billion dollars and fly to the moon on weekends - am I lying if I don't actually? In your words - no. I'm being "aspirational".
It was true when they made the offer, time passes and things changed, now it's not true.
It's a lie if it's false when you say it - not if it becomes false in the unpredictable future.
It was true when they accepted the offer, time passes and things changed (e.g., got a better offer), now it's not true.
How about Coinbase withdraws the offer AND gives the former-future-employee some money to reflect the fact that Coinbase really did want to hire them but now genuinely can't AND that this change has a real and negative impact on the former-future-employee?
Like, a payment on the order of a month or two of living costs (not just "Sorry, and here's $100")
Sure that's expensive, but it's still cheaper than hiring the person for months of time, what with salary, benefits, office and equipment costs, etc.
> This decision is not a reflection on the highly talented people we had extended job offers to. We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
Just one or two months? Banks insist on 6 months of expenses these days when you apply for a mortgage with an offer letter in hand because they know that shit happens all the time.
Here's the kicker: companies have a very good idea of the financial shape they are in. It's just not possible that there was a sudden downturn in fortunes between the offer letter and start date. Except if a round of funding fell through, but an honest man doesn't hire on promises.
The corollary is that these days everyone is a crook.
Look at this from the angle of an insurance company pricing in risk. For example, I might consider a job paying 500k TC for a 1/3 risk that the company goes bust in 2 months. I might also accept an offer for 300k at a company that has a 1/10 risk of going bust in 2 months. And there are a lot of people who would accept working at a company that pays 150k for a 1/100 chance of going bust in the same timeframe.
The thing is, the overall compensation for all of the above scenarios is exactly the same, but the risk is priced differently. Unfortunately some companies are deceptive, and don’t fairly articulate the risk to candidates, which can wildly swing the market value of their compensation. When expectations doesn’t match reality, people feel like they were taken advantage of.
Yes, absolutely. It’s called integrity. I just bought a house, probably at a loss, at the top of the market, and could have backed out because the economic situation is no longer looking as great. I could have easily used a BS contingency to get out of the contract. However, I made a handshake agreement and asked someone to upend their life for me.
My own code of ethics is to do what I say I will. Maybe it’s not the most game theory thing to do but at least I can sleep at night knowing I was an honest person. There are things in life more important than money.
Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.
Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.
You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.
Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.
Isn't this exactly what's happening if you accept an exploding offer and then later rescind your acceptance if you get a better one? The job offer was the best you had at the time, so you accepted it. Somewhat unexpectedly you later receive a better offer, so you have to rescind the first.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this practice, but I do agree it's pretty close to what Coinbase is doing with the roles reversed.
If you make these your rules, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll play with others who think similarly. There is another move at every poker table: get up. Not everyone is playing poker. There are companies and people who interview with integrity. The veteran advantage is in knowing who they are.
Metaphors suck, I know
The other brings machine guns.
Maybe there is such a thing as absolute virtue, and maybe the army of swords has found it. Maybe it's worth dying on this literal hill to defend the way of the sword. Maybe they believe insisting that the world "should" work some arbitrary way will make it so.
In any case, by fighting this way they've chosen to lose. By losing they've ensured the values they're supposedly defending won't survive—so what was the point?
If your actual true goal is to preserve the way of the sword, you bring artillery and tanks and wipe the other army off the map; then you go back to your way. Or make alliances in which your swords can serve some purpose, or use diplomacy to keep the war from starting. Just anything that's not the least effective strategy.
If your goal instead is to feel Right, you fight as Real Men do and guarantee the way of the sword is extinguished.
There is no world in which you fight with swords against machine guns while ensuring the continued existence of the way of the sword. (There's an echo of the paradox of tolerance here.) You have to choose between defending it effectively, preserving it as much as possible in the world that actually exists, or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
It's tempting to insist there is such a world, but that's just insisting on the way of the sword, again, except about possible worlds.
If there really are no sword hills to charge and it’s all machine guns - then I don’t mind going down that way. I can’t imagine that environment is anything but depressing anyways.
That's not the way I took it, but if you're right I wouldn't disagree. Sometimes you can play a different game. Though strategies designed to win will outcompete and replace ones that aren't, so you may not have that option in the long run.
Further, you have dehumanize the attacker. They have agency and don't have to attack in the first place. Even then, your analogy fails because you can disengage from the "attacking force" (quit or not accept an offer) without surrendering in the theater of operations of the professional world.
I try to be good. I'd like that from others.
But when your bubbles intersect and you're in the same game, competing directly, other people's ethics absolutely do constrain the ethics you can choose for yourself while remaining effective. I'm not saying you should sacrifice your principles; I'm saying you should mind the difference between sticking to your principles and winning, accept they aren't the same, and not insist they always are or would be "if everyone just." Because everyone won't just.
Your principles may make you better as a person in some way (they really might!) but that doesn't mean they'll make you win. Not admitting this will make you less effective at defending them.
Maybe I'm getting away from the point of the thread, I don't know.
I guess in my analogy the war has come to the army of swords, like it or not. Team Machine Gun could have chosen to be nice. They didn't, so what now? The answer cannot be, "Well, then they're bad." It doesn't matter if they're good or bad: they're here. They don't care what you think. So what do you do?
And the American Service-Members' Protection Act…
> You have to choose between [...] or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
If you choose to double down you might get lucky and win, or some outside-context thing might happen and who knows. There's a range of not-impossible outcomes. The outcome doesn't justify the strategy unless the strategy produced it.
>Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem
I have seen examples of this from several FAANG companies.
Companies are interviewing multiple candidates for a single spot, it’s insane not to expect reciprocal behavior
No, you are accepting to work for a business that is legally bound to prioritize the interests of the shareholders over those of any employee. They will always, always be "rude" to you if that's best for the people whose money they're spending to employ you.
I 100% agree with you on your broader point. That said, this is incorrect. There are no laws that stipulate a business must put shareholders above anything else. There _are_ laws that say employees get first dibs on accrued pay in the event of a bankruptcy, among other things that businesses must do on behalf of employees.
Ref: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
And why would you hobble yourself into a disadvantage and even potentially take a multiyear hit to your life because you have some vague notion of objective ethics? That's just letting them take advantage of you. They bet on engineers thinking the game is not rigged.
In jurisdictions with at-will employment (like California), most full-time jobs explicitly have no guarantees or commitments from either side about how long an employment offer will last. If your ethics are instead based on supposed implicit norms (like "it's rude to change your mind on a job offer" or "it's rude to leave your job before the recruiter/hiring manager gets their bonus" or whatever), then I think it's entirely reasonable to examine 1) whether those supposed norms actually even exist, 2) what the source of those norms are, and 3) whether those norms systematically favor one party over another.
I have a hard time reading this as anything other than "it's OK for companies to rescind agreements but not OK for employees to". Consistency requires that it's either acceptable for both employer and employee to do that, or unacceptable for both. (Personally, I lean toward the latter.)
Ethics is a scam by the powerful to control everyone else.
I don't love my kid because of ethics, I love my kid because I love my kid. I'm not kind to my annoying neighbor because "it's the right thing", I'm kind to my neighbor because, despite his being annoying, I appreciate his friendship.
Ethics that you're advocating for exist so people running companies an take advantage of you, full stop. If it's more important for you to feel smugly superior, good for you, but I don't buy into it. I'd rather minimize how exploited I am.
You don't have to buy into someone else's definition of "ethics" in order to life a full, happy life, which involves loving your community and being kind to your neighbor. The rejection of mainstream ethics doesn't mean you have to be a monster, it just mean you're going to stop being manipulated for the benefit of someone far more powerful then you who never even paused for a moment to consider ethics.
edit: obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic here. Spinoza and de Beauvoir both establish fairly exquisite ethical systems. But by en large "pop" ethics is a scam that is asymmetrically followed to the advantage of people in power. Quick example: Music companies want you to consider ethics when pirating music, but absolutely never bring up ethics when it comes to decisions around artists that could potentially increase profits.
I simply put myself in the shoes of the other person and ask, how would my decision make them feel? I may be even more selfish, in some interpretations, because I think that behaving this way impacts others, and pretty soon you have a culture of respect and empathy, which I think is good for everyone including myself. So I am acting towards my own benefit.
I haven't read Stirner or Spinoza much, but it seems like common sense to behave ethically in the way that I've described. And maybe you have a point with Stirner regarding your later music piracy point, because I don't pirate music, and I don't do it for any reason other than I feel my integrity is worth more than any song. I don't care at all for the major labels' thoughts, I do it for "selfish" reasons and maybe it's egoism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Corporations are not people. They don't have ethics. The most they can have is an ethical culture or guidelines - which still doesn't preclude them from doing anything.
The power imbalance is just too great. Don't be an as**, but don't be naive, either.
Perhaps if the co-founders hadn't paid themselves over a billion in stock compensation, this wouldn't have happened.
Poorly performing companies lay people off.
Now, at this new company I've been excited to work for, I receive an email telling me that I in fact do not have a job next week and I am actually unemployed.
My options range from extremely bad (begging for old job back) to mildly embarrassing (attempting to re-accept a previously declined counter offer).
I am hiring manager in mid-size company and if you used different email to login into workday, to work for somebody who is not sitting next to me, no chance your previous behaviour could disqualify you in any way.
Please don't be duplicitous - there are many teams out there with strong core values and an honest and open communication culture.
Don't let the crypto-bros poison our collective dignity!
Trust, but verify. You shouldn't set yourself up to get massively screwed if a corporate pinky swear falls through. But if you act like an asshole in ever interaction, you're going to select for people who find that the norm.
People acting behalf on these entities don’t deserve your unearned trust.
I never said that. I just don't want to be permanently surrounded by assholes. Presuming the other side is an asshole is a good way to end up in that situation.
Many tech companies have done this...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-rescinds-job-offers-c...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-05-26/twitte...
https://www.protocol.com/workplace/stripe-hiring-issues-resc...
My attempt at levity was really ad hominem; I regret it!
Also, I wonder if this mainly a problem when there is a long gap between accepting the offer and the job start date. I would think a better strategy is to try to start getting paid as soon an offer is extended, by starting sooner.
Came here to quote the same line, but follow it with "yeah, fuck these guys". Its not fair to paint the whole industry with bad sentiment, but anyone who recinds accepted offers either has no decency or no ability to forecast their most basic needs.
The honesty is refreshing.
Still, why does it always have to be when they're doing something they shouldn't do?
...
Then I realized that they really have to do something, and I don't know exactly what the alternative is. If they gave them any compensation they would be admitting harming people and that could be a legal issue.
Edit: Oh, they are doing that, but are vague about it:
> We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
That's a pretty nice minimal way of saying it, and they probably will have a minimal approach of doing it as well, both to reduce the cost and risks.
This is not a sustainable long-term strategy for most people. You know what is? Walking away from the offer immediately when it has an overly-aggressive expiration date and letting them know the reason.
Coinbase HR are just being jackasses and deserve to be blacklisted. This behavior should not be tolerated to prevent employees from giving 0 day notice when they quit and screwing over the rest of us. I know they are going in my hiring notebook for do not hire.
The playing God shit by founders has to end and this move by Coinbase gives a huge boost to employees to hedge their offers. I won't be surprised if employees accept 2 offers, join one and after a a couple of days say no to the other or ghost them.
TLDR: HR definitely does not care about you. It’s all about making sure the company doesn’t get in trouble while they do their best to exploit you.
I was slotted for the last release. At the end of the summer. Just before my kids would return to college / high school. The first release was in May. I could spend the whole summer thinking about what to do next, and beach days with my kids.
So I told management, I am out of here in May. They said 'no, and if you leave, you lose your vacation pay and severance'.
So I called HR, explained my thinking, and told them to get me out of there in May. Management was not happy, but HR took full responsibility for the moved date. And I got to spend a glorious late spring and early summer lazing about before reentering the work force.
Last part is extremely uncool.
https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/bitcoin-investor-tool...
When N=3 because that's the entire size of the sampling pool, failing to take heed of those patterns is an unforced error.
For businesses it's important to understand earnings and assets because those put a floor on the price of the business: they set a price level at which you are very likely to see demand for taking over the business. At the end of the day, though, when you study fundamentals you are making guesses at supply and demand.
The price of a Bitcoin depends on how many people are trying to use it for remittances and how easily those people can acquire Bitcoin and how long recipients hold before selling. Demand also depends on the macro environment and it's historic correlation with other markets. Supply depends on the issuance rate and energy prices (higher prices will force miners to sell more to pay for their operations). Many other factors are at play; by predicting them you can make guesses as to future supply and demand and future bitcoin prices.
Fundamentals in crypto are existential, favorable qualities of a token that can survive severe downturns (bear markets, depressions).
For BTC, fundamentals are absolute scarcity combined with buy-in/popularity.
For ETH, fundamentals are utility/flexibility and network effect.
For HorneyDonkeyKongCoin, fundamentals are...none. It will go to zero and never come back.
This is literally the opposite of the meaning of fundamentals. Absolute scarcity is meaningless; in classical economics, everything is scarce. And popularity are animal spirits.
You don't decide on the value of a scarce asset, the owners of the asset do. If you personally believe the nominal value of a scarce asset like BTC is meaningless and thus zero, short it.
I agree. It's just convenient that fundamentals, by this definition, always equals the market price. At which point one asks why there are two words other than for misdirection.
So if you accept an offer at CB, give notice to your current employer, have CB rescind the offer, and now find yourself unemployed? Is that what's happened here?
For me, that sounds worse.
It is not hard to tell my current manager that I would like to stay because coinbase rescinds the offer.
If your manager cannot handle this, then I have even worse news for you... You have a shitty manager that will screws you up one day.
I don't care what the business case is, how can you have had such a short planning horizon that you were making offers and then rescinding them before folks start?
Let them start, they will see writing on wall and can start looking for a new place with an active job.
Those with the ability to choose often chose other firms when hiring got back on track later.
But we'd get the HR managers complaining if employees accepted offers and then ghosted, so we should complain about employers doing this.
Crazy they can't even afford to give folks a 6 month slot in a "gardening" type position. Be upfront. Hey, we're hurting, we can keep you for 6 months or so, no expectation on work output, but growth trajectory is going to be limited and a RIF is possible so may not be a bad idea to look for next spot.
I'd make a snarky comment about "how's that no politics in the workplace policy working out for you," but real talk, I'm sure it has nothing to do with this, so it'd be a cheap dunk. The underlying problems with crypto are so multitudinous that they easily dwarf any such practice.
As such, I imagine they'll have these wild swings every 4-6 years. I think many people don't realize just how incredibly stagnate and boring crypto is when it's not consuming every part of everyone's online identity. The bad news is that for companies like Coinbase they essentially have to drastically downsize every few years. The good news is that with proper planning, they can really make the profits from a bull market last.
We’re not even in a proper bear market and its already collapsing
Just see dex trading volume metrics or OpenSea volume data on Dune.com - a much better indicator of the state of the crypto markets since you can’t hide on chain data
Coinbase ran a gambling business like an exchange business. That's their mistake. The guys who knew they were running unregulated slot machines are doing fine.
Crypto trade volume collapses catastrophically in bear markets
Precisely. Holders HODL during bear markets. Traders go bankrupt. New money stays on the sidelines. Everyone else forgets about crypto for a few years.
Its a total scam in bear markets
That’s pretty much the sentiment across the board
I do wonder how SoftBank investing $680M into SoRare at the height of the NFT boom is going to work out. If SoRareStats is correct, they did 170Eth of auction volume in 24 hours. If they have the same fees as OpenSea, that’s roughly $8,000 in daily revenue.
This only goes one way, and that way is down.
I don’t understand how VCs work. I was deep in the NFT world at that time and outside of the influencers on Twitter, every single trader I know was just in it to dump NFTs on someone else. And everyone knew that it wasn’t sustainable at all.
How can VCs look at something like this, abandon all common sense and buy in right at the top of a mania phase?
I made and subsequently lost a very large sum of money from 2015 to 2018. This happened because I bought into the ICO craze and after seeing 1000x gains I saw almost all of it evaporate. So to me, NFTs reeked of the same odor.
I was smart enough this cycle to stick with projects that made sense to me. NFTs didn't make sense, and even though I saw people making money on them, I knew the risk was too high. I think another learning point for me was letting go of romanticizing crypto as a technology and embracing it for what it truly is, which is gambling.
I don't think crypto is the future of anything other than online gambling and speculation. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's the reality.
VCs seem stuck in that romantic phase coupled with a lack of technical understanding. I think after they get burned this cycle they'll be less likely to invest in the next. They'll have the experience to know.
I wonder if this announcement was pressure from management and the board to make some public announcement for shareholders that Coinbase is doing something, anything, to cut costs and weather the crypto and tech downturn.
And for sure, if you work as a recruiter for Coinbase and still have a job... time to start tapping your network for other opportunities.
The fact they felt they had to means layoffs are right around the corner, and they're in a very bad spot.
No; apart from a bit of severance pay, the responsibility is on your former hires to restart their job hunts or plead for their previous roles. "Taking responsibility" is not a declaration but an action.
Who, me? Doubt it. Worst of luck to them!
Until all cryptocurrencies are totally wiped out, banned and stopped completely 100%, then Coinbase is finished. Realistically and especially at this rate, I'm afraid that is simply not going to happen.
It's very disappointing to see a company treat employees like this. There are ways to plan better, especially at huge corps like this.
If you're in a position making decisions like this in your organization, please remember that decisions like this affect real people and have a serious impact on their wellbeing in numerous ways.
It is really difficult for me to see how XXXXX going into pieces fails your global career.
Not really true for crypto. The crypto crash of the last 2 months was extreme and sudden, not an ordinary "bear market". It puts the company as a whole into an existential mode. And not just this company, most of tech companies.
Also, Coinbase was getting into all kinds of side projects, like an NFT marketplace. Due to market conditions, NFTs all of a sudden are dead. People pull out their liquidity and trading stops.
Say they had offers for 10 NFT experts. Now they need none. What are they to do, hire them anyway?
I do feel for your friend. Tell her what my dad always tells me: don't worry, they didn't take away your hands or brain. You'll be fine.
Her offer was rescinded and she's devastated about it. She received her offer in the past couple of weeks, well after the stock lost a lot of its value and they announced a hiring "slow down":
"I'm not sure yet if they will/have rescinded her offer or not."
In the meanwhile, the timeline got clarified? Anyway, I agree with you if the offer was made when the downturn was already obvious.
It's a shitty situation, and it will be followed by much more of it, cross industry. The music stopped playing. Don't waste time wondering why it stopped, find a chair.
List of dead coins.[1]
NFTs stall, rather than crashing. High asking price, low offering price, few sales. Peak NFT volume was in late 2021.
Everything that depended on growth rather than profits is tanking. Even Softbank is in trouble.
Despite tens of billions in investments poured into the space, crypto is fundamentally unable to create lasting value.
For the 4th time. See you in 4 years for the next crypto bubble.
For the 900th time, the crypto bubble is 'popping' or it has already 'popped'. The speculators and bag-holders are getting flushed and wiped out once again just like in 2017. This is before regulations are coming and it is happening again.
Meme-coins and other useless ERC-20 tokens will collapse and become abandoned where as the utility in many other cryptocurrencies (coins not tokens) will continue to survive.
Until then it has to go down before another drive higher which will probably happen after another Bitcoin halving, most likely in a couple of years time.
On the other hand, after the current central bank shenanigans, trust in centralized institutions is even lower and non-centralized currencies become more attractive.
Its a wait and watch for me.
Besides the wealthy, there's the army of believers putting in small money.
Risk assets look very different when you can borrow at 0.5% interest rate vs 3.5% interest rate.
I think CB is on a very slippery slope. There are plenty of opportunities out there. Why working at CB?
- Banning political discussion
- Ask employees to rate each other
- Rescind accepted offers
- What's next?
Also, what would happen to your beloved assets if they go bankrupt?
For now, but give it six months I would tell you that they'd take a job at Coinbase for the same reason anyone today works anywhere: for the pay cheque.
We've had an entire generation of tech workers that forget that there are market downturns and in these downturns you end up with thousands of laid off people competing for the same job - often a job that you would have considered "under" you 6 months ago. I'm talking someone with 5 years more experience than you willing to take your job, and they'll do it for less money to boot.
It's in times like that where people will accept a job at Coinbase, because Coinbase will be around. And they'll be around because back in the early stages of the downturn they took the painfully necessary step of reducing payrolls.
> We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
It's funny, just last week I was talking about my friend who got a job offer and then lost it and got severance back in 2000. Some asked me, "how do I get that to happen to me!"
I said "try to get a job offer and then pray for failure". Apparently the answer was, "try to get a job at Coinbase".
While Coinbase's value is not dependent on a given price of a given crypto currency they are quite dependent on people using and trading some crypto currency.
Sounds like people are not doing that.
The shills first shilled the coin itself, the Washington Post in 2015 had a very good summary https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco...
> So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially-speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. Sounds great. How does it do that? Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? Yes. Okay, but is it at least easy to use? The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. Oh. Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours.
Then starting in 2017 but really gathering steam in 2018 came stablecoins.
And, of course, 2020 was the real start and 2021 the peak of NFTs.
Both stablecoins and NFTs are in ruins now. Note how quick NFT was compared to stablecoins -- and USDT still holds but that won't last either.
Unless a new shilling vehicle can be found, bitcoin is next.
It was always a scam. It never was and never can be anything else.
I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31462469 this two weeks ago.
While that view is understandable, can folks think of companies who did 20% type layoffs at the eve of bad times, e.g. 2001 or 2008, and then became market leaders, expanding as the market recovered?
I know Coinbase is not a typical startup given their IPO but they are a startup in other senses.
Page 10 for basic breakdown: https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q1...
Amazon did a quite famous layoff in 2000, actually.
But it was very heavily covered at the time, and viewed as a sign of the inevitable collapse of the internet economy.
They ended up doing OK.
How many others like Amazon did 20% layoffs and then died anyway?
Back in 2000 I left a long term position because I was unhappy at work (there was a lot of turmoil) and filled out a few applications, In response I got two promising offers. The one I was leaning towards put the offer 'on hold'. Not rescinded completely, but no explanation, just 'on hold'.
I couldn't take the risk, and accepted the other offer, which was best in hind sight.
The 'on hold' was because the company had been bought one day before my start date, and the deal had to close first, because I would be hired into the new company. If they had told me that, I might have waited, but they could not, because it would have been insider info on the purchase.
Rescinding an offer is brutal. I don't think hiring organizations make that decision lightly, and they certainly shouldn't.
If I had turned down my other offer, and the delayed one had fallen through, that would have been career altering. It would have completely changed the arc of my life, likely not for the better.
Can you rescind offers and suffer 0 consequences?
I can easily imagine a situation, where manager A wants to get rid of employee E. So manager A, asks a friend in company B, to make an offer for 10M dollars. Then employee E leaves, offer gets rescinded by company B.
Employee E left on their own from company A, so "problem solved". Obviously some other employee, this time from company B gets another miracle offer, just to quit and be rescinded.
I imagine that this is somehow banned, or everyone would be doing this?
I saw much wilder stuff going
Many states have "at will employment", which means you can be fired at any point for basically no reason.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
For the extremely high end of salaries (your theoretical "10M" offer), you would do well to negotiate explicit terms of severance pay, or a signing bonus or other incentive, in your offer before signing it. Your employer will be bound by the terms of a signed job contract or other legal document. You should at the bare minimum not quit an active position on a verbal offer, wait until the full legal paperwork has been fully negotiated and signed. But there are almost no "default" protections applied at the state or federal level. Also job contract terms are often highly in favor the employer and non-negotiable language at most entry level / minimum wage jobs, leading to the vast majority of Americans working with a very low level of employee legal protection.
This is especially the case for many of these companies who may have essentially "overhired" and are correcting for that, rather than pausing hiring because the general economic conditions have affected their revenue outlook.
What does that mean for people who accepted but have not started?
Stripe, lyft and uber do the same. At Stripe( at least) VPs and up get the standard 4 year fixed number of stock grants which basically creates a class system.
Get wrecked, Coinbase.
and later:
> We will also rescind a number of outstanding offers for people who have not started yet. ...
Will those rescinded offers get severance?
Of course, if you're working somewhere that you'd never want to go back to under any circumstances, all bets are off.
This reminds me of something one of my previous employers did. They had hired a ton of new engineers straight out of college and gave them a couple weeks to relocate to the city, get apartments, etc. After about 2 weeks of their training, executives decided it was time for some layoffs. The main targets? Those new employees. Company severance policy was only based on tenure, so these people probably got $20 and were unemployed, with a brand new lease, in a city they didn't know (and frankly, one that isn't at the top of most peoples' lists to live in).
You don't want to screw up the relationship you have with your colleagues and friends at work. My actual company, fuck 'em.
Feel for the new grads who got offers from Coinbase.
Looks like basing your business model on gamblers and speculators isn’t doing well at all.
Creating a company propped up by vulture capitalists (especially in the gambling sector) is completely immoral.
We now need is a complete crypto crash to will wipe this casino out completely.