Coinbase employees petition to remove execs
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web.archive.org
The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
[1] https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1534986892906639360
I guess I'm just frustrated at these "tech writers" for re-posting unverified information from Blind and then needing to walk it back later. It's unprofessional and risky.
"I am aware of the open letter published today that was claimed to be from Coinbase empoyees. We will do our best to verify this and also respond to those employees internally to try and solve any issues they have with the direction of our company. I appreciate all feedback from Coinbase employees, positive or negative."
Then deal with this internally.
This comment is really, really tone-deaf. People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction and/or making decisions that negatively impact the company's mission.
If he would have left it at these two points and immeditaly called a company all hands:
>First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
> Our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private. Posting this publicly is also deeply unethical because it harms your fellow co-workers, along with shareholders and customers.
Or to put it this way: if Coinbase goes bankrupt, customers have priority for Coinbase's assets over its shareholders.
> But wait, you bluster, the custodial agreement clearly says that I am the owner, that it’s my property, that I retain title to it. Yup, but that’s not how the law actually works. Just because they wrote that doesn’t mean it’s true.
> In fact, the exchanges are lulling the consumers with language claiming that the consumer "owns" the coins, when in fact the legal treatment is quite likely to be different in bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it is likely to be treated as a debtor-creditor relationship, not a custodial (bailment) relationship.
> Not only are the customers likely mere creditors, but they are also likely general unsecured creditors, which means they will have to wait at the back of the line for repayment with everyone else. They will share on a pro rata basis whatever assets are leftover (if any) after the secured creditors and the priority creditors (including the expenses of running the bankruptcy) get paid, and any payment might not be for quite a while. That’s not a happy to place to be. Recoveries could be pennies on the dollar.
https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/02/what-happens...
Your citation refers to the status of customers with respect to other creditors.
It says diddly squat about shareholders, who are below creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. Because, in a corporate bankruptcy, shareholders generally lose their investment.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests. In bankruptcy, customers will be screwed over to benefit the other creditors, not to benefit the shareholders as I mistakenly said.
No, this is still wrong. Shareholders are not prioritized over creditors, at any time. Shareholders are the least important stakeholders in a corporation, because by virtue of their limited investment, they have the least at risk.
Clearly that is the case here. CEO really comes off as if he’s living in a fantasy world here.
Which isn’t surprising given he started a crypto company.
If you don't like a company's leadership, obviously don't go work there. If you do, then decide you don't like them, obviously you quit. A 5-year old could understand that. Though it's beyond the anarchist collective on HN, apparently.
> We praise in public and criticize in private
But you’re criticizing employees in public right now? As the CEO and founder I think you need to be receptive to criticism and take it on the chin. This tweet reads as if it was written in a frustrated, spontaneous episode. That’s also not a really inspiring look for outsiders or investors.
Best of luck, I’m moving over to Kraken. Treating and talking about employees like this isn’t okay.
>If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution).
Yet all his thread does is criticize this petition without trying to understand and work with the person who wrote it. I understand that a CEO would be very unhappy at something like this and I can't fault him for feeling that way, but he'd do well to listen to his own point in this instance - "be a part of the solution".
I mean, being silent about company dirty laundry is not exactly virtue.
If you're leaking about something that's genuinely concerning (criminal, or just very bad and immoral), by all means, leak it.
But this seems more of a leak to make some noise, to win an argument by public opinion. Nothing but a political stunt. Not very virtuous.
It's not a political stunt. The people who haven't left clearly want to remain their for various reasons asides from the issues they expressed. It's an attempt from those employees to actually improve the company and address the issues they have.
The third option -- to escalate the argument to the public square and enlist the public as allies -- is available, but think what would happen if everybody did this. In a company of thousands of people there will always be passionate disagreement. If companies tolerated this kind of public escalation, it would erode the trust that is necessary for any organization to operate. It would be its own kind of toxic culture.
A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending:
Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This is a very amateurish response, and honestly I'm expecting better from some exec of a publicly traded company. You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice, share how Coinbase is always (supposed to be) looking for new ways to improve, and how there are more appropriate channels for this kind of feedback.
Instead you let your ego get in the way, shared some childish tweets (that you'll probably regret soon), and alienated the majority of your employees.
Well, he did say he felt offended that he wasn't included in the list.
>You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice
Brian is doing that here. Except he is appealing to the employees that aligns with him and his choice of people for exec leadership. You seem to assume that a vast majority of the employee base agrees with the petitioner, and Brian seems to assume that a vast majority agrees with his PoV.
Retaliation?
I dare him to do it, no I double dare him to do it.
But I bet all the tea in china he wont do it.
No it's not. It's often the only recourse because of the certainty of retaliation because of the power imbalance.
My first thought after reading that - maybe your employees actually believe that their execs are the ones running the show?
it's nice to see you haven't changed in the sense that you're responding here directly and address the issue without mincing words. The content is less nice though, very misguided even. I don't have inside knowledge and can't speak for the employees but I can tell you that other shareholders also aren't happy with the way things are going and what's been said in the petition largely resonates with me.
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that. Most long term investors don't care about the current share price either, but we're worried about the future value of the company. The out of control hiring was completely incomprehensible after you and other execs for months repeated the mantra that Coinbase is well prepared for the bear market. Spending has been out of control lately as the Q1 figures showed, especially on administration and employee stock options, wherever that money went. The company is quickly turning into another Silicon Valley bureaucratic monster, eating up funds with little real world gain in terms of productivity. (Foreign) acquisitions don't seem to be going great. And neither do you communicate any of the "challenges" to the shareholders, you seem to be treating us the same way as the employees. One day you announce the plan to hire thousands of new employees, a few weeks later that gets completely scrapped and a hiring stop put in place. This isn't good leadership and doesn't look like there is sufficient foresight.
Lastly in terms of investments, one of the great opportunities Coinbase has at the moment is investing aggressively in startups in the space, given the cash reserves. Having a chief people officer who doesn't understand crypto hire more and more people who don't know what they're doing at Coinbase isn't needed at this point, it would be better to invest in talent that does understand the space and actively builds solutions.
And while of course the leadership should lead and the employees should follow, not the other way around, it doesn't hurt to listen to them once in a while. Publicly dismissing their concerns in an arrogant and aggressive manner is not helpful!
It absolutely is and there is a lot more of this blame game to come as people’s illusions are crushed. BTW it’s not a downcycle or a season, it’s a crash and cryptocurrencies will not recover because:
Nobody is using them as currencies - the experiment has failed, instead they are vehicles for speculation
The supply of greater fools in the world population has been exhausted, and after they lose all their money they will never return
That’s not to say coinbase and Armstrong don’t deserve criticism but let’s be clear about why it is happening now - his actions haven’t changed, the context has, and a lot of people have lost money they’re never getting back invested in coinbase itself and cryptocurrencies so they are angry (esp employees who probably invest in crypto, in coinbase and depend on the company).
Granted, maybe the crypto aficionados celebrating the hiring spree are different from the ones now demanding labor austerity, but it strikes me as quite the heel-turn.
Not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user here. The CEO responding to petitions like this on Twitter in a childish and heated manner is reducing my confidence in Coinbase as a company. The same might be true for other users who are watching.
You are the CEO of a public company, and will have to see many such petitions over the course of your career if things go well. Lashing out on Twitter is a shortcut to achieving much worse outcomes that will not end well.
I suggest apologizing publicly to your employees for your heated Tweets, and cite that you will definitely not use Dot Collector in the future. If it's such a non-event, why not take the win and admit that it was a bad idea? It is well-known as controversial anyway from all I have heard about it.
The biggest threat to my confidence about Coinbase is the structural parts of it, the fact that they are a growing centralized for-profit company responsible for a large amount of assets.
On this trivial (to me, maybe not to Coinbase) Twitter matter: I can see how both sides would go public like this. If you are an internal employee and you think there are C-level personnel changes that should be made, the odds are definitely not in your favor to propose such a thing internally. The risk is high that there will be retribution (whether direct or indirect). Going public is a way to drive attention to the issues, and incentivize that execs act in a legal manner in their responses.
I can also see why Brian would want to address this. Employees are airing their dirty laundry publicly. Shareholders and users can see this. If all you saw was this petition, it would certainly raise a lot of questions. It needs to be addressed in the arena in which it was surfaced by leadership. Where I think Brian is going wrong is he is being 100% defensive and 0% open-minded/empathetic. What about Coinbase's environment led to employees feeling the need to go public like this? This should be a time for some introspection, to hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.
For a reason that is not "a small group of employees suck" or "working from home sucks". It would have been important to address and embrace that.
""" I’m deeply troubled by this, but not for the reasons you might imagine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690452
2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. I was a little offended not to be included :)
3/ Second, let’s separate the problems that you perceive to stem from a few execs, and those that you believe are core to the company's mission. If you don’t like the mission, your decision is easy: you should leave. If a few unpopular execs, my decision is hard.
4/ Third, making suggestions on how to improve the company is a great idea (in fact, we expect everyone to be a part of that). But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private.
5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired. """
The rest was really good!
>5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
That's just terrible advice - whistleblower retaliation is illegal, and you're suggesting he retaliate publicly? I'd argue that your post could best be condensed to, "Speak with your legal team before you publicly respond to something like this."
The amount of blatant hypocrisy in this tweet is mindblowing. If I knew I wasn’t smart enough to run a company I’d at the very least get someone to proofread my tweets before exposing my lack of logical consistency and awareness.
This whole leak/rant is something that should have been addressed internally. Shot in the foot.
Or, you could hope that people will stop having emotions and acting irrationally based on those emotions. I seriously doubt that will pan out well.
So much this. I’ve worked at a couple companies that at some point had a lot of leaks. In every case it was because employees had become disgruntled because there was no way to affect change inside the system.
Coinbase seems like a dumpster fire. Heed the warnings of the recent announcements that your assets can be considered the company's in bankruptcy proceedings - and move your assets into hardware wallets.
This guy is dumb, really dumb, on multiple levels.
If this same response were posted after an internal petition, it would have the wrong tone. Externally, I'm not going to condemn it so much.
Aside from the fact that his response is likely illegal according to California labor code, threatening to fire employee for discussing workplace conditions, it blows my mind how ignorant and illiterate he is when it comes to understanding power dynamics, and even the basic history of labor.
How do you go from being a startup founder to a public company CEO without deeply reflecting about workplaces, employee happiness, dysfunction, power dynamics and history of all of that?!
Here’s a link on your CPO:
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Coinbase-product-team-culture...
he says whilst criticizing his employees on Twitter
Brian armstrong: We need to lay-off 18% of our workforce to stay healthy as a company.
Brian armstrong: Doesn't slash his $60M compensation to help retain some staff who've contributed to building the company.
Also, Brian armstrong: I take accountability.
Clearly not.
It seems to me that it's not the company's health he's worried about.
I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
Sounds like hell.
There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this person a good teammate, yes/no?" and the person gets many no's...perhaps it's something to look into?
No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever).
If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I should intervene. In this case, I will contact them directly trying to understand them and solve the problem in an amicable way, without involving any external party. This helps in a vast majority of cases. Only in extremely rare cases, once in a few years, the problem becomes so grave that another person needs to be involved. In any case, giving anyone a thumbs down doesn't solve anything.
Perhaps coinbase doesn’t target employees like you. Maybe they like happy clappy medicinally-well-adjusted type employees?
I would like to say I occasionally write low quality comments to empirically test my personal self-judgement about my own metrics of reality.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?
Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.
Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.
I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.
And of course that Black Mirror episode. Constantly evince a super positive energy or else.
Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.
One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.
AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.
These happy clappy "systems" usually fail to take into account (almost biological) realities of how power structures work.
I'm not familiar with other companies that have the same reputation of using a system like this the same way Bridgewater does.
You have to remember you give real-time feedback during the meeting itself.
> happens all the time
Hmm how do the CEOs react to that? I imagine that the good ones are happy for feedback
The others though?
(I understand if you were exaggerating a bit, wrt "all the time")
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-asking-staff-rate-e...
[1] https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...
I shall check it out!
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work, because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance.
One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.
No one is positive and happy all the time and having to fake it "as a job requirement" sounds wrong on so many levels.
I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.
That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."
I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.
My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.
As an aside: I assume that you know this from your own life, and appreciate when people behave in a manner that cares for the emotional commons of wherever you are. Is your objection to it here the fact that it's a giant stupid company ostensibly trying to curate your feelings, and that's annoying and (probably) hypocritical? Or do you really object to the premise?
We don't need you dragging yourself in to work after caring for your cancer patient family member or newborn.
Not sure what you are trying to mean.
Sounds like standard corporate usistan.
Fair enough, but why single out Coinbase when the same kind of BS goes on in pretty much every large corp over there?
This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.
There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.
I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.
The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.
I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.
I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?
It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…
A) it's a strange request B) it's an imposition C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly? D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.
I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.
(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)
Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.
Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".
This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
And who required us all to use the horrible XBugTool, which got extremely angry if you used it to file bug reports against itself:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...
>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
https://web.archive.org/web/20120216050221/http://toastytech...
It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who to fire first.
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...
https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203
The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186
That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.
Maybe Gumby can provide some more context!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c...
Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992
https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c...
The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2
Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.
Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.
To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.
Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.
- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow
- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances
- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)
During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.
If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.
(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).
They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Just imagine if all companies were run like your high school social hierarchy, except that this also determined whether you kept your job or not.
Great insight! It's like an ouija board. It feels like you're making independent decisions and a gestalt outcome "appears", but it's much more social than we perceive.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
Where is the middle ground?
Depending on who is it that people do and don’t want to work with, we might call it “discrimination against a protected class”, which is at least bad enough that it’s illegal in many countries.
That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when you have the clout to do so, because there's no manager to protect them from the bullshit anymore. It's basically inviting these sorts of shenanigans rather than forcing saboteurs to do a lot of extra work to get people fired.
Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actually were the asshole here? Wouldn't you be saying the same thing? Maybe this incident made people realize that "you" weren't a good person to work with?
If you were on the other side, isn't that a good outcome?
If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.
When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.
If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.
Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.
The dot system would probably *help" here, because a sudden drop in ratings right after the incident would merit an investigation.
It is if there is no objectivity to it. It wouldn't be the first time I get a bad review because I do things slightly different.
Another way to look at [high school cliques] is that people who other people want to be around get high [social] ratings. Is that bad?
From experience: yes, it is. The fact that this criticism can be reframed in a way that hides the problem, that something we've all experienced becomes invisible, shows that it is a problem. There is a kind of problem with group social dynamics that can't be easily ironed out; the real experience of existing high school cliques is proof of this. Unsurprisingly, this same problem that comes up in high schools appears in workplaces also.
Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social acumen can easily see.
Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones. The quarterback’s popularity doesn’t rest on whether or not he’s pretty.
Whether or not the social dynamics of big established companies and high risk startups vary due to this is interesting to consider.
Sounds very defeatist to me. Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
> Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones.
I think it’s telling that your example here is high school. IMO the focus is always on who has the most power. In high school, yes, the pretty girls have power, because of the way the boys treat them. I can’t say I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in adult workspaces.
Improve and do better for whom? Those of us with adequate social acumen can deal with human nature just fine.
It is observably true though that low status persons often fantasize about somehow overturn the social order such that when it all shakes out they come out on top. It’s so common that it’s a well-known and frankly overworked trope.
The world has seen plenty of revolutions and other social disruptions and every single time those with a good grasp of human nature come out on top. You can fight reality if you wish, but you can never beat it.
> Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
And it’s telling how reliably chumps fall for that story. The process is observably no more than a fig leaf covering office politics except perhaps at the levels where nobody with influence gives a fig.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
Learning through others' mistakes instead of ones own :-)
Also, interesting to read
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.
Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity and Wiles.
Normally, I try not to value any principle over the others, but today, I'd have to say Cheer is my favorite.
The app is based on his philosophy https://www.principles.com/
But, like major thumbs down on their vibe. They need more positive vibes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
Ray Dalio to me seems like a bright person, having glanced at:
They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs.
This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above.
A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
I don't understand -- what should I look for, how should I act (and why)?
(I've never been in such an environment)
Interesting to read about their system!
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
BTw Kerala supposedly.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_combat
“ The Kerala practice was discontinued in the 19th century under the British Raj.”
For instance there are 10 people in a meeting and Person 1 is talking about the Bank of Japan effect on the EUR/USD. The other 9 would rate that person on this specific topic in terms of "credibility, experience, etc...". The results would then be displayed after all people talked and were given so the team could come to a consensus on correct action.
Brilliant if used correctly. Does not sound like it's being used as intended.
But yeah that alone sounds like hell.
Also, Bridgewater associates were being paid ridiculous amounts (I think, haven't run specific nubmers on this) by someone widely regarded as a visionary, so they were much more incentivized to stay and deal with this stuff. I suspect that there wasn't a comparable job opportunity for them at the time, whereas with Coinbase in a market downturn...
DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams).
This has been to my heart for years https://www.radicalsimpli.city/
Looking at HN, enjoying the single founder SaaS threads, this is the future for a lot of business models.
People don't want to have meaningless jobs [1] and want jobs that make sense to them. But the other force is VC driven startups where the mantra is "Scale, scale, scale" by hiring hundreds of people - with the goal to make people rich. I do assume for more and more people money is no longer a substitue for sense though, several of my coachees want new jobs with less pay but more sense. I do believe this becoming a mega trend for the next decades (AI, 3d-printing, ... will accelerate this trend). We're at the very very beginning.
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2015/...
You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.
To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.
Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.
Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.
I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.
In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.
2MB/minute is 33KB/second.
How is that impressive?
maybe the presentation was called "Timmy's first named pipe" or "Sally explores /etc/logrotate.d"
to clarify could you say the same thing, in a different way?
In ABNBs case, business going to almost zero overnight was a forcing function to a level not often seen. After being forced to lean up and prioritize, they were well positioned for the market to improve.
FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.
This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick.
If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small.
It is for this reason that I find Apple fascinating. They have their issues but if there is a company that seems to have somehow escaped this jinx, they are it. (I know, I know, YMMV. Please don’t turn this in to an Apple thread.)
They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.
There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).
I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.
Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.
TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas". Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.
In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.
Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.
Do i understand it correctly?
60k ppl left ur job and went to zoom?
Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?
This could well be true, but it seems far from obvious to me. Do you have any evidence? Clearly netflix stock is doing poorly in recent months, but this seems much more of a consequence of content issues rather than engineering talent.
Oh wait. That isn't what happened.
Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.
The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.
The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.
Genuine question
Whats the diff between them and yt?
At it's peak Netflix accounted for ~35%+ of traffic on the Internet (around 2014-2015 era) alone. Times have obviously changed since then. Not because it had more users than YouTube or more playtime but because it was delivering long-form content in high resolution. Which at the time was a considerable technical challenge, from bandwidth and distribution itself but also to encoding infrastructure.
More broadly Netflix also had a profound impact on the CDN landscape. They made use of all existing CDNs (Akamai, Cloudfront, old stuff I forget) while also building out their own POPs, they paved the way for modern CDNs in many ways. The style of which would eventually be cloned by many players but most importantly Fastly. Fastly would then go on to provide this service to new players like Bytedance to rapidly deploy massive delivery capability with very little ramp-up. They did some less-cool things ofc, they bowed to the HDCP mob and did dumb things like build a Silverlight based client etc. By and large however Netflix has had a positive impact on the industry.
YouTube on the other hand (after acquisition) was largely built with Google tech on Google infra. The only major project to come out of it isn't delivery related is Vitess - a sharding system for MySQL. Its largest impacts on the industry are unfortunately much less savory. Mostly pioneering inventions like pre-roll ads and targeting based on content in which the video is embedded, heinous recommendation algorithms that send people into procrastination spirals etc.
Well that isn't entirely fair, we can thank Youtube for pushing for better encoding standards and tangentially through Chrome making HTML5 video not suck (arguably though, Safari/Webkit was also influential there).
In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000.
I have never worked somewhere with larger teams so I may well be wrong, however there is definitely a step in small businesses with two founders at about the 20 people point.
Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?
The worst company-level experience I saw in my career was seeing over-hiring only with a massive downsizing later on. It was during that time, that first employee I was directly involved in hiring was part of the layoff. A company that goes acquisition crazy and trying to boost staff rapidly seemed at first like a good thing. In my case, I saw sales staff grow a lot. However, executive leadership, with whatever responsibilities they have, will always have different agendas. Hiring sprees can probably build credentials for managers, whether or not it is a good investment in the first place.
Hiring sprees and acquisitions towards some business goal that doesn't match the current product goal can also cloud judgement on what can actually be delivered. If your product is optimized for a certain set of things, but it is being sold for other use-cases because "meh, we need to compete", you create a multi-year issue when that business plan fails (in an R&D perspective, since that's only what I am interested in.) I bet this is exactly going to happen to Coinbase. Just jumping on that NFT craze instead of developing out their core business more is probably an example that can be relatable (but I am speculating here.)
True but not fatal. Being equal to the first employees isn't a requirement: as long as the employee creates more value than they cost, it's worthwhile. Facebook is a simple premise that could be (and was) created with a skeleton team but it's still worth hiring the person to work on Linux's networking stack if that enables them to make it more efficient.
So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders will be left with 60%. After the 2nd hire 1st hire would give up 5%, and founders 10% to get 15% ...
My idea was that this would disincentivise hiring new people, so that new people would be hired only when absolutely necessary .
I'm still planning on experimenting with this at some point in my life.
It's an interesting concept, but it feels like there would be significant pitfalls any way I think if it.
There are lots of details that I thought about, and surely many others I didn't. That's why I'm still ruminating the idea in my head, until I feel it is complete enough to apply it.
When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected. So, I in a way I, as an IC with 2.5% of shares could push to hire more people to do more of the work I did without any negative direct impact to me (I know the impact comes as the company spends more money, has to raise more and then dilute the value of the stocks in theory, but that's something employees rarely see).
What I want is being able to sit down with say, the team of 10 people in the startup and ask them: Hey, do we REALLY need to hire this 11th person? we all are going to have to give X% of our share of the pie to him. And particularly, when starting the project, the first 5 or 6 should have a sizeable chunk of the pie, and not 2.5% ... ideally, a 1st employee would get to 2.5% once there are about a 100 people in the company (i.e. after hiring the other 97 people)
Where did the new hires' shares come from, if not dilution?
They might have come from an option pool, but that just adds a layer of indirection. When the option pool runs low, typically it is replenished with new shares, diluting existing ones.
So I think the dynamic you're describing already exists in most startups.
This conversation happens when fundraising. Usually the lead wants to see the option pool replenished at the same time.
In the days of horse-delivered mail, you wanted all your employees in one big building, and you wanted to cover all the functions inside your own org so you don’t have to send many slow, expensive letters.
Fast forward to email and zoom and automated SaaS businesses - there is very little friction in engaging a third party to do the things you don’t specialize in. You don’t need any employees beyond your core team anymore.
Compile time per person and code understanding time per person grows linearly with the number of people (which grows exponentially as revenue grows), which means that the total time people are spending with understanding the code base & total compilation time for the code server grows quadraticly with number of engineers (+ exponentially with revenue).
Total code size should be kept under square root of number of engineers in an organization probably to keep product velocity OK, and engineers should spend significant time minimizing the number of changes in the code base after they have the first proof of concept.
The one valid criticism is that they had a wildly ambitious hiring plan that they had to scale back in a hurry, resulting in severe fallout. However, any such plan had to be approved by the CEO, it's not clear to me why the Chief Operating, Product and People Officers specifically should be ones falling on their swords here.
While it looks like coinbase had a toxic work culture I have no sympathy for those “mercenaries” joining companies on exceptionally great times then complain when things get back to reality
- The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
- Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
- A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
- Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
> ..fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable
Feedback like 'apathy' and 'condescending attitude' are very legit for employees and even to the interview candidates. Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
It comes down to someone's judgement call. It's usually not possible to quantify if "certain products" should be prioritized over "other important issues" or vice versa. Particularly so for someone who does not have the full picture.
> Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Is it objective or just an opinion? If objective, how is it measured?
> Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
Because "Someone anonymous said some of you were generally apathetic and sometimes condescending". "Well, can you give specific examples? No? Then it's fluff and not actionable".
The petition is immature and maybe 'condescending attitude' towards petitioner is deserved.
It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g. vs. Open Sea), and how to minimize risk, and maximize success (e.g. adoption).
Investing too much in new initiatives, while not building the right platforms, and tech infra for it, will lead to even higher tech debt and more chaos - so they seem like logically reasonable complaints. Whether they are true or not I have no idea but the points do not seem vague at all.
It’s poorly worded and broadly vague in most places.
If the criticism is valid but you’d never know it for lack of details. It just reads as disgruntled workers trying to stir things up.
They'd be better off either trying to form a bargaining unit and attempt to get management to rollback on the performance management changes.
I think that is what is happening here, they mention at the bottom - replace the current execs with people who are knowledgable about crypto world.
They want the company to succeed.
On the other hand, if you're some random dude in the IT department with very little influence or stock ownership, and with little reason to believe the host of engineering and product is going to stand up behind you, then yeah I'd say the time spent organizing an effort like this is much better spent "shopping elsewhere".
- Yesterday was onboarding my friend to Coinbase wallet and the landing page for that product was 404'ing. This is the first result on Google! Proof - https://imgur.com/yMt1N49
- They activated the dapp browser in the app, with a new wallet that's different than my existing coinbase wallet. Why?? Why do I now have 2 wallets.
- Coinbase direct deposit does not work with Gusto, or at least it didn't 3 months ago. Tried and got silent error.
- Rescinding offers. Terrible, how could they not forsee a massive backlash? Does the foreign national new grad who was counting on that offer/visa really affect the bottom line so much? Maybe $20M for a superbowl ad where the app crashed wasn't worth it?
- Coinbase wallet: popular projects like Chain Runners do not even display.
I mean the list goes on. Meanwhile the CEO is going on Good Time Show talking about "how we built this" and I'm thinking hello? Your own house is on fire right now. All this said, Brian Armstrong is a legendary entrepreneur and I know that he can reset. Airbnb went through a similar phase before the CEO made changes and got them back to their core.
While it is sad that offers are rescinded, the company is struggling. Sometimes, hard choices need to be made.
https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/bitcoin-investor-tool...
Execs often hold too much power in tech companies, and I’ve worked enough to see how condescending they can be to people even just 1-2 levels below them.
If the choice is between many the of employees that are actually building the company and a few bad execs, it seems easy to me.
I remember reading about him as the guy who got over $600 million [1] in compensation for 15 months of work (factoring Coinbase’s high share price at the time of its direct listing)…mind-blowing
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/google-ex...
Thanks to brilliant management, like handing out a billion dollars to some google exec who knew nothing about crypto and shipped a product no one uses, Coinbase is now indexed to the average price of the shitcoins it consistently lists.
Hire builders. Not resume builders.
However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions)
I think it's very hard for non-builders to really understand the underlying processes that result in success.
This is also a common English proverb
The last part (in casibus non exceptis) is usually omitted, giving it the meaning we have now. The original meaning was a little different.
Jeff Bezos was a programmer?
It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful.
My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels.
Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.
I think companies like coinbase can't afford to have non builders in leadership because they don't have a strong product market fit compared to Facebook, Tesla cars, AWS etc.
Also, I know a lot of entrepreneurial people that do not do very well when the company gets beyond a certain size. They can't operate within a system of greater restriction and don't want to follow best practices for employees. Managers are often not good builders and builders aren't always good managers.
https://www.afr.com/wealth/people/crypto-billionaires-fortun...
The CEO and his C-suite all have agency.
If one member of the C-suite misbehaves professionally, you are suggesting that the one who hired/managed him/her should be punished alongside the errant person by virtue of association, rather than by establishing concrete evidence that they both acted in concert?
Premature judgement is what is causing a lot of commenters to elevate these anonymous claims to the level of facts, rather than wait until an interested party (like an external investigator commissioned by the board of directors, or a regulator like SEC) is able to substantiate any or all of the claims.
I don't work for Coinbase, so I am in no position to speak on whether the CEO is at fault or not. Any attempt to do so as an outsider with limited information would be pure speculation.
Not very strategic or well thought out.
If that is not the case, this is an extremely foolish move. Erodes confidence in the company, peers, everyone.
Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captured over IP protocol, with Bitcoin I expect the base layer to capture most of the value, and not the companies on top of it.
Coinbase made more money on trading fees than the whole ICE exchange, it's not sustainable.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Coinbase-product-team-culture...
This is the key problem with crypto only exchanges.
At some point (probably further down in share price) they will become a target for existing exchanges looking to diversify - ICE, CME
Unfortunately COIN is currently worth 15, and was worth around 70Bn last year.
Looks like lots of commenters here don't realise this, believe anything and hastefully jump in without questioning this as it could be made by a random user. Always be skeptical around the source of this.
> It seems completely anonymous.
That's the case here since the Ethereum address has absolutely 0 iterations, making it more harder to trace.
So it probably isn't fake.
It might seem silly to point out the obvious, but a lot of people still genuinely believe HR is their friend, especially those starting their careers.
What are some ideas for how to do this? Maybe start with the assumption that each employee has an ECC key signed by a corporate certificate authority.
Not saying they shouldn't throw Coinbase management in the trash, just commenting on the reality of IPO stock prices.
Coinbase hasn’t cornered the market. They’re one player in an industry where other players aren’t that far behind. They had first mover advantage which it seems like they’ve squandered on dumbass political fights.
Brian should’ve done what other CEOs do: hire a Head of DIB, fund them just enough, and focus on product.
Instead he’s suffered from that ailment that everyone will suffer from when they’re on a success high: they believe they’re somehow just better due to X (doesn’t matter what it is) and all their decisions will then be around defending that core belief.
Or in other words, he is a huge idiot. He’s going to wreck everything and the end result isn’t going to be pretty.
edit: That said I don't see any proof that this was written by Coinbase employees. Will treat it as unconfirmed although that doesn't change anything about the criticism being correct.
From copying Ray Dalio’s Corp practices blindly to copying Elon’s “unfiltered” tweet style, this guy is revealing his weaknesses. Doubt a vacation would cure that.
Though I would imagine the responsibility for this extends to the CEO, not the various execs.
Heh.
>The failure of the Coinbase NFT platform
Market forces.
>The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
Name them. General "I disagree with your priorities" is pathetic. Name the decisions and explain why they were foreseeably wrong.
>Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Welcome to any fast growing team. You get slower before you get faster.
>A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Grow up.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/coinbase-ceo-offers-severanc...
Sure the initial petition is somewhat dumb but the fact that the CEO is so proud of his response is comical levels of dumb. Cringed hard at the revelation of how dumb this guy is. Sometimes the best response is no response.
The most generous way I can view this is that this guy is trying to copy Elon Musk in a contrived manner. Just shows a lack of original thinking.
This the smoke