Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Update on Hiring Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31600505 - June 2022 (466 comments)
I've been through the dot com crash and several hard economic downturns. It really puts your company's humanity on full display. It's the real test.
Preserving cash flow is important. But you also have to do things carefully, openly, and with genuine care for the people who've believed in your vision.
People will respect the hard decisions but not sloppy or careless execution.
As someone who’s been on both sides of the proverbial desk, I’ve come away frustrated but enlightened in some way almost every time.
Now, this requires you to run your business responsibly from the start. If you’re already on the edge of your runway you either cut back or die. But if you have the cash in the bank you’re a better person for spending it on the employees than doubling down on your war chest.
Those affected will gain access to the company’s “generous severance philosophy” and “a talent hub to allow them to opt-in to receive additional support services.” (The details surrounding the severance package are unclear, but some affected workers on Blind alleged they would receive two months worth of base pay; a representative from Coinbase did not provide further comment.)
Don't hire me if you need me to lie to your staff.
That means an updated resume, career document of accomplishments and talking points, an active network and “fuck you money” in the bank. If you live in any major city in the US, and are a software developer with experience, you should be making in the upper quintile of income for your area. There is usually no excuse not to have savings.
Good advice on the other points.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/2/25/18239828/report-middle-class...
The average software developer in SF makes more then twice that.
https://www.builtinsf.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-eng...
These are the numbers from the census bureau. It still says $119K
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
Median isn’t some obscure statistic that’s hard to calculate.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
And that's of 2020 so out of date.
Sounds soulless, and for some it is, but there is no place for drama when the day comes.
Being good hearted will eventually backfire - that one employee who feels its very unfair to him, with right access can do so much damage to already faltering company it can even bring it down.
So its a precaution, because 1 (or 5) percent of people are vengeful assholes, and you often find out only when right buttons are pressed.
Severance package is always generous, ie my bank gives in such case 1 salary for every year worked, on top of mandatory 3 ones mandated by Swiss laws.
I can't imagine many professionals would do something damaging to their employer on the way out. Facing legal troubles right when you are looking for a new job seems very shortsighted.
Also, if you treat the people you are letting go as humans, they will be less likely to retaliate. Ironically, trying to prevent retaliation by treating them like they will retaliate is more likely to cause them to do so.
However, if you are laying someone off simply because the business if struggling, you presumably think they are trustworthy enough to employ. If you trusted them enough to give them the power before letting them go, you obviously trust them. If you are worried getting laid off will make them abuse that trust and use their access to cause damage, how could you trust them before you laid them off?
If your personel has an exit period of a few months, they can take their time to process what happened, grieve, and find a new job, without losing the house or healthcare. There simply isn't that much of a reason for revenge.
But bigger organisations give extra insurance. This covers e.g. avprivate or 2 person hospital room instead of multi person rooms. Or private care without waitung lists
Also, as healthcare is getting more expensive, the core package gets smaller. E.g. dental care was a victim in my country, preventative care is still covered but restorative probably not.
Whatever I don’t usually expect business to be honorable or empathic, but don’t be surprised if I start lying to you too.
Other than in the mafia, what is an underboss? [1]
It is not-improbable that the GP intended a mafia reference for how the layoffs were handled. Your choosing to infer instead of learning produces incorrect results. i.e. It's best not to assume.
Those who were connected to the right bosses knew more than others. There were a couple leaders who already had new jobs lined up when the news became public while others were stuck scrambling. There was a lot of anger and resentment compared to other layoffs I’d been through.
On the other hand, there were layoffs more of the form of directors making “objective” decisions without the bottom two layers of management knowing much of anything beyond that layoffs were probably going to happen. There was more shock. People had a bad time still but there wasn’t the same toxicity to it.
All the stock that the executives dumped could easily pay the salaries of all the people they screwed. And by resigning, they would open up some nice corner offices for all the people who they hired while fully knowing they were going to need to fire a lot of people soon.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-insiders-dump-nearly...
>Coinbase insiders dump nearly $5 billion in COIN stock shortly after listing
>After an edict to remain "mission focused," Coinbase executives have succeeded in making themselves a fortune.
>Insider activity reports for Coinbase’s COIN stock indicate that multiple early investors and executives sold billions in equity shortly after COIN’s direct listing. While the filings initially indicated that multiple executives sold a high percentage of their stake in the company, a representative for Coinbase told Cointelegraph that the sellers maintain strong ownership positions.
>Data from Capital Market Laboratories and confirmed by filings on Coinbase’s Investor Relations website shows a total of 12,965,079 shares were sold by insiders, worth over $4.6 billion at COIN’s $344.38 per share Friday close.
>Notable transactions include Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas selling some 255,500 shares at a price of $388.73 (though her Form 4 states that she retains options), while CEO Brian Armstrong sold 749,999 shares in three transactions at various prices, netting a total of $291,827,966.
>According to his Form 4 disclosure, after the sale Armstrong retains 300,001 shares worth over $1 billion. In a filing prior to the direct listing however, he was reported to have 36,851,833 shares, indicating that he sold just over 2% of his stake in the company.
not sure how you can do it humanely. what does "humanely" got to do with business decision?
That’s more than most jobs.
I don’t know how you can determine what the minimum is without knowing the severance and etc.
Isn't hiring excessively sloppy? In tech when times are good, everyone's desperately throwing warm bodies in chairs. I'm sure many have thought to themselves, "I'm glad I'm getting paid, but is my job really that necessary? Do we need a six-person Button Component Team?"
I've been interviewing for the past month and I made a rule that I won't be doing any algorithm interviews. I didn't have time to study; some friends questioned whether this was a good idea or not. I ended up submitting code samples when recruiters or managers would try to go through that kind of phone screening. Not only am I interviewing at better quality firms, but it's not nearly as stressful.
Anecdotally there is a high correlation between firms that tell me they're freezing hiring, etc and algorithm interviews.
Both are signs of companies that treat employees as ammunition rather than assets.
There is https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards , but there aren't many larger companies on the list
Same thing happened in March 2020, when investors panicked over COVID-19 and flew to US treasuries. Stocks went down, crypto went through the floor.
I wish it were the same as March 2020. You had a big drop and then almost an immediate reversal that lead to an explosive bull run to many new all-time-highs until April 2021.
Instead this time it's had the big drop and been very anemic for months since, with no clear end in sight. Could easily drop more. Starting to look more and more like the two year crypto winter back in 2014. Course if I was buying a coin a month that entire time it was $200 a coin I would have been retired by now. Or at least semi-retired.
In my experience the higher quality non-FAANG firms who aren't wildly popular places to work and also need to turn a profit to survive tend to be more appreciative of qualified applicants and waste less time getting them started
I’m making in the $200s now. But I found a job at $BigTech that was permanently remote.
Stranger here. Just want to suggest that getting furious over things outside of your control, or the world not being as you would like it to be, is optional.
If you don't like being enraged, you can quit that pattern with some practice in learning to notice your emotions as they come and go, and then learning to interrupt the chain of events that leads to the state of being furious and brooding.
Yet a lot of people get angry easily, and being an easily-triggered person works against a person's life. No one wants to constantly have to walk on eggshells around another person in order to be their friend, partner, child, etc.
Personally, I don't enjoy the emotion of being angry. If you do, more power to you.
no one cares
Getting angry is optional. With some practice (largely, mindfulness) people can learn to notice their emotions and not become strongly identified with whatever is happening in the moment, and choose to do something more productive than simply stewing or ruminating in the unfairness of life.
Thanks for engaging.
Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code.
It's definitely true that not all companies that use these algorithm interviews are worth working for. But, at least in my experience, companies that don't require them at all are pretty awful places to work. It demonstrates that management doesn't care who they hire.
Other industries don’t hire this way for anyone but fresh grads, and most don’t even do this for them.
Without exception the companies that weighted academic algorithm skills over practical architecture skill and implementation experience had some of the most confident and brazen mistakes in security or scalability and some of the poorest work-life balance.
I understand most people will say "this is too much work". The problem is that it is all too easy for someone to say "in my experience, X is correlated with Y" ... but that isn't very believable if the observer didn't even write things down.
I don't like asking for everything to be quantified, but it does seem in this case you probably have the data in your head and just need a nudge to write it down.
But it was his comment you chose to "suggest he show the work".
Also, I didn't say it didn't apply. I'm not a perfectly consistent machine you know.
The industry is at a point where there are plenty of clueless cookie cutter companies cargo culting Leetcode just because those interesting companies engage in it.
As far as interesting companies that don't require that, there's at least Stripe, famously, and surely more from this list:
> Programming/debugging phone screen + on site with your own laptop/setup and full access to internet, systems design discussion and talk with hiring manager about team alignment.
That seems to me to be a technical interview. I'm not sure what makes this different from a Facebook or Google.
The parent commenter wasn't saying we shouldn't have "high standards"; just that filtering for maximal prowess at leet code grinding does not serve as a useful instance of such, in their book.
Further, this distinction seems basically quite obvious -- there's no other way to read their text, actually.
I have quite high standards when I hire, which is why I don't use leetcode to assess. :)
I can get much better data more quickly without it. And, indeed, the best places I've ever worked with the smartest people I've ever known have not used these types of problems in the interview.
I've personally solved hundreds of them for the problem-solving challenge, but it's a horrible way to determine if someone is a good fit for a job. It's like interviewing a mechanic for your auto shop by seeing how well they can change a tire using only a screwdriver.
How would you go about checking if somebody is qualified in an interview?
Using his past experience may help but too often it can be embellished or flat out lied about. That's why these algorithm interviews became popular in the first place, to my knowledge.
It depends on the job, but for coding I've had great luck asking them to bring some code they were proud of in to the interview. Language doesn't matter, subject doesn't matter.
And then in the interview I ask them to teach me how it works. It becomes apparent in no time if they don't know what they're doing (or stole it). And if they can tell me about it, I learn how well they understand their own system--do they only understand it well enough to code it, or do they understand it well enough to teach it? I also learn if they're a good communicator. And if they're a good culture fit. And if they're enthusiastic about coding. I can also ask probing questions about design decisions and shortcomings.
That covers the "how well do they code" part, but falls a little short on the problem-solving part. But I can come up with on-the-fly questions (often about the code they brought in) that exercise those muscles. "What would you do if this data weren't available?" "What if you needed more guaranteed uptime?" "What if you needed to process 1000x more data in the same timeframe?" These are more relevant questions.
I'm after someone who learns fast. I'll take someone who knows a little and learns fast over someone who knows a lot and learns slow 9/10 times.
(Once I had someone bring in a device driver written in C for a JavaScript gig. They were hired. Another time we hired a dev with zero experience in the platform, language, or framework. Worked out great.)
If they ace leetcode-style challenges, I know they're good at _that_, but I don't trust it as a proxy for the other things I want to know, above.
Looking back, it would appear I got lucky since we all know new blood is the first to be dropped come a downturn. Well, maybe potentially not lucky since I recently jumped ship anyway, but it is not crypto or startup so risk level is lower.
To your point, I agree. As an applicant, I would be really aggravated if I passed on an offer, because I received and accepted offer from another place ( and that another placed rescinded offer afterwards ). Can I assume there will be some lawsuits over this ( in that case there seems to be an incurred loss )?
They needn't get furious. They need to get a lawyer.
So let me get this straight: now, we're not allowed to ask people if they can perform an __essential function of the job__, without being labeled "inhumane" ?
You interview for sanitation work, I want to know that you can sling a heavy bag of hot garbage.
You interview for SWE, I want to know that you can throw a sling a heavy bag of hot garbage!!!
If someone has code samples, years of experience building things and can make it clear to companies that they can do the job, I don’t see the problem.
It’s a two way street about finding a good fit, I think a lot of employers don’t see it that way. Maybe they should.
I didn't get the job.
Me: “This is a domain I’m familiar with because I spent 9 years working in the bill payment industry. Here all of the corner cases you have to deal with. You’re much better off using these USPS certified CASS solutions instead of writing it internally for these reasons and went on to explain all of the drawbacks of writing software that didn’t give you a competitive advantage.”
The middle level developer interviewing me wasn’t impressed. The director was and I got the job and soon became the lead.
I think there's a simple solution to the problem of algorithm testing and Leetcode problems in hiring: every company should run their hiring technical test on their current staff, at random, on a regular basis. If the current staff can pass then the test is a valid one. If they can't then it isn't, and they should update it to be a more realistic task that the current staff can do.
A healthy way would be bringing your current talent pool up to a higher level through training, even if that's maths (if that's what your current problem is).
An unhealthy way is introducing a bunch of new talent that is tested on one niche domain of software engineering and pretending everyone needs to do that while also trying to improve fundamental skills that help them with their day to day job.
- you've got people working crazy hours and learned on the job. Are they supposed to spend extra time on this stuff when they're barely keeping up?
- the existing people have developed all sorts of niche skills of their own. I'm not trying the new folks on that stuff because... we don't need more of it right now.
All I suggested is using the team's existing skillset as the measure to hire new people for the team, rather than some sort of arbitrary test that doesn't reflect the work they do.
“we need someone who can help us write our yet another SaaS CRUD app using an MVC framework. But to get the job you have to reverse a binary tree while riding a unicycle on a tightrope juggling bowling balls. We also offer below average pay and make up the difference in statistically worthless ‘equity’ and only want 10x developers who are willing to work for 60 hours a week”
If you really need to hire someone you can't assess internally then you should seek help with hiring them. This is one reason why networking and mentors are so helpful. Other people can help with this sort of problem.
Please tell me of companies which ask about essential functions of the job? That's become infinitesmially rare.
Instead, interview are about memorizing algorithms and perfecting a theatrical delivery where you pretend to discover the fruits of years of research in 45 minutes.
In order words, things you will never ever do in the actual day to day job after getting hired.
But DS&A style interviews don’t come anywhere near testing the type of work that most developers will be doing day to day in 2022.
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
So firing people who have actively worked on the vision is better than firing people who haven't started working yet? You seem to be taking things backwards.
This option is quite a lot better than the alternative.
Which are the companies from the dot com crash you remember doing this very well, and very wrong?
I guess I was right? Not trying to brag or anything. Just a tip to everyone job hunting I guess. Watch what executives do (not what they say). Well, and human history of speculative bubbles.
I didn't think it was a coincidence Coinbase did a direct listing rather than an IPO, since an IPO has a waiting period for insiders to sell. I think insiders knew they had a limited window of cheap money froth.
I made quite a bit of money by throwing my ex-gaming 4870x2 radeon machine into a closet for a year.
my investment was a few bucks in energy, and an old computer that was going to become e-waste, and a few minutes time.
I got lucky that at the time this was a feasible strategy before ASIC domination -- but this 'investment' wasn't anything like the rest of my portfolio by any means.
See https://scitechdaily.com/dutch-tulip-fields-come-into-bloom-...
Where do you find this information? I'm really new to this. Is it using stock charts or something similar?
But, scouring SEC filings can be demanding, so there are several websites that specialize in extracting and displaying such information, for example - https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades...
But if you don't know what you're looking for it can be tedious.
Here are insider purchases and sales in an easier to navigate format: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/coin/insider-a...
What exactly makes you think that? As far as I can tell, it's still unclear if distributed ledgers are really effective tools for much of anything. What real problems have they solved?
A whole lot of the interesting applications are non-monetary-- proving that a record was produced and made available before a certain time and has not been tampered with since.
As a world economy, we spend like $100B/year on notarizing things and related kinds of non-repudiation record keeping. If it was really cheap, we'd do much more. And a big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries.
These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it. Ledger-based solutions tend to focus on a tiny technical step of a big process without considering whether that's a bottleneck or even a non-negligible part and whether improving it actually results in a better solution.
I used to sympathize and engage with the theoretical arguments; but at this point a more productive approach is: if the advantages are such and such, where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage? Maybe this competitive advantage doesn't exist at all?
Distributed ledgers are being used for real business cases in banking. Realizing these full benefits will take a very slow process of societal adoption and legal/evidentiary recognition.
I said "not going away". These use cases are going to slowly grow and become ubiquitous, but it will be a very slow process. It isn't some overnight disruption where notaries vanish and banking is dis-intermediated in the next 5 years.
> where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage
E.g. JP Morgan and Liink are quietly connecting hundreds of banks and using it to more robustly and quickly move payment-related information between banks.
At this point you're trusting JP Morgan and link to run the ledger. What if I disagree with a transaction and fork the ledger? How is this any different to JP Morgan running a SQL database and speaking a common protocol?
Liink is ETH derived, so it's hybrid proof-of-stake and proof-of-work.
(Of course, JP Morgan likely dominates both at this point, but they don't have to).
So what happens if someone comes along and stakes $X Billion and becomes the majority stakeholder? Do you _really_ think that JP Morgan will just sit and let that happen? That they won't fork? That Deutsche Bank will continue to stand by the ledger if a group of anonymous traders from China become the majority stake?
It's a technical solution to a political problem.
Looking at JPMorgan's Liink, there is no proof that this is anything more than a cynical publicity stunt to try to capture some of the money sloshing around in the crypto hype. Most of its touted features are things that could have been done without blockchain and should have been done decades ago if they were willing to invest in modernizing things.
It's not being sold to end-user rubes. It's a way to try and suck banks into JPMorgan's technology ecosystem (promising to settle repurchase agreements faster and save lots of interest intraday).
It's not huge yet-- only about $1 billion per day flows through it.
> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...
Liink appears to have all three elements Schneier describes-- an immutable ledger distributed over many participants that any of the participants can read; the ETH consensus algorithm; and the third is a US-dollar backed stablecoin.
> In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features.
Yes, there's a limited number of participants with varying degrees of mutual trust. So this criticism is accurate, but I don't find the actual mechanism you get worthless.
In any case, note that what I said was not that blockchain was here to stay, but distributed ledgers. So even if one got rid of the specific consensus algorithm and the value token, you'd still have a distributed ledger.
In particular it's not about having many trusted participants, it's about being public without any trust (from the blog post: "This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it").
The closest analog to crypto distributed ledgers is, well, ledgers. If you look around you, there probably isn't a single product that could have been produced without the adoption of double entry accounting. And yet that adoption process took around 300 years.
Crypto is on the exact same trajectory. When people look around them in 300 years, there probably won't be a single product that could have been created without distributed ledger technology. But obviously this isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes.
The IQ test is being able to see the trend even though crypto is currently at literally 0.00% adoption (on the basis of total financial transactions). Sooner or later, reality always goes to par with the math.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
People used ledgers right after they were created, by definition, and long enough to go through all these years without that practice disappearing and without speculation to prop them up. So they brought value from the very beginning. Speculation prevents this logic from applying to blockchains (the value is making money by extracting it from gullible users).
> the trend
Which trend? If anything it's stagnant with just more scams, I still don't know anyone who uses cryptocurrencies for anything other than speculation.
1. Uniswap now has deeper liquidity on several major trading pairs than the leading centralized crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance:
https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance
2. The volume of stablecoins on the blockchain is growing rapidly, notwithstanding the recent collapse of LUNA/UST:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255835/stablecoin-marke...
If anything, that's an invitation to wait the next financial crisis to see what really is left of the "trend".
These distributed ledgers are here to stay in fact. Unless in less than 5 years or so, they are all going to go away 100% totally guaranteed?
Cryptocurrencies don’t have that kind of track record. They also provide dubious value to society at best currently.
* represent a broad swathe of the diverse American economy and more or less correlate with it as a whole
* have to issue regular, public, audited statements about their balance sheets
Crypto is none of those things.
Still waiting for the bull market there.
It's probably going to collapse worse.
„Taiwanese Ends His Life After Losing $2 Million Luna Investment„
https://coinquora.com/taiwanese-ends-his-life-after-losing-2...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
> So if tulipmania wasn’t actually a calamity, why was it made out to be one? We have tetchy Christian moralists to blame for that. With great wealth comes great social anxiety, or as historian Simon Schama writes in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, “The prodigious quality of their success went to their heads, but it also made them a bit queasy.” All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.
There will be other bubbles in future, but probably in other areas.
Coinbase has only gotten as big as it is because they were effectively the most legit American exchange selling crypto. With Robinhood, Square, Paypal, and even legacy exchanges getting in the game, they won't have that advantage next time around.
I'm also amused by the headhunter I heard from who apparently was trying to specialize in whatevercoin/NFT/etc. startups. I politely told him I would entertain any non-"web3" plays, and he started telling me how I was making the worst career choice of my life and turning away money, etc.
Wonder how he feels about his career right now.
I will admit to a little schadenfreude, but more generally it just saddens me. Idiot greed is eternal, I know, it is just a bit depressing to watch the destructive nonsense play out.
> Wonder how he feels about his career right now.
Pretty good, for all the money he collected placing developers in these crap bubble jobs. A little sad, that recruiting is going to be down for a couple years before he can start cajoling developers to take some other kind of new-fangled job that he doesn't understand.
As you note, since it was a direct listing and not an IPO, there isn't really an analog to many other companies.
My opinion about why they did a direct listing is because institutional investors didn't want to touch it, and that memetail traders (a portmanteau of meme and retail) are undiscerning at any valuation.
The company didn't sell any shares or make any money from the direct listing itself, so that means the only people that could make money or provide any shares for making a market at all would be existing shareholders that have a lot of shares. It's impossible to levy criticism both ways simultaneously, just to smugly pat yourself on the back, but there are other reasons to.
The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. A significant reason I avoided Coinbase's attempt at a 100 billion dollar direct listing is because there would be no stabilizing bid and retail doesn't have enough capital to simulate one.
Do you mean that you would have gotten the shares and would sell your shares at this point with a certain guarantee on the price, or something else?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stabilizingbid.asp#:~:t....
There is dilution in a “final” equity round, and then the banks are immediately flipping them to people that believe they are helping the company but are just getting dumped on by the banks, as all help was done by the banks
I theoretically like direct listings more, but I don’t like retails tolerance of getting screwed in a different way because the valuations are unsupportable
I just like exposure and liquidity, so float the shares one way or the other! People should be pragmatic about what they are participating in
No offense to the companies intended, I like both of their products.
The email protocol isn't complicated though. Back before spam was a thing, lots of people could just open a port and manually talk SMTP (you could send messages as Santa, or whatever). The only service Gmail provides that's not trivial (and I mean, something that can be done in a whiteboard interview) is the spam protection.
A more advanced classifier certainly do better these days.
However, it's also a closed system and you need to get crypto from somewhere. A centralized exchange is the most efficient facilitator of buying/selling crypto, and after that you can withdraw it and enjoy digital transfers without a centralized party.
(You can also get crypto buy mining or selling things for it, or even buy it for cash, but an exchange like Coinbase is much faster and more convenient.)
That’s where the biggest money and the highest yield is achievable anyway. And the quality of decenttalized offerings is rapidly improving.
Sometimes companies use downturns to get rid of people that they haven’t managed properly. It’s lazy, but cutting the bottom 10% in a layoff can be less short term work than performance reviews. They avoid the PR issues by saying “everyone is doing it.” This isn’t what Coinbase did.
If companies are cash flow negative and can’t get funding, they may reneg on offers too. This is what the banks did it 2008 and tech did in 2001. People see the burn and get it. The firms survive the reputations damage because they can say “we don’t want you to join if we are about to go under and we need to save cash.” This isn’t what Coinbase is doing.
Coinbase is still cash flow positive and has positive earnings. So why are they doing this? My sense is they see what’s coming. It’s either volume will shrink, leaving them unable to cover fixed costs, or some other seismic shift in crypto that will cost them a fortune. They are rational and have tremendous data on the crypto world. To me this is an incredibly bearish sign. But it’s also a very prudent sign on their part. (They feel the current risk is higher than future hiring challenges)
Please don’t take this as investment advice on COIN or crypto.
Eventually the snake has no more tail to eat.
Imagine you could peer into all the class A gamblers, there'll always be a subset who get lucky and convince themselves they "worked harder' or whatever.
Point is, without proper interrogation, it looks like a gamble and crypto looks like a scam. There's always tops of pyramid schemes.
But beyond that, I don't think your premise holds true. People do often start companies because they believe in (or even have a passion for) the thing their company will be doing. But people often just start companies because they believe those companies can make them money. That doesn't mean that the thing the company does is going to be good and sustainable over the longer term. Just that there's some money to be made, even if it's on the backs of speculators and gamblers that don't provide much value to the ecosystem.
Ponzi is not an acronym for “I don’t understand its value therefore it’s a Ponzi scheme”.
Gold is a hedge against hyper inflation and global crisis. Art is an elaborate mechanism for money laundering. Baseball, stamps, and pokemon cards are collectibles and eb and flow with the tides of pop culture And I am too tired to explain stocks to you.
> You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. It might actual shock you to learn that the US money supply historically grows faster than inflation.
Do they though?
Unlike cryptos, gold and stocks have real material value behind them, not just community buy-in.
You can make the art/baseball cards/stamps argument, but then you’d be conceding that the value of cryptos — something pitched as a revolutionary technology with limitless profit potential — is, in reality, determined by the same irrational valuation process as niche collectible markets.
There’s a reason we don’t pay for groceries and mortgages with baseball cards and stamps.
What I’m calling “real material value” are things like physical assets and profit generation capacity. Companies own things, and they use those things to generate profit, which in turn filters down to investors. This dynamic doesn’t exist in crypto.
Gold has real material value as a useful product, not simply a store of value.
I’ve only worked in finance for 6 years, and only on the technical side, so forgive me if my vocabulary doesn’t meet your standards.
If you’re actually disagreeing with the point that I’m making, and not just being pedantic, please let me know who you work for so I can be sure to avoid their services in the future.
If you’re in finance and interested in value, find a great textbook and get to reading. It’s a fascinating topic.
I’ll leave you with Goethe: “Doubt grows with knowledge.”
A pretty frustrating comment, honestly.
Edit: You know what, forget the textbook: spend 5 minutes on [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(economics)).
I usually just ignore this stuff. But people repeat this garbage over, and over, and over on HN to disdain others (have a look at examples in this thread) and it’s just plain wrong.
This is borderline arguing in bad faith. You’ll need to demonstrate a good faith argument to continue this conversation.
All value is psychological. Money is a behavioral coordination system. Believing gold has an intrinsic value that justifies trading at $1.8k an oz is sufficient for gold to trade at that value - regardless of gold’s real utility to any holder of gold. It’s the belief that drives the value.
Every single thing you hold that you believe has value either: 1) has direct value to you or 2) can be traded for something that has direct value to you
History is full of people who mistakenly believed their wealth was far more “real” than it was.
When the Dole company buys a banana plantation, it is because they believe that consumers will want to buy bananas in the future. That future may or may not become "real". This is where your logic ends. You have proven that perceived value is all that matters and have stopped.
You need to understand that a year later millions of bananas will be ready to harvest. And grocery stores will be placing or not placing orders to have those bananas delivered. So that perceived value is now hitting reality. The crypto people have done a pretty good job kicking the can down the road and avoiding reality hitting their perceived value, but it is hard to keep that up forever.
It’s bad faith to point out how wrong what you said was? Sorry about that, guess we can’t talk anymore.
Speculation on that asset can make the price go up far above the underlying value. But that comes at a high risk of the price falling down to the underlying value. For crypto this underlying value is basically zero.
I also think the putative concept of “underlying value” - always defined in opposition to some other form of value the speaker is railing against - is a lazy rhetorical crutch that provides nothing of analytical value to a discussion.
Every time these crypto threads come along we have tens of people drawing this same distinction and hordes of software engineers nodding along in agreement like it’s actually a thing. It’s not a thing. At least, not the way it’s deployed here.
Usually I just ignore it but it’s beginning to pass into accepted wisdom through sheer repetition.
TLDR scarcity + utility is where value comes from. Crypto really only has scarcity arguing for it. Much like collectibles actually.
I’m saying it’s a rhetorical crutch that doesn’t lead to meaningful discussion or insight.
If people acknowledged in these threads that “value” is way more complex and nebulous than these facile comparisons make it out to be, we’d have more interesting discussion.
It reminds me of the mortgage backed securities fraud. "You cannot criticize these complex financial derivatives, they were created by MIT PhDs."
Wealth isn’t denominated in currency - price is an exchange rate to another system of faith.
Value is the length people will go to acquire an asset. Utility is only one dimension. And true utility is arguably far less important than perceived utility. Being convinced something like gold has intrinsic utility that justifies its current exchange rate is sufficient to carry the current price regardless of whether that belief is based in reality.
I would agree that perceived value is more important than real value, but it is risky to place bets on there being a big difference between the two for a long time.
For an otherwise useless digital token which can only be held or exchanged, its price would seem to be pretty relevant when discussing its value as it literally only has exchange value and no utility.
The non-blockchain part is the scam part.
Don’t even try man
Predatory con artist are taking advantage of the wild west
Regulation is coming, I'd assume Coinbase is sensing the headwinds change
I think this vastly overestimates how efficiently corporations are actually run.
I've been in meetings with executives at several public companies. When the topic of adjusting HC or spending money comes up, usually those conversations happen in a ratio of 50% politics, 40% wild-ass opinion, and 10% data. And almost always, the "data" are completely cherry-picked, highly speculative nonsense that someone asked a BI team to produce to support their own political agenda. Now, I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy, but IMO there is pretty much zero correlation between their actions and having some kind of crystal ball on the market.
Arguably, that's just how well things can work at this scale. A CEO of a company that large who can see all the way down to me would be a nano-manager who should be fired. But it's still incredibly frustrating to be implementing decisions that affect me (such as a hiring or spending freeze), knowing that it was decided blindly with respect to me.
As I near retirement, I'm starting to believe that any organization run substantially by spreadsheets alone is too large, meaning that profit is wasted on organizational overhead, and investors should be dismantling such companies into smaller ones.
One would think that there's an enormous chance for optimization at companies at this scale, especially because everyone at the bottom know what is/isn't working but for various reasons, companies are very bad at doing this.
I’d say that a company that makes an offer today and reneges it tomorrow is not a healthy company. It’s certainly not a company I’d work for. We aren’t talking about contracts underwritten 3 years ago.
I.e., general rule, don't assign to malice which can be explained by incompetency.
Realistically, if they could actually predict the crypto market, they wouldn't need to worry about money period.
If this is true, Coinbase - and crypto - are in for a rough time
There is zero evidence of this.
https://twitter.com/TeamBlind/status/1532769735393169410
2 weeks ago they sent out emails saying "we will not be rescinding the offers of any employees who have already signed or have received an offer from us".
They then proceeded to rescind offers from people who received this assurance.
2 weeks is long enough that people signed leases, resigned from jobs, moved cities. And yet it's also short enough that Coinbase leadership was certainly already preparing to make this decision.
You don’t need any “preparation” to make this decision. Information changed, and a new course of action is taken.
I agree those who started in the 6 months after IPO got the short end of a stick. The current packages are based on 90 day moving average IIRC. At least the grants being yearly helps in this case
Other companies like Meta rescinded too, I’m not sure if they offered severance. Maybe just a generic email?
This summarizes a few other searches I found: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Is-meta-really-rescinding-off...
I could be wrong but that's what I found.
strange country
you can quit on the spot and ignore the notice period, and they can try suing you for lost business as a result, which is quite difficult to prove to any sort of standard
whereas it's generally very easy to go after an employer if they don't pay your notice if they sack you on the spot
Recruiting may have had nothing to do with Linked in.
I don’t expect them to police other companies this way for me.
Coinbase has several jobs posted on LinkedIn.
I expect LinkedIn to filter out companies that are outright scams. Rescinding an offer is just one step above that.
www.linkedin.com##.eah-header-item.eah-menu-trigger.ember-view.artdeco-dropdown__trigger--placement-bottom.artdeco-dropdown__trigger
www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
www.linkedin.com##.pv3.news-module
If you have to choose between resciding offers and leading your company to its death by running out of funds, the only sensible decision is the first one.
I also don't get why LinkedIn should be the HR police of 2022, this is nonsense.
Let's imagine the issue i mentioned above doesn't exist. Linkedin figured out a perfect way to figure out and filter out companies that rescinded offers. If that became a problem for companies, then a company would just hire someone and then lay them off immediately. Same result, but larger administrative/accounting overhead, so no severences for rescinded people, most likely. How would Linkedin track that? What's the time period cutoff for which laying someone off/firing them is considered "just a loophole around rescinding an offer"? A week? A month? How will you be able tell the difference between an instance of someone being fired within a short period of time after starting as a loophole around rescinding an offer vs. someone genuinely being fired within a month for whatever legitimate reason?
Imo i dont see how the current situation with coinbase/meta is a reason for such a major outrage. I could have understood it, if they were habitually known for rescinding offers as a part of their regular practice. But they don't, they all did it exactly once, at the same time, due to a very legitimate reason of a strong economic downturn affecting their survival/livelihood very badly. Imagine your spouse was having serious health problems, and you just found out you will need to take care of them for a year, right after you just accepted an offer from a company a few days ago. I think it is more than reasonable for that person to rescind their offer and tell the company they have something that's more important and that matters to their survival.
And that's not even mentioning that coinbase is paying severance worth 2 months of work (as well as provides job search assistance services, whatever that means) to those whose offers they rescinded. So those people essentially are paid for 2 months of job searching. Still sucks to deal with job search, don't get me wrong. But that severance package wasn't expected and feels pretty fair.
Would I be OK if LinkedIn gave similar tools to recruiters? No, because an applicant has a lot less power than a company. But I can see that recruiters would want that. So why wouldn't we want that on our side?
The "hire for a day, then fire" issue is interesting. Companies would tread more carefully there, though. Once you've hired someone, then you have a legal relationship with them. In the US, employment is at-will, but protections for firing due to race, gender, etc. still apply. So there's a lawsuit threat that would make this a dangerous game for companies to play.
Other threads claim that Meta did not actually rescind - those were more visa issues. Why is this such a big outrage? Because it's a breach in the norms of how job markets work. Re your analogy - Coinbase would certainly prefer not to have all these people in a downturn. But it certainly has options that the person with a spouse with health problems doesn't have. For example, executives could reduce their compensation temporarily to deal with this. The entering cohort of employees would make Coinbase less profitable, but won't by itself cause it to fail.
Do I really think that the CEO of Coinbase would take a 10% pay cut rather than rescind several offers? No. But the point is that Coinbase has options that mean it can do the ethical thing.
I'm sure a company like Coinbase with their HR/recruiting resources has a rather different experience, though.
There are so many proper applications of blockchain that could improve humanity and provide value to customers and instead these shitheads create NFTs.
"But the US dollar is fiat" they will say, "what's the difference?!"
Gee, I dunno, the fact that the US Government backs it? All central banks use it? It's the reserve currency of the world? Any currency that isn't backed by a government or was widely used before there was a government (gold, for example) is a goddamn scam and I'm sick of it.
- Utilities could use the extra boost of heat in winter
- producing potable water
The coin produced from these processes could then be used as tradable units. "Heat Coin" or "Fresh Water Coin" would ease the transaction of these resources.
Hence, we get to the root of the problem of any "Coin": it is inherently worthless without any real asset or unit of production to back it's value.
Yes, it’s not backed by a real asset, so crypto is truly a sister to Monopoly money, but I don’t see an issue with investing as long as you recognize what crypto is and what it isn’t.
I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t wait until “web3” moves past the whole fintech thing and people start realizing the true value of Web3 technologies: the fact that you no longer need a third party to mediate interactions between individual users on the internet.
Could you explain this more?
Like how you no longer need your ISP, or the blockchain systems run by third parties?
It seems to me like just playing semantic games if the third party is supposedly no longer a third party if it's distributed.
Maybe I missed something concrete about "web3"'s promises?
At any rate, this is the part I find interesting. The money games are a huge distraction IMHO.
I have quite a few disorganized thoughts on the subject… maybe I should write an essay…
For sign in there are distributed ways. SQRL by Steve Gibson is one, that is just first and second party. No third party needed, distributed or not.
But really, any public key system, like gpg web of trust would do it.
You could even do mTLS, with self-signed certs. Or build an identity tree with signed certs.
Like all things Blockchain there's always the open question to any solution of "but why not just do it without the Blockchain, and it'll be better faster stronger?".
Indeed i see many stories of solutions where they ended up just removing the Blockchain in the end, with no loss of functionality.
If you write up your thoughts then please look at non-blockchain alternatives.
Like why is a gpg key not identity, or not good enough, but a Blockchain solution would be?
There’s some overlap, but it’s very much the latter that I find interesting and worthwhile.
https://therealdeal.com/la/2022/01/03/pawson-designed-bel-ai...
And what is this nonsense about paying severance in cash? Do they believe in crypto or do they not?
You have to draw the line somewhere. When the economy goes south, guess what? People will be out of work. I don't know why white collar workers seem to think they need to be isolated from all bad events.
So things like lost bonuses or options or moving expenses are very much something that Coinbase need worry about
Imagine you've left your job, you probably don't want to go back there. You have to start a new job search. You're likely out more than one month's salary. Plus the intangibles of a job search while unemployed vs. employed.
Imagine you declined COBRA, or even with COBRA, you might end up with a period of being responsible for your own health insurance payments, too.
You have a gap in your employment record where you otherwise wouldn't have had one. That affects credit decisions.
Unless you qualify for marketplace subsidies, marketplace plans aren't a better deal like for like, than the best deals on employer group plans. If you had a good employer plan, a minimal marketplace plan will be far cheaper, but switching insurers can have a nonfinancial transitional cost associated with networks changes that you may not want to deal with when transitioning to job hunting, and while for the average consumer a cheaper plan will usually also be lower cost, you may not be the average consumer; a cheaper plan that covers less may, as well as being a transitional headache, increase your total insurance + out of pocket cost.
This is not like firing someone who has a established relationship with a company and might see his coworkers as friends etc. over email.
[1]: "The details surrounding the severance package are unclear, but some affected workers on Blind alleged they would receive two months worth of base pay; a representative from Coinbase did not provide further comment."
I would love to have an offer rescinded with pay. If the company’s prospects are really that dim I wouldn’t want to join anyway. Getting a cash bonus to go somewhere else is even better.
In all cases I’m sure one of the companies I turned down would take me back if my first choice turned out to be a dud.
YMMV, but it seems like there’s more incentive than ever right now to make sure you’ve got more than one offer when job hopping.
These companies, and your manager, and that recruiter is not your friend. Stories like these just pull back the veil and show that the mutually accepted delusion between employee/employer disappears when the bad times come.
It is no different than been fired I don't understand the noise it is making
Exactly. Not sure what the fuss is all about other than these companies not caring about you.
I've seen worse and Fast straight up shut down [0] after assuming that the VCs will just bankroll them despite Fast making little to no money for years with an extremely inflated valuation in the multi-billions.
I think lots of people have also forgotten the change of policy that Tesla, Meta, Apple, and Google said about the 'Working from Home' option in the job description. Before it was 'we're 100% remote', then it was 'you can go remote but you'll get a paycut if you do', then it was 'back to the office by spring 2022' and now some employees who are back at the office are also having their benefits cut.
With any company, 'nothing' is guaranteed. Once again these companies DO NOT care about YOU.
[0] https://www.axios.com/2022/04/06/fast-checkout-startup-colla...
No, it was 'you get a paycut if you move out of where you were working, into a lower-wage region.' Most (but not all) remote jobs in remote-only, or remote-first firms will cut your pay if you do that.
When the pandemic started, and the office closed, a few people certainly did just that (with, or without notifying their employer), but the firm never made any promises that this sort of thing will work out.
> then it was 'back to the office by spring 2022'
In some orgs/teams, yes. In others, no. In Meta/Google, this is not a corporate-wide mandate, this is up to your director to make a decision on. Mine has no problem with remote, and we've hired two 100% remote people in the past 6 months.
The way of backing up to people who already left their jobs was very unprofessional.
I know for a fact you can go back to the same team (and same level) in many FAANG companies without even interviewing. If you left on good terms that is.
By “egotistical”, I mean that the interviewer clearly believed he knew more than he actually did. It was that “I’m hot shit” vibe. I have worked across several roles in this industry over the last 20 years, and there was clearly inexperience on the other end of the phone.
That told me everything I needed to know about the company, and I was happy to move on from that experience.
https://twitter.com/teamblind/status/1532769735393169410?s=2...
The only thing I can think to do is gently blacklist this company (personally and amongst friends). This kinda behavior needs to have some kind of consequences, I think.
The questions asked also seemed to be outrageous and silly for a 45 minute session. Felt like their process suits Machines rather than actual engineers lol.
Additionally, the entire process according to him was badly mismanaged by the recruiter so it feels like one of the worst companies to work at.
https://www.4investors.eu/post/the-shoeshine-boy-indicator
Similarly, when I saw the crypto Super Bowl ads, I knew the bubble was about to pop.
I only air this out publicly since, it seems by design that they want to delay or prevent withdrawal of your funds. And there is no other recourse.
Explicitly caution everyone to move your holdings to a hardware wallet, and never stake anything on Coinbase. Not your keys, not your coins.
I mean, it's been pretty explicitly warned that you can't withdraw until the Eth2 merge. This is not a Coinbase issue, this is a staking issue.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/facebook/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/coinbase/marketcap/
Coinbase seems to still be the "winner" here.
One good example would be old mining companies that went bankrupt. Their value cratered to zero, AND now the corporate overlords that ended up acquiring them are spending neverending millions of dollars spent to clean up Superfund sites decade after decade. There are some liabilities that simply cannot be discharged.
You may as well ask why someone buys a stock that then goes down. You didn't think it would go down when you bought it, obviously, but you were wrong.
Now, these companies have pretty good access to capital, and retail getting ripped off is no problem. The interesting part of this glacier is the pre-IPO ecosystem that is bleeding money and trying to avoid similar markdowns.
Please father, may I have another? I’m afraid I did not learn my lesson last time, says public through apathy to adjust agency.
Plenty of impotent rage and frustration. Hardly any exceptional deviation from routine of it. Such grit.
Last I checked, nothing is stopping teachers, nurses, programmers, from quitting and signing up their community to take advantage of their services.
Give a minority of bean counters authority to count your beans, don’t be surprised when your allotment comes up short.
Corporatism is effectively quota based communism everyone is afraid of; “your skills earn you this much per annum! No more! Remember the fundamentals!”
Secular propaganda repeated over and over to make it stick. Advertising and marketing spawned from WW2 propaganda research. They’re intentionally targeting biology religion stumbled upon.
I think we should be more surprised that anyone wants to work for Coinbase, Tesla, etc.
edit: Not even Montana. At-will for the first six months; fire for any legal reason. Protections kick in after that.
Non-at-will usually just means that that the company can only discharge people for categories of reasons enumerated in the law. In at-will states the company can terminate for any reason except for reasons that are specifically forbidden by law.
The acceptable reasons to discharge people in a non-at-will jurisdiction is likely to include reducing costs when the business is facing a downturn.
Nobody likes doing this kind of stuff, its really bad for PR, really bad for the stock (short term) and messes with morale.. So for them to do with when they have billions in cash is very kewl.
Props to Brian and the team