Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs

blog.coinbase.com

778 pointsnpalli593 comments

> If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.

How typical is this? Is he really talking about the hot wallet and/or cold storage?

Those claiming that this is a "crypto" sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month.

Pretty standard to not let terminated employees hang around. It feels cold but it’s just the way it has to be. Sone places will even do this when an employee submits a resignation on good terms. Just a way for the company to cover themselves.

This is absolutely untrue. In Europe we work several days/weeks after the layoff notice. You can fire people from the night to the morning only in US

In Europe you have to keep paying the person, but it's not uncommon for them to be told not to come in anymore.

true, they call it gardening leave

That's what I've always known it as. It can be quite long, especially in financial services.

My last position was three months.

3 months gardeling leave? That's a long time. Free money for you

This is true in the US as well. While in some cases you can lay someone off, and immediately stop paying, most of the time there is a period where the former employee will be paid and not have to come to work (or really, allowed to).

It's also what Coinbase seems to be doing here (they are paying people for fourteen weeks or more).

Coinbase layoff is so large they are paying them because of the WARN act in California.

WARN is federal law not state law.

There's both a federal law and a California law.

https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

Yes but you can't really "cut them off". You can tell them they don't need to be there, and most will be happy not to. But you can't revoke their access for no reason.

If you want to do that you need to prove they have (already) committed a fault of such gravity that allowing them to stay would harm the company irremediably -- it's a high bar to cross.

I've definitely seen people told there's nothing left for them to do, and their accounts and access immediately turned off. Why would they need access to systems or the office if they have no tasks? Are you saying there's some kind of right they have as an employee to come in and work even if they are told not to and there are no tasks assigned to them?

Europe is not a country, there are different laws everywhere. I haven't seen one yet, that would explicitly make it forbidden to cut off the access. Can you share a link to such law?

I think they can cut you off here but it's less common.

If I get fired from my company I get like a year's wage to go (and government assistance after that) so I wouldn't be that upset. Hence no need for a disorderly exit.

I think it's more in the US when people are let go with nothing, I think it's pretty obvious that they'd be pissed about it.

It’s the exact same in the US. Most companies pay a decent severance that is tied to tenure and is meant to avoid lawsuits. If you resign and they don’t want you to stay for 2 weeks then they will still pay you.

Severance is different, though. My contract, for example, requires the employer to give me 3 month's notice (well, potentially up to 4 since the 3 month timer doesn't start until the first day of the month after notice was given), and without a very good reason to do so (we think we might run into cash problems if we don't do this wouldn't count), they'd have to offer a significant amount of money to get me to leave voluntarily - often times that ends up being about a month's pay per year worked.

It’s true in the US too, depends on the risk of terminated employees causing intentional harm. Most of the time layoffs come with severance making it similar to your “garden leave” situations.

We may be mixing things up.

You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked. They're completely orthogonal. Depends on role, company, situation. It's an assessment and tradeoff - is it worth / do I need the next two weeks of work and KT from this person, vs the risk of having access.

The notion of revoking security access to limit risk is definitely not a US thing.

>You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked.

In France, this is a breach of contract as you are not providing your employees with the means to work, and you can be sued for it if it is not done as a disciplinary measure (which you can also be sued for if not done in good faith)

EDIT: my dudes stop trying to link legifrance articles to me, I have literally been in this situation twice, gone to prud'hommes twice and helped multiple friends with such a situation. I'm starting to know our work code a little bit.

EDIT 2: alright, more context for all the nonbelievers and people who never had to face an actual work code:

In the very best case for the employer (in such a way that doesn't expose them to being sued), firing a single employee takes two weeks.

* Initial notification of the firing, with at least 5 days between this notification and the meeting before firing to explain the reasons

* Meeting before firing, a mandatory 48 hours waiting period before taking any decision.

* Notification has to be mailed in as a recommandé, which can only be sent after those 48 hours, and takes a day or two to arrive.

It gets infinitely more complicated for Coinbase sized companies trying to lay off more than 10 people for economical reasons, the company is obligated to have meetings with the employee representatives, at the very least twice spaced by 15 days. For a company the size of Coinbase, the CSE has 2-4 months to answer and can ask for proof that the company is, indeed in financial troubles, having them open their books. https://entreprendre.service-public.fr/vosdroits/F24648

Doesn't seem correct "Upon termination of employment, the employer may release the employee from working during all or part of the notice period and pay him an indemnity in lieu of notice"

https://knowledge.leglobal.org/restrictive-covenants-in-fran...

Indeed! And that is perfectly fine. The employer can dispense you from your préavis de licenciement, especially if it's a single person being fired. https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F24660

However, any firing must be notified of an entretien préalable de licenciement by letter (can be given directly). This is usually a week after, to grant the employee time to prepare (and to eventually be helped by employee representatives). Then, after this, the employer has to give at least 48 hours before doing anything. This gets even worse in the case of a massive layoff like Coinbase's for economical reasons, the company is obligated to have meetings with the employee representatives, at the very least twice spaced by 15 days. For a company the size of Coinbase, the CSE has 2-4 months to answer and can ask for proof that the company is, indeed in financial troubles, having them open their books. https://entreprendre.service-public.fr/vosdroits/F24648

So, in practice, while quick firings are possible for individual cases, massive layoffs like that do not happen over a single day.

>not providing your employees with the means to work

Logic would dictate that providing the exact same pay/benefits as one would get for the work ought to be sufficient. But, <insert joke about logic and French labour laws here>...

Logic would also dictate that the employer-employee power relationship is inherently biased towards the employer, and that said employer can hurt you much more than you can hurt him. You not doing your job for a month might be impractical, but it's relatively easy to get over. You suddenly being out of a job with no warning and your severance is much more damaging.

Also consider that software developer is an incredibly privileged position and that, while you may not give a shit because you get 100k and can find another job in two weeks, many people have a salary that barely covers their living expenses and take much longer to find a new job. In effect, that would be subsidizing employers through unemployment benefits and therefore, cost society as a whole.

Coming from an American perspective, that is super interesting. I don't think I understand why it is seen as harm to the employee? They are getting full pay, but aren't required to do anything for it.

The core reasons are:

* as an employee, you sign a contract that exchanges your time for both a salary and a job. Refusing to provide either of those is a breach of contract. It's one thing to say "things are a bit slow right now, so do whatever". It is an entirely other one to not give your employee tools, access to things they'd need to do their job, or even leave them wondering if they even have a job still. Doubly worse if you require them to come to the office to not know what to do. Hence, the common solution to that is to change their job to something that just puts them in the corner on mostly useless tasks. They're technically working, but you can't fire them unless you have a good reason to. It's then hoped that the boredom makes you leave. However, that goes in to point two:

* Putting people in such a position is alienating and potentially damaging mentally. You are seen as the guy who does fuck all by your colleagues, you are not allowed to take another job in the mean time, itb is mentally unfulfilling and morally discouraging. Do so at your own risks, because there have been plenty of instances where the employer has had to pay damages.

Basically, if you want to fire someone, either do it and pay the (quite expensive if the employee has been here for a while) indemnities, or don't. The halfway solution of boring them until they quit is illegal.

That doesn't seem right. This discussion (as I understand it) is NOT about having a full time employee with no access.

It is when somebody is explicitly fired and laid off (as is the case in Coinbase, and all the examples I believe we've been discussing in this thread).

They DO know what their status is, it's not ambiguous. Essentially it is: "Hi; You've been laid off; your services are no longer required; we will continue paying you for the remainder of your contractual notice period / two weeks; you'll get whatever package is due to you; please go home and ensure you take all of your materials with you."

This is completely unrelated to any notion of effectively dis-empowering an active employee or keeping them in the dark.

So if you want to lay someone off in France, you have to allow them access to company facilities and systems and allow them to work? You cannot just pay them through their severance period, but tell them to stay home? If so, that’s absurd, and I don’t see what purpose it would serve.

There's no way this is true.

Are you sure? This is a quite common practice for businesses to put the fired employees on paid leave until the contract is terminated, I would be really surprised if that would not be possible in France.

Article L1234-5 [1] of French Labor Code looks like it is possible.

* [1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGISCTA000006195622...

Paid leave is entirely different. Paid leave is, well, leave. You do not have to show up to the office, unable to do anything.

L1234-5 (which is a very nice number) merely says that you have to pay the employee a compensation if the préavis is not respected, equal to the amount of days the employee would have worked, in addition to everything else (severance package, etc). It gets more complicated in the case of massive layoffs, because the CSE/lawyers get involved, and for a 50+ employee company firing over 10 employees, a plan de sauvegarde de l'emploi is put into place, which lasts multiple months.

How is it different? If you are on paid leave, you are not supposed to do any work. For security reasons your access can and should be restricted for this period.

The only context in which you can be technically still employed but be refused access to your work tools is if you are suspended for a grave mistake. Abuse this at your own risk, as the employee isn't paid in the mean time and will very likely get tribunal-happy. Any other concept (paid leave, maternity leave, vacation leave, * leave) means you are still an employee of the company and the company is legally obligated to give you access to your work tools.

On leave, you are trusted as an employee to not do any work. Anything you do will be your own responsibility, or eventually the employer's responsibility to refuse any work you hand over. You are also not covered by the company's insurance on your leave. Your company cutting off access is a clear breach of contract.

Can you refer to a specific regulation or legal precedent proving this point in clear words?

This does sound non-sensical to me. If someone is not working, there should not be any entitlement to access.

To give you an example: let’s say a factory is temporarily closed due to lack of supply materials or modernization and workers are put on paid leave. Are those workers allowed to visit their workplace to access their tools? If not, why digital workers should have this privilege when they are on paid leave?

Wait, France makes it illegal to keep paying an employee and tell them not to do any work?

That sounds awful.

Doubly so if it's alienating and you require them to come to work, as it is considered harassment and mental abuse.

you may however send the employee home with his full salary and no obligation to work. I know, worker protection is a crazy concept.

You started by quoting

>> You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked.

and replying

> In France, this is a breach of contract

And now you write

> you may however send the employee home with his full salary and no obligation to work

Which was exactly the original claim!

I'm not sure if you misread or misunderstood, but you have been arguing incorrectly in most of your subsequent replies, and the sarcastic jibes at other countries don't help.

France is a more trusting society than the USA, so I won't be surprised if gardening leave is less common, but you can be sure it's sometimes used when employees of investment banks, defence contractors, the government, military etc are made redundant or resign.

The core part of the problem is "you revoke his access". It's simple. You revoke someone's access, it is akin to firing, and it is illegal.

Send people home with their severence after the necessary period to inform the employee that they're getting fired, sure. But telling them out of the blue "Fuck off, don't come to work today, your access is revoked" is a breach of contract and is illegal.

So, no, you cannot be a paid laid off employee with no access. You're either employee, paid a salary and with access, or not an employee with your severance package and no access. There is no inbetween, and your lack of reading comprehension doesn't mean i misunderstood.

It is not "Akin to firing", it IS an action following firing or laying off.

>>You're either employee, paid a salary and with access, or not an employee with your severance package and no access.

The latter. It's the latter. We've all been discussing the latter (or at least that's my impression, as that's what the original article is about, and certainly what my post was about :).

Have had colleagues who were required to not work for their resignation period (3 months). "Professional quarantine," since they were going to competitors.

In the financial industry, this is common and is referred to there as "garden leave."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave

In the UK you have to provide employees with a consultation period, which is typically done while the employee is still carrying out their day-to-day jobs (dependent on the reason for the redundancy). I believe it is similar in other EU companies.

See here: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

Revoking access and not allowing users to complete their jobs would often be seen as a failure to consult (see, for instance, the recent P&O ferries dismissals where they immediately removed ship access from the crew, replaced them with oversees workers, and then began consultation. This was a failure to consult and was found to be illegal).

People tend not to do rash things anyway during this period, as gross misconduct during that time would mean the employee is instantly fired regardless with zero redundancy pay. Treat people fairly and as adults and they tend to behave fairly and respond as adults. Treat people as untrustworthy and rash, and they tend to respond with the same.

Consultation seems to be more like an explicitly defined way to fire an employee (they are entitled to learn why and what has been done to try to keep them). It does not look like it is prohibiting garden leave.

In the UK, if you place an employee on garden leave immediately there is a legal argument during tribunal that the redundancy was predetermined (and thus unfair).

You mentioned that "they are entitled to learn why and what has been done to try to keep them", but actually it's much further than that - they are entitled to be part of the conversation and to propose alternatives to the dismissal which the company is legally obligated to consider.

As an example, if the redundancy proposes to make a team redundant and split that teams responsibilities across other teams, the consultation might raise that the team being made redundant could take on additional responsibilities and down-size as an alternative which could result in fewer redundancies. Similarly, employees could suggest an initial round of voluntary redundancies first to reduce the people impact (particularly if there are employees nearing retirement age). The employer is legally obligated to genuinely consider these alternatives, however if the action was taken immediately to disband the team and place employees on gardening leave it is much more difficult for them to argue that the consultation was 'genuine'.

If a genuine consultation is not held, where alternatives are listened to and genuinely considered, this could then be brought to an employment tribunal and could open them to unfair dismissal claims.

Maybe only a few countries allow to terminate and put on garden leave immediately, I'm not talking about them. There's always some procedure that ensures that dismissal is fair and justified: when this procedure is concluded and there's no other option found but to fire, the employee should not be entitled to work until contract is terminated - they can be put on the garden leave and in that case their access should be terminated, the equipment they used can be sold etc.

It's quite common in the UK for an employee to work their notice period after redundancy has been announced / consultation has been concluded (e.g. to allow for a handover of the role to respective teams).

Garden leave is not a necessity (particularly if you have structured your company so a single employee cannot go too rogue regardless - if a single bad-apple employee can take down coinbase then they have bigger systemic risks!).

This assumes that the employee has been working for the company for more than 2 years. If it's less than that, they have no such protection and can be fired for any reason whatsoever.

There are different rules if you're dismissing a single employee vs making multiple employees redundant.

> This assumes that the employee has been working for the company for more than 2 years. If it's less than that, they have no such protection and can be fired for any reason whatsoever.

There are some protections, but yes, they are much more limited (in particular, anything that would generally be classified as automatic unfair dismissal is still protected, for instance for whistleblowing, joining a trade union, firing someone for raising a health and safety concern or for going on maternity leave).

You will likely still want to capture and document the genuine reason under either performance, absence or conduct grounds in order to protect against any invalid claim that the dismissal was because of a protected reason if it was brought to tribunal (when in reality it wasn't).

Yep definitely, but if it's just a case of the business isn't doing well and they need to cut headcount then they absolutely can do that without going through a redundancy process.

Yeah absolutely, agreed.

Although it may still be better to go through formal redundancy so you can make the redundancy on the basis of performance rather than just length of service.

No. In many places the law and the contract states that the company has to provide the required means to do work described in the contract. If they change the job description to "do nothing" then it needs unilateral signing of a amendment to the contract. (And that can count as mobbing.)

He is not mixing things up. The idea that immediate revoking security access to everything is only way how to do things is definitely a US thing.

Nobody is saying it's the only way to do things. In USA it's not the only way to do things. It's not only done in USA (I worked in Canada and in Europe, never in USA).

I'm Canadian, it's our national pastime to diss our neighbours to the South, but the notion that a laid off employee can be a high risk to the company knows no borders. Are we making a claim that those working on Rafale or Gripen get to keep messing with classified files after being fired, because "we don't DO that in Europe"? :)

Let me tell it differently. I have seen people fired or laid off and exactly one was taken away immediately. The exact same company fire also different people, without walking them out immediately via security.

I have heard of one more person fired that way - it was by American company and pretty much everyone else treated it as great injustice. Team members met with him in nearby pub pretty much right after.

I've seen this happen to people numerous times in the UK, so it's not only a US thing but may be more common there.

I have seen people fired in the morning and their access cutoff by noon and them being asked to go on "gardening leave" in Europe.

This is rare but depends on your manager, if they don't want you around. You will still be paid for the remaining of your "employment" but will not be working.

It’s also more typical in situations where serious damage could be done by a malicious act. I’ve seen a UK Finance Director escorted from his desk because of this.

Only in the US? What about Australia or Canada? What about China or Russia? You have no idea how hard it can be to fire a state or federal employee here in the US. I’m guessing there are regions or industries in Europe where it is easy to fire employees. The situation is so much more complex than US bad Europe good. Poorly constructed swipes like this are becoming more and more common and it’s disappointing.

Australia is at least a week: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/...

Canada two weeks: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/servi...

China, 30 days: https://china.acclime.com/guides/china-labour-law-hiring-fir...

Russia, two weeks: https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/5-503-4083?transi...

(Did you really think ex-communist countries would be good examples?)

In Europe I think it's far less common to be fired in the first place, I actually know zero people that was ever fired (but I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, I think it even happened recently at Klarna).

I’ve known dozens of people fired by Google in a mass layoff, when they decided to close one of their offices. The process has stretched for months.

Redundancy is a different matter to firing for cause, and I definitely read 'firing' as meaning the latter.

I suspect the fact that some people in this thread read it the way I do, and others (I guess including you?) read 'firing' to include redundancy, is causing a fair amount of confusion / people talking past each other.

(I'm not claiming I'm right and you're wrong, btw, just observing a linguistic disconnect)

Firing is very common in Europe depending on specific country and it's laws and the industry we're talking about (is it unionized? are the employees easily replaceable? immigration, etc).

In Austria it's super easy to fire jobs like white collar tech workers and sales people without any reason as the employee protection laws are very weak (you just have to give them their notice period). At every company I've worked here I've seen people get fired after not meeting their performance goals(PIPs), or even having too slow velocity in Jira's charts, or just some manager having an axe to grind.

There's no magic protection aura from the government to save you from getting fired here.

It depends on the company/position more than the country. People with high access levels / dealing with lots of money will be treated differently than receptionists for example.

Did you see the severance the ex-employees are getting? It’s super generous and amounts to months of work. Id rather that than face the humiliation of having to come in for weeks to a company that has fired me.

Flexible labor laws are also a major reason Americans are paid considerably more than euros.

Those people's contracts aren't invalidated by revoking access. Those companies are basically saying you're not expected to do any more work except react to our emails until the end of whatever the notice period is. And the same thing might be less common but can definitely happen to you in Europe as well, it mostly depends on which sector/roles you work in.

Employees from the HN sphere maybe, but ask a temp worker. They can get fired on the spot — in Germany!

Even in Austria, tech workers ca be fired on the spot without any reason and sent home (though you stil have to pay them the duration of their notice period, which I believe is called gardening leave on this topic), or you can still keep them working in the office during their notice period, but then you need to give them 10 days off to look for jobs.

Coinbase should had opened their offices in Austria then...

You are mixing things up: It's possible to get fired on the spot in EU as well. You'd most likely receive a generous package but it can happen.

And instances of employee sabotage are elevated in Europe. Imagine that.

I(an american) was quitting a job at a UK company and tried to put in my 2 weeks notice, they said the standard was a 2 months notice for them and so I just kinda bumbled along for 2 months not doing much. Really odd practice

It's not odd at all really -- it just sounds like you weren't a perticularly key employee. For many roles, the extra time to ensure continuity and handover is very valuable.

I've usually (in the UK) had 1 month's notice upon quitting and spent it doing documentation updates and handover meetings. I managed to use pretty much the entire time productively - though admittedly one could make a good argument that that was because I hadn't been making time to document things better previously.

I've known quite a few senior developers with a 3 months' notice period baked into their contract.

The same happens in Europe. It did not happen to my but a friend but he knew that he was the one to go when he couldn't login to his laptop after lunch break. And when they let him do it to finish some things he got someone watching behind his back.

Over here in North America is common. Been to so many companies last few years and it’s always escort out of building right away.

The one I remember most is how our coworkers coffee was still there for like a week. She had made it literally right before getting called in for the layoff!

Apparently main thing is they don’t want them to start a scene, talk shit about things, and cause issues with their computer access

I’ve been laid off and it’s varied between 6 months notice and 2 weeks.

Note, whether you get walked out the door right away or later, in these types of job you get a severance package.

In my case where it was two weeks it was work 2 weeks, go home keep getting paid for another 30 days, then start your paid 60 day WARN period, then actually separate and receive severance of ~9 months pay plus heath insurance for 1 year.

> You can fire people from the night to the morning only in US

And in most of the Europe and I'd guess also world during probation period (typically in Europe 1-3 months).

But yeah, you can't do that once probation period pass, then it's usually at least 1-3 months PAID resignation period. You can tell people not to come to work and still get salary though, but if they would still wanna come it could get very messy legally.

I had actually only fixed contracts during my EU jobs and either company told me they won't extend the contract or I told them I won't extend it, but they were happy to keep me working until very end.

Only in China during Microsoft layoff I was told I don't need to come to work, while getting compensation, but that was understandable considering me and other Israeli girl were only two people fighting against company trying to cheat us for our legal compensation and it came to me telling them whether they wanna leak certain data and me contact labor bureau about their illegal procedures.

I have never worked outside of Europe and I have seen it happen multiple times. More often than not.

The fired person is just sent on paid time off.

This was a well known thing at a company I worked for that was involved with government work. If you were leaving for another industry the last 2 weeks were for finishing up work and saying goodbye to your coworkers.

If you were leaving for a competitor you were walked out within an hour of submitting your resignation and promised your 2 weeks pay. It was so well known that engineers would schedule vacations starting the day after they planned to resign and say their goodbyes to coworkers before telling their bosses.

I usually terminate access immediately. It's just solid IT security practice.

I've seen WAY too many cases of employees email forwarding documents to their personal email the moment they are told they're being let go.

Before we started terminating access immediately, I'd estimate that roughly 25% of employees would email themselves at least something.

What were they emailing themselves, IP?

All sorts of things. Sometimes it's code or documentation/guides they wrote that they believe they're entitled to... Sometimes it's personal things they kept on their work computer/account.... Sometimes it's contact lists... Sometimes it's strategy docs they authored... Sometimes it's password files (which often mix personal and work creds). Sometimes it's whatever-they-can-think-of that might be of value on the share drive...

It's just so incredibly common that I don't understand why any employer doesn't terminate access the instant someone is let go. When people they're in a state of stress just grab whatever they can think of.

What about emails that they might need to bring up in court?

What's the general way for an employee to retain access to those?

If they file a case in court, they are entitled subpoena documents that might support their case, including emails. There is an established procedure for that and company legal/compliance departments have legal-hold policies to freeze anything that might be relevant for a pending legal case.

Trying to forcibly steal those documents/emails is a wonderful way to being charged with a computer crime if it's serious enough. ...but lesser consequences include public lawsuits that impact your career prospects (we did this to one high ranking employee who tried to email herself powerpoint strategy presentations she made and copied to a USB). ...but at the very least, having an attempted theft of documents on record will get any future allegations they might make against the company much easier to throw out.

I used to work as a contractor at a help desk, the company was based on the east coast while the office we were at was back west.

We hired a guy that while nice enough was not a good fit; he couldn't do the work. HQ decided that we would terminate him on Friday. I have no idea why, but the on site supervisor had gotten the perception that we had the go ahead to inform this guy he was terminated, and right before he was going to get escorted out he realized this was premature.

We basically had to tell this guy, "You're fired, oh wait you're fired on Friday, carry on until then unless you want to quit before that.." it was a Monday or a Tuesday. We practically begged the company to move it up, our supervisor even asking to give the guy his own leave for the rest of the week to get him out of here. They didn't budge. Because of all the bureaucracy we couldn't revoke his building access or even his computer access; we risked getting in trouble just by disabling all of his administrator related privileges just because we didn't know what he was going to do if left to his own devices.

The guy was a mess, he had left a decent job to have a shorter commute and it blew up in his face horribly. I felt awful because he wasn't a bad guy or lazy or anything.. he just wasn't a good fit and couldn't contribute. I remember talking to him later and him saying how humiliating it was to be sitting there knowing full well he was 'a failure' and just 'waiting to be fired', browsing the internet looking for jobs while at 'work'.. but wasn't willing to quit before hand because he needed as big a pay check as possible to support his family. I don't believe it was just because of this but do I do firmly believe this awful experience may have been a contributing factor to him taking his life later that year.

It was such a garbage company. We had the reverse happen with another employee; local management was planning to let him go on Friday; somebody from payroll sent an email telling him to fill out his time card so they could process his termination.

Cold? Maybe, but frankly to me it's a million times better than my experience with the inverse. I do NOT want people who know they're about to get canned hanging around. In the best case they are miserable and just wanting to leave.

He also knew if you quit,even if verbally told your out anyway, unemployment is basically impossible to get.

In my younger days I literally got unemployment 100% of the time I applied. In California unless you get arrested at work, your getting UI.

> I don't believe it was just because of this but do I do firmly believe this awful experience may have been a contributing factor to him taking his life later that year.

That’s extremly sad to hear. Not saying that the company or anyone owed him anything but we do live in a really mean world. In an alternate universe or maybe eveb a different country nobody would be pushed into taking such decisions as taking their own life.

I had my timeline off; it was a few years later. In any case it was really sad to hear, back in the dark days of my active Facebook use I was friends with a friend of his, his family was very heart broken and I learned more than I cared to of the specifics of his end.

He had apparently took up delivering pizza instead of IT, it was pretty awkward when he delivered Pizza to one of us. Another one of us felt so bad about how it all went down that he kept in regular contact with him right up to when he passed away.

Another coworker however chose to his interactions with this guy as the basis of a post on /r/talesfromtechsupport to win internet points.

I have chosen to keep my strongest memory of this man based around the one potlock we had while he was with us; he brought in an amazing habanero salsa and was a pleasure to chat with.

I miss some of the people but I don't miss working there.

Esp for finance institutions.

While in colleague I interned for a major investment bank. They extended my internship since I was doing a good job and have a few weeks to spare.

However IT did not get the memo and the very next day after my original termination date I came to my desk to find my machine wiped and account deactivated.

At one place I've worked at the company policy was to hand you laptop and badge in at 3pm in the afternoon. I had a scheduled meeting/shadowing a installation after handover scheduled at 2pm (due to timezone differences), but it had to pushed back till 5pm, so I kept my badge and laptop over the weekend and I've returned it on Monday morning.

So not only I hanged around, I also made sure that my replacements had all the information they need and I saw that they can fulfill my duties :)

Granted, it was me who gave in his resignation, but it was nice to see that the trust didn't erode during this leaving process.

very typical.

This is very typical. He is talking about cutting now former employees access to email, source code repositories, internal systems. It is done all the time. It looks very harsh.

And if I were a customer, I'd be concerned if they didn't cut off access immediately.

IMO it's concerning that they don't have more granular security controls than totally shutting down someone's access (or maybe they do, but they laid off the person who knows how to take access away from production systems without taking away someone's ability to read email)

I’m would say pretty common? Sometimes it happens to personal accounts if the user has access to sensitive data. For setups that aren’t as sensitive or groups of employees that don’t have access to such data, various systems may be locked down for a period. For example, access to source control or staging/production environments may be generally limited. For unexpected one-off firings, the user is often locked out before they’re aware they’ve been let go.

Common in lots of jobs. I’ve seen people get fired from Gov IT and F500 IT teams where they only find out they’re fired when they rock up to work and their pass doesn’t let them in. Security has their stuff in a box to give to them along with a letter explaining everything.

To be fair, getting fired from those companies meant you actually did something wrong. There wasn’t these mass culls that crypto/startup type companies are famous for.

To be honest this is the more concerning thing in that quoted statement:

> "Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information"

Surly they should have very very few employs that have access to that type of information?

> Surly they should have very very few employs that have access to that type of information?

It depends on the nature of the information. If we're talking anything that directly affects liquidity, I'd be surprised if that number was large. But if we're talking regulated or contractually protected consumer information (e.g PCI), that number's probably a bit bigger.

You are completely right. Sensitive customer information should be only accessible as a per need basis. It's very bad practice, possibly illegal in many countries, to have free access to production customer data. It's also quite dangerous for a big company. Production databases should not be accessible by developers, logs should need enough to debug problems, and should be scrapped after some time. Metrics can be stored as long as needed, as should not contain personal data but just counters, averages, etc.

A responsible company would consider "sensitive customer information" to be pretty much every bit of customer information - names, addresses, phone numbers, bank accounts. Maybe low-level developers won't have access to that but every member of the infrastructure and customer facing teams will in some fashion because it's 100% part of their job and odds are good that's the majority of the people in the company.

As a teenager I worked an evening job at one of the largest banks in the world, processing mail-in credit card orders. I would sit at a computer, run an app that could query any bank account number, and I'd get their current balance (along with all other personal info). It was part of a series of checks I had to do to make sure they qualified for the credit card.

One kid definitely got fired for querying data on persons they weren't supposed to query for.

With work-from-home, I can imagine there's employees with all sorts of access. And with them being a startup, who knows how much controls they've got in place yet.

From a customers point of view, sensitive is a fairly broad term. Every customer service agent (of which they're hopefully quite a lot) has access to sensitive information.

Every tier 1 support rep needs to be able to pull up at least some of my account information. Sure IT and other internal teams shouldn't have direct access, but when your business is managing other people's accounts/money a lot of people will need to have access to customer data.

But you can still restrict that. Make it so every access must be tied to a specific open ticket. Don't just say "well, this person sometimes needs access to a specific customer's information so they can have permanent always-on access to all customer information."

That's a mitigation strategy but there are many open tickets at any one time. The employee can just go through open tickets and wreak havoc.

How do you know it isn't? The only claim was that there are many employees with acess to 'sensitive customer information'. That would be the case even if the employees could only see customer information associated with tickets that they had been assigned.

I have a lot of access to very confidential customer information at my job. But based on passwords I need to request that require someone else to approve. Based on a ticket/incident/change number that actually needs to exist. The password rotates as soon as it expires. All password requests and usage are logged and audited.

If you need to completely revoke someone's account overnight to prevent adverse impact, you designed your "access matrix" incorrectly.

> If you need to completely revoke someone's account overnight to prevent adverse impact, you designed your "access matrix" incorrectly.

This doesn't make any sense to me, and is in fact exactly how it should work.

So you're telling me that every time, say, a CS rep needs to access some sensitive customer information (which is almost every single call), you think they should need to go through some password approval process? Security procedures that are so cumbersome to getting work done get bypassed.

The whole point of SSO systems is that you can immediately revoke access to any and all systems at once by just changing one setting.

Of course it will depend on exactly how sensitive etc. the information is and there are always grey areas.

But indeed, permanent access to sensitive info without ever needing approval from a second person (beyond being hired and gaining the access) seems like a bad idea.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, I think in an industry that is rife with crime and theft of enormous sums you would indeed hope that some mature player like Coinbase restricts access to sensitive customer information to a really small part of their workforce.

Having said that, we're still talking about hundreds of people being laid off, so even with excellent access controls this step might be prudent -- e.g. even customer support staff would have access to some stuff that would be useful for social engineering, at the very least.

Unfortunately, least privilege access is not common practice in the industry yet. It's coming along, but it's a huge lift to get everything and everyone onboarded, especially if you have a bunch of legacy systems you need to retrofit. At companies where least privilege is a thing you can just revoke most of a person's permissions while leaving them access to, say, internal email and Slack. Without pervasive RBAC or ABAC that's basically impossible.

Asking as a layman to macroeconomics, if you think that the current rash of crypto companies collapsing heralds a greater economic catastrophe, do you have any advice on how to best survive another dot-com style crash?

Do whatever you have to in order to keep your job. Your investments may go up, down or sideways, prices of things might move around, but it's all secondary to keeping a job.

I'm also a layman, though one of my degrees is in economics, which tbh isn't that helpful here beyond understanding the fundamentals.

My current working model is that there are multiple simultaneous effects, mostly separable but interrelated. In order of decreasing acuteness:

a) asset bubble popping due to imminent rate increases. Crypto the obvious candidate for a correction that IMO was predictable? Future of the industry unpredictable (by me)

b) Tech stock correction and hiring freeze, due to skyrocketing value growth and some overextension during the pandemic. This is a good thing, and a healthy pullback on very recent overestimate of value gains. Fundamentals largely unaffected

c) More secular pullback of tech value into a lower equilibrium. High-growth stocks do well in historically low-rate environment, that we're potentially exiting

d) General recession expected. Marginal tech startups wiped out, bigtech generally still a great place to get paid a ton and buy the market while it's low

I'd love to hear if anyone has anyone else has any disagreements with my working model! I'm far from an expert, but using it for my own decision-making. Eg, I just quit my job, but I was planning to go back to bigtech so I'm not especially worried (plus I have tons of savings and frankly don't care about $ that much). OTOH, I'm not taking much time off, because I expect hiring and possibly salaries to start tightening even in bigtech.

The same as in the good times.

1. Create a budget

Know how much you spend per month, and what are essentials (Rent, Food, Transport etc.) and what can go if you really need to (Netflix, eating out, etc.)

2. Have 3-6 months expenses in an emergency fund

Usually cash or things not likely to tank during a downturn like stock/crypto.

You can find more helpful info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

Unfortunately it's common enough. It's harsh, it's cold, but ultimately for companies it's a real necessity. The explanation is blunt and correct - even a single malicious actor can enact HUGE devastating harm.

It doesn't have to be hot wallet / cold storage. Source code, business plans, revenue & profit statements, SSH to servers, physical access to datacentre, client contact lists, etc etc... there's a myriad things that are either valuable to the company or can cause harm to the company.

I've been escorted out of the building during a layoff once early in my career. Friendly, smiley, fake. It felt AWFUL. I'm as goody-two-shoes pacifist laid back easy going do-no-harm as it gets... and I definitely had various strong emotions going through my head heart and body at the time. So on both cold & rational, as well as personal & empathetic side, I understand both how the individuals feel as well as why companies need to do it.

> Friendly, smiley, fake.

My father had to lay off a bunch of people in 2008. I am now a manager. He told me that if I am ever forced to do this to not ever do this crap to my team. Tell them that this is bullshit. Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept. Tell them that the are right to be mad, disappointed, and even to hate you for choosing their head to roll. Anything better than fake smiles and "I'm sure you'll land on your feet."

For me, I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team. Maybe that's hard to do in the moment, since I'd also not want to lose my job in a major crisis, but it sounds awful.

Company I worked at had a layoff in 2012, security manager escorted 200 people out of the building. At the end of the day, he was escorted out of the building. It was quite shitty for that fellow, I felt terrible for him.

One place I worked at briefly would call the cops and have them escourt you out if they thought there was any risk of "disruption or back talk" (their words). I decided not to work for assholes who lay off little old ladies and then to add insult to injury, call the cops on them.

"Pardon, Officer, but we're firing several employees today and would you like you to assist. We're concerned they might say bad things to us."

"ON OUR WAY!"

This is a disgusting scenario. I hope they weren't misusing on-duty police resources for this.

You could tell the cops weren't happy about it. These were women in their mid 50's and up who worked front desk jobs, not really a risk of violence.

All they wanted to do was go get their personal items and say goodbye to their peers. Some of them were forced to leave phones and purses behind and wait a week for them to be mailed to them.

It's one of those times in life where you see the mask slip off and realize who the people you've been dealing with actually are.

> All they wanted to do was go get their personal items and say goodbye to their peers. Some of them were forced to leave phones and purses behind and wait a week for them to be mailed to them.

How is that even legal? I wouldn’t leave without my personal belongings or I would file charges for theft with those cops.

One company I worked for (a bank) had an office outside of the security gates, mainly used for exit interviews; they would disable people's access cards and accounts while that was going on.

When RSA Data Security was acquired in the mid `90's they laid off a bunch of people, presumably to sweeten the deal, and security was waiting outside in the morning to block people from coming into the building.

One of my former colleagues, who showed up to work early, inadvertently freaked out one of the executives when they saw them in the hall. Naturally they (not the executive) were soon escorted out of the building and told they had been laid off.

This has strong IT Crowd vibes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGFGD5pj03M

I've never laid people off, but I've fired them.

It's hard to know what emotional tenor to put on it. On the one hand, of course you're right that upbeat positive optimistic is fake and maybe feels like it's more for you than them. On the other hand, being like, "this sucks and it's bad for you and I hated doing it" feels like kicking people when they're down, making them feel like it's even worse than it already is.

I have generally give with a pretty emotionless affect, but tried to convey respect for them as a person, even if they didn't work as an employee, but that's hard to convey. It's a generally fraught situation.

Firing someone is the result of poor performance or unacceptable behaviour.

In many jurisdictions (not in the US I suppose), before firing someone for poor performance they must be told that their performance is inadequate and be given a chance to improve.

Bottom line, in general being fired is fully on the person being fired so no need to sugar-coat or to feel bad.

>In many jurisdictions (not in the US I suppose), before firing someone for poor performance they must be told that their performance is inadequate and be given a chance to improve.

Performance Improvement Plans are a thing at larger companies. That said, once someone is on a PIP, the handwriting is almost certainly on the wall.

I've also worked with people who were incredibly oblivious about the quality of their work, however much feedback they received and however much rework others had to put in. I can think of at least one case where this went on far too long and they were incredibly shocked when they were let go.

The PIP thing varies. Some companies just use them as a risk reducing tool to fire people, but a few really believe in them and will keep employees who've gone through them. I take a dim view of that, personally, just because it ends up feeling like management-by-fear.

People can get their act together especially if external factors were a significant part of the problem. That said, assuming they can find employment elsewhere--which may be easier or harder depending on their skills and location--they're probably better starting fresh somewhere else.

My view is that if your employer is telling you to come to Jesus, the productive relationship is already gone. Work isn't a marriage or a family; if it's not working, you don't have to take extraordinary measures to preserve it.

It doesn't have to. At its best, PIP is a very open, transparent, communicative, supportive method - here is what we need; here's how we believe you can help us; let's work together to meet our mutual targets.

As others have said, in a good company and team, PIP is one amongst many coaching tools, rarely the first one, and can be useful in various situations - somebody not taking a hint or being oblivious, indicator of seriousness, but also to those with potential who need structure and benefit from explicit list. And yes of course, a paper trail and a documented process if things don't work out for various reasons.

I mean, it comes down to how much you trust your HR department to treat you as a human. If you work someplace where that kind of rapport is normal, then great! But that's not been my experience.

Right; in my current company, PIP is created and held by your Coach / Manager. It's orthogonal on whether HR treats you as human :D

> once someone is on a PIP, the handwriting is almost certainly on the wall.

My current manager is particularly transparent about this (with other managers, at least). When he puts someone on a PIP, it is a formality. He deliberately chooses a redemption project that is impossible to achieve.

Edit: Jeez, guys, don't downvote -me- ;-). It's not my policy.

In a better world, that would be illegal.

This is likely something that HR would flip out about seeing in writing because being given an impossible redemption task would probably be interpreted as constructive termination in a court.

Ouch. That is unfortunate on several levels. From legal to moral to practical.

Depending on the company, that could easily be appealed/disputed.

My assumption is that HR would be irritated to find out he was doing that. Legally, I assume 'at will' handily covers it as long as nobody being targeted is a member of a protect class.

Personally, I do sort of understand his view. He does not like to put anyone on a PIP, and by the time he gets there, he has already concluded that the relationship is not saveable. In his mind, everyone involved should know that the PIP is a formality, and ideally they'd use the time to find another job and have a smooth transition. HR probably would not agree to firing someone with a few months of severance.

That’s a bad thing to do, unless his goal is to create an easy employment law settlement, in which case it’s kind of cool. :)

What sort of impossible projects does he assign?

I think managers call HR and put a person on a PIP only after good will and patience have been exhausted, so it's a sign that the person does not improve despite feedback and that management has had enough... So, yeah, writing is on the wall.

I'd argue PIP is meant to give you a chance to find another job.

For legal reasons most employers will only verify dates of employment. 2 months of so of PIP is more than enough to find a new role.

This is another reason to not get too attached to any job. I come to work for money, not to feel apart of something.

You WILL get fired if your in this industry. Hell, I've quit several jobs since the manager sucked.

Demanding salary employees work nights regularly is good way to get em to quit.

Imagine if America had a NHS style system, vs the horrific employer provided system. Then more people would be free to quit bad jobs.

Let's say you have an abusive manager, but your husband has an expensive to treat illness. You just need to suffer since if you leave your husband won't have access to treatment

>2 months of so of PIP is more than enough to find a new role.

I think a lot of people here underestimate the difficulty of landing a new job depending on your background, overall skill level, experience, and location.

2 months is a much better deal than getting fired on the spot.

At best you find a new job, at worse you have time to cut back on your spending

I've seen both sides of this: a PIP for a person who was falling behind that wasn't possible for the person to achieve because they were in a role without the skills needed to succeed in that role, and a PIP that was based on one supervisor's bad opinion of a particular person that was easy to accomplish when put in place by a different supervisor.

I have had lots of employees who I think had poor performance but weren't bad people and I don't like the thought that they're in bad financial situation or just feeling emotional distress over being fired. Every manager I've known has felt terrible while firing people.

That doesn't mean the firing shouldn't happen, but it does mean that everyone feels bad.

>[Firing people is] a generally fraught situation.

It is, but it should not be. In the best world, it's impersonal. Sometimes it's not a good fit, period. The reason it's fraught is at least partly systemic. Having healthcare tied to the employer is particularly wrong. It makes severance (for any reason) akin to having life support turned off.

But also, ours is a culture that discourages employees from participating in the job market while employed - this is deeply hypocritical, especially as most employment is "at will", which means they can dump you whenever you want, and of course the employer is always active in the job market, happy to replace you with someone cheaper/better if they could. If you're already in the market, and have warm leads, this softens the blow considerably. The final thing worth mentioning is that a firing is a severance, and need not reflect poorly on you (except, perhaps, insofar as you didn't adequately anticipate it and quit in advance). On first principles I hate it when those in power tacitly accept the implication that if other, unrelated powerful people have punished you, you're bad. I'm not sure if this is actually believed, or just used as leverage to get a better deal, or both, but either way it's unfair. Hence the importance of privacy in such situations.

It's a thin line to walk; never make it sound like you are the victim as well, or that you're even worse off than they are.

Yeah, absolutely. Overly spending time on how difficult it is for yourself makes it sound like, "Well, I'm firing you, but have you considered how it makes me feel?" Which is gross.

Hence, usually going for a somewhat impersonal affect.

A friend of mine's manager had to lay him off but the manager was the nicest guy and was basically in tears through the exit process. My friend essentially had to do the break up. We felt for the manager but also, keep your isht together. If you can't then you are putting that on the individual that you are letting go.

That's exactly the thing. Don't make it about you! How much of telling employee "this is bullshit, I could't sleep over this" is actually doing for them? Vs absolving yourself of guilt, having them like you, and making you look like the victim you definitely aren't?

Respect and support and empathy and sincerity are the key, always. Deflecting blame and ranting are not long term helpful.

Absolutely this. It was my misfortune to lay off teams of 20+ 3 times. You are the instrument. In that moment, they will want to hate you and you shouldn't try to deflect it. Do everything you can constructively behind the scenes to improve the situation before and after the announcement but, in that moment, it's not about you.

The proper responsibility of a concerned manager in this case is to make sure the person knows you have their back in terms of future references, petty resources (one guy I knew was on the hook for >$300 in reimbursements when laid off, as far as I know he never got them - another guy was forbidden to take his personal mouse/keyboard home with him), and similar things.

If a mid-level manager actually cares, and was any good at their job, the best thing they can do is to keep doing it for that person.

It isn't doing anything for them. But it is sincere (I didn't say this in my post, but the idea is that my father actually did lose weeks of sleep over this). It, of course, should not be about you in this moment (this is hard to convey in a short post). But it seems far more supportive and honest than pretending that everything is okay and normal or acting like a robot.

Maybe it is also bad. I don't know. But the fake smile seems much worse.

There's a lot of advice on how to handle these situations and a lot of it is good, even when conflicting. It's all situational.

One thought though, for whatever little it may be worth:

>>For me, I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team.

That has been my personal emotional reaction many a time. As I spend more time as a manager though, I try to force myself to look harder and harder at what will this course of action actually accomplish? And the self-righteous emotional me hates that the rational conclusion is: it'll only accomplish negative things, i.e now the team that remains has lost your support. Bluntly, it will not "send a message", it will not "change things", it will not "make them realize what they're doing / what they're losing". Literally the only thing it'll do majority of time is make things even crappier for those who remain :-/.

So I would put it in inverse: the hard thing in the moment is to NOT go with your emotional reaction, and consider truly how can you be of best benefit / support / help to the team. Basically, I would say most of the time one quits for personal reasons (whether positive "I can get more money there" or negative "I hate this place and everybody in it"), not for the benefit of others.

Oh it wouldn't accomplish anything. It'd be 100% hiding from the emotional pain of laying off employees that I believe are productive and good team members. But I've only got one life to live and emotions are real, so I don't have any problem optimizing for my emotions when making life choices.

>>I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team.

I did that in the dotcom bust. As a manager I was highest paid and had least billable hours, so when asked to reduce costs in my team I was the logical choice to go. The company went through a series of layoffs but at least for that cut I managed to leave my team in place for a bit longer. I went travelling for a year, so also benefitted from not having to deal with any more rounds of layoffs.

I've participated in a number of layoffs, and while I agree with the advice to be honest, not fake smiley, with you'll-land-on-your-feet platitudes, I would strongly recommend not talking about your own feelings. It's not about YOU (the person doing the layoff who gets to keep his job), it's about THEM (the people losing their jobs who probably earn less than you and have less financial security). Telling them how hard it is for you comes across as self absorbed and can provoke a strong negative reaction. Instead, be understanding, give them space to be angry and hurt, and help them any way you can.

This, so much.

I've had to fire people a few times. It's never fun, it's always been a hard decision that I took for the benefit of my team. It's never "bullshit". If it is bullshit then it would be MY job as manager to fix it and stop it being bullshit.

I've never had a negative reaction to the firing from the team members who remain. If anything, the reaction has always been "why did you wait so long?".

But luckily I've never had to do a team downsizing because of budget cuts. I imagine that would be a more difficult process and managing the emotions involved in that would be difficult. I see entirely why Coinbase chose not to take any of those risks and just cut everyone off first and then answer questions later.

I agree wholeheartedly, it's definitely not the right moment to make it about you. I have had to layoff people several times, and was laid off myself once, and the best thing to do in my opinion is to be direct succinct and stick to a script. You can still be authentic and kind, and offer them an opportunity to reach out (to you or HR) afterwards for follow up questions (about the process, not the reasons or anything sensitive). You will feel like shit doing it, and they'll be able to tell, there's no need to say it and pull the attention towards your gainfully-employed feelings at the same moment you're telling someone they're losing their financial security blanket.

I've reached out to some afterwards and offered help (serving as a reference, reviewing resumes, connecting to people, etc.) but in _that_ moment you should say as little as possible give them space to process emotions however they will.

> Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept.

Dunno. I find it pretty bad when managers talk about their difficulties when e.g. firing people. It's about them, not about you. I agree about the part about fake smiles.

To me, saying that "you don't want to be doing it" (paraphrased as "you are upset" or "you haven't slept"), is much more of a fake bullshit than the other thing. Be an adult take responsibility for your actions, don't blame "the guy" (your boss, your company, the economy, whatever).

If you really hated doing it, you wouldn't be doing it. Quitting yourself is always an option.

As I stated very explicitly in my post, I believe that I'd quit in this situation.

> I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team.

I was at a startup that had massive layoffs during the pandemic. I was able to protect my team (though I had to rescind a few offers).

The problem was that after the layoffs, while everyone was still grieving, management decided to come down really hard on my team and others. I realized at one point I could either keep my job, or protect my teams sanity for the next few months.

I chose the latter. Upper management didn't like it, but my team got time to heal and after I was let go and my team survived for another two years.

I had never been fired before, but when I was I honestly felt a bit a pride that this "leadership" team felt I wasn't a good match.

I don't know if there's a point to this story other than that, when the shit hits the fan, you can standup for what you believe in and fight to make the tiny bit of this world you have some say in a bit better. I've known plenty of people who just shrug their shoulders in such times and say "what can you do?", but you can do something and in my experience it is worth it to take a stand at these crucial points.

> Tell them that the are right to be mad, disappointed, and even to hate you for choosing their head to roll.

This is OK.

> Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept.

No, no, no. Never talk about your own difficulties when you lay someone off, this is one particular time when it's not about you but 100% about the person that you are laying off.

Right. I'm mystified this is anyone's reaction... dishing empathy while garnering sympathy is a weird double bind to put on people on the receiving end.

I was a fairly junior manager at the beginning of COVID when my company decided to make a deep cut (20% of the company) in order to make sure we would survive. I didn't even know about the layoffs until after they happened which annoyed me quite a bit. The director of engineering for my team and 3-4 others was the one to do the calls to each laid off engineer. The 2 engineers that got laid off on my team were pretty recent hires. One was only around for a couple of weeks. They were both already contributing a good amount to the team though which annoyed me even more that my input wasn't taking into account because I would've pushed for different people to be let go instead.

I offered to try and give up some salary to keep one of them because he was on a visa and would have to find a new job within 90 days or something like that. Everything worked out in the end with both engineers that were let go but the "bias for action" by executives and middle management in these kinds of scenarios pisses me off quite a bit since they usually don't ask for any input from the people actually working with the employees that are getting laid off.

I don't mean any offense by this but it's very clear by this sentiment that you're a junior, (maybe) mid-level still.

For myriad reasons, it's not always practical to discuss potential layoffs. It's certainly not ethical to discuss "who should stay?" with more junior folks on the same team who are themselves staying. It's extraordinarily likely that your managers had much better insight into what the other folks were contributing that you did.

Cutting salaries to maintain team size has been tried time and time again, and every time the same thing happens: everyone takes a pay cut, the highest performers leave for more money, and both velocity and morale tank.

I've been here more than 99% of the company and we're now at 2000+ (was ~50 when I started and was ~1000 when COVID hit). I've pivoted back to a lateral IC role but considering the size of the org at the time (not really that large, maybe 30 engineers total under the director) it was totally practical. The salary cut proposition would've been a one time thing to either give the laid off engineer enough time to find another role (because he had a temporary visa) or until we were comfortable enough to pay both of our full-time salaries (this actually would've happened fairly quickly).

I agree with your father's sentiments except for 'I haven't slept.' If you have to layoff people, don't make it about yourself. If I'm the person getting laid off, I don't give a damn how much sleep you've had. You still have job.

Talking about how the layoffs affect you, the still-employed manager, makes any thing else you say sound hollow.

> For me, I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team. Maybe that's hard to do in the moment, since I'd also not want to lose my job in a major crisis, but it sounds awful.

Typically layoffs happen for a reason - if its the company failing and trying to survive, it's not a bad idea to jump ship. If its economic (like all of the layoffs right now) - it's a bad idea to jump to a new job if you can avoid it -- you may very well get hired, and laid off as a new hire.

> Tell them that you haven't slept.

This is the odd one out here. Showing your grief about an undesirable decision is one thing. But implying that you're making significant decisions about your employees' welfare in a deteriorated mental state is wildly unprofessional (even if truthful).

However bad you think you feel, at least you still have a paycheck and don't have to scramble for employment in a market of hiring freezes across the board.

Those you're directly telling this message to don't have that comfort. Now is not the time to talk about how bad you think you have it. You might have a couple sleepless nights, they're going to have sleepless weeks.

At a long ago company I worked at for quite a few years, there were various periods when you knew layoffs were going to be happening. There were also rare occasions when logins (these were terminals) would go out for some reason. When the two things intersected, it was very nervous making until you determined everyone was out.

There's something weirdly unnerving about watching HR hurriedly pack other peoples desks without their knowledge moments after they're called into a meeting never to be seen again.

I'd far rather just come back after hours and remove my things supervised than have somebody else hastily throwing my stuff into a box.

Luckily it's never happened to me, but I've seen it happen a couple times.

We should stop empowering individuals to have this authority over a majority.

No one seems to care about the huge effects this has on private citizens.

All the concern is with the ephemeral belief these businesses are the future.

Anyone remember Nortel? 80% of last generations Fortune 500 is gone.

The future has no obligation to drag along, and will probably mock how primitive it is, our bleeding.

These guys are traditional confidence men promising prosperity for the ages while routinely pumping and dumping all over the public, that despite what memes media and politics try to peddle, does not owe deference to history and self aggrandizing story.

This is why I prefer being laid off through email.

I don't need to cry in front of my boss.

Never heard this happen (Scandinavia) other than in the cases where an employee clearly breached laws or company policy. Standard procedure here is that you as a salaried employee will be guaranteed 1-2-3 months (depending on your contract) of notice.

Edit with example: https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/dismiss...

> An employee may usually remain in the post as long as negotiations or legal proceedings are in progress, provided the courts have not decided otherwise.

> [...]

> The employer may summarily dismiss an employee if he or she is guilty of a gross breach of duty or other serious breach of the contract of employment. The employee has no right to remain in his post while the matter is being considered, unless the court has decided otherwise.

Being paid for 1-3 months is entirely independent of whether they want you in the office or not.

In Britain it's called gardening leave, and it's common in finance and other jobs with tight security. You are paid, but you stay and home and do some gardening. (Or, more likely, look for a new job.)

I work with online payment processor and early during the covid pandemic we had some layoffs. They were all notices of 1+ month and everyone of them continued to work for the majority of the notice period. Nobody had anything revoked early.

I understand it happens, but it seems _way_ too common (reading the comments here) compared to what is actually necessary.

Yeah, I worked at a UK bank and was given gardening leave even when I left to start a (somewhat orthogonal) competitor. Actually, they didn't even insist that I served out my leave before starting work. It's an odd system.

A decent amount of states in the US have “at-will employment” laws, meaning you can be fired for any reason (excluding specific things to do with “protected classes” like race, etc.), at any time, with immediate effect and without any notice. Similarly, this means you can quit your job at any time, with immediate effect and without any notice. If you quit, it’s only if you want to maintain reputation or relationships that you should work a notice period, but given the asymmetry of employer-employee power, that ends up being pretty common. For at-will employment, I don’t think there needs to be any severance package or mandatory weeks of pay, but I think it’s offered in many cases.

Having said that, in finance (I used to work at a proprietary trading firm in an at-will state), it’s extremely common for firings to be immediate, e.g., arrive at work, boss calls you to office, get fired, badge taken and you’re walked out and your desk belongings are mailed to you later. More often, you’re walked to your desk to pick up your things instead of having them mailed out, but both happen. But even more often, people are “incentivized” through bad reviews and bad bonuses to quit in advance of a firing.

When I quit, they didn’t want me to leave, and I negotiated a couple weeks of notice to hand over my responsibilities and knowledge, and to maintain some relationships.

I had a non-compete in my original contract, so I would have to negotiate with the original firm as to whether they would enforce it. If so, I would receive gardening leave pay in order to delay my employment at a competing firm. That could be for as much as 2 years, and they would pay my base salary at the original firm in order for me to not start at the competition. This gardening leave is totally different than a severance package though.

I've worked on security products as a SWE and as a SRE over critical systems, I've never seen this kind of behavior. This says a lot about the relationship Bryan and his team have with the people that work with them, imo.

Edit: not sure what's up with the current iteration of the HN crowd, but downvote is not equal to "I disagree".

It's as old as time. Or at least as old as the first few times mass layoffs and networked employee devices co-existed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/jobs/laid-off-and-locked-...

Some companies do it, sure, but I wouldn't call it normal or acceptable. In fact, it's kind sleezy.

Mass-scale layoffs it's almost guaranteed. When you're talking even a single percentage point of employees departing, it's more normal than you might expect.

Some companies even do it after an employee submits notice on their end (paying through the end of the term but disabling access earlier than expected, or even immediately), though this is far less common.

You can keep saying it, but it doesn't make it more true or acceptable. Anyway, the current HN crowd has been disappointing lately, so time to take a break.

> You can keep saying it, but it doesn't make it more true or acceptable.

We agree on whether it's acceptable, but let's be honest, any roles I've held in the past (and all security jobs around the world, really) exist only because people have a surprising potential to be absolutely crappy.

In finance it's pretty common practice (and in that sense Coinbase is similar to a broker). I remember stories about how half (?) the people working at UBS London came to work one morning to find that their badges didn't unlock the entrance gates anymore. And lots of stories like that in the years following the 2008 crash.

Wouldn't their Blackberries be remotely deactivated first?

Phones stop working for lots of reasons other than "I've been fired". I'd still show up to work. It'd be pretty bad if your phone indeed had just stopped working, and rather going in to get it fixed, you just assumed you were fired and then stopped going into work, thus actually getting fired for not showing up.

BES doing something reliably? That was a good laugh, thanks.

That is a major plot point in Margin Call, which is a dramatization of the initial housing bubble crash of 08: https://youtu.be/zn2Xf9hAFcE?t=461

Most people there would probably come into work between 8 and 9am. Even if the phones were deactivated before then, most might not even have noticed (those that did notice might have had a premonition, but what are you going to do about it on your commute?).

I think it's typical and I would honestly prefer this if I worked somewhere. Our working relationship is over and you've let me go so let's call it a day.

> we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees

Apparently they used to do this at Microsoft. Microsoft stopped doing it though because people would freak out if the network ever went down - employees would think "oh my god, I'm about to get fired".

Perhaps Coinbase is speedrunning the evolution of modern HR practices, just as the market it serves is speedrunning through the history of financial regulation.

Common practice. In places where I have worked if you told the company you had a competitive offer the standard practice was to take 15 minutes to try to get you a matched offer. If you declined or they couldn’t match it was automatic walk off the premise

I've only seen this in American companies. I'm sure other companies in other countries do it but it's pretty standard for Americans.

Can anyone explain their 6 plus billion dollar yearly operating costs?

I hope it's not mainly advertising.

Their operating expense over the past year was $4.35 billion. Cost of revenue was $1.3b, leaving the $1.5b operating income.

$745m selling & marketing expense over the past year (SG&A was $1.95b overall).

$1.67b expense for R&D.

$733m for other.

> Those claiming that this is a "crypto" sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month

That may very well happen, but Coinbase is directly blaming their layoffs on over-hiring for web3 usecases and ideas that they feel are no longer financially viable.

Extremely common in fintech and health care. It's the remote analog to being escorted out by security. I've worked for two health care companies and have had access removed the literal last minute of my last day. One, a large pharma co, used a policy update to remove my ability to log into the company laptop. Not a comment on the practice, only sharing experience.

Par de course in finance (hedge funds etc.).

People just "disappear" overnight. Access cut. You've had nothing on your personal computer anyways (all work & data is on company machines, accessed through Remote Desktop).

Lol, so 18% of their employees have access to personal data.

Ok. I am very comfortable entrusting my data to this company.

Very, very typical. Insider threat teams are a thing at many tech or otherwise companies. Nothing specific to crypto other than a higher incentive to have an ithreat team. You should be doing nothing and no one on a work computer that is not 100% work related. Blows my mind that people do otherwise.

Just the remote working equivalent of being escorted from site by security.

There's a lot of commentary on this, but people seem to be conflating a couple of points - namely that this cut all access - everything, and emailed to personal email and not just access to "secure" systems. That is pretty unusual, and not something I've seen.

Typically access to sensitive systems is cut, but cutting everything and notifying to personal email seems unusual. Sensitive information should always be segregated and subject to tight controls, which is easy to sever, and then leave regular email and video conferencing in place - ie. the bare minimum necessary to communicate over a work device.

> Sensitive information should always be segregated and subject to tight controls, which is easy to sever

This, very few people should have access to production data. This is a shocking revelation. I’m reevaluating being a customer of theirs.

In this episode of Coinbase they learn that authentication and authorization are two different things :D

I was similarly shocked that the only control plane they had to limit access to sensitive information was literally terminating everything. They don't have any kind of access control that would allow them to keep an employee in their system but limit their access. How exactly are they running a "finance company" if they don't have these basic protections.

I could see if they were an early stage startup and just haven't gotten around to it, but they are multiple thousands of employees at this point. In every start up I've worked in, implementing access controls ends up being a priority around 100 employees.

I've never used Coinbase but this revelation makes me not want to ever use them in the future.

Email is often "production data" -- it contains personal data, IP, business relationship information and so on. Sending an email from an @coinbase.com is certainly a production action.

It is only fairly recently that locking people out of the office didn't implicitly remove their access to email, memos, letters and so on.

This is true, but most institutions like Coinbase don’t have customers email employees.

Customers email something like “support@domain.com” and that routes to a ticketing system (eg Zendesk), not to people.

And, the vast majority of employees don’t directly interact with customers either.

Well designed controls deliberately keep PII data out of general purpose systems like email, drive sharing, dev ticketing, etc

I agree that the remote move introduces new risks, but those should be minimized by the existing controls in place.

> I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you.

Then don't fucking give it. Or don't write this sentence.

This is the primary reason why Active Directory and Rippling exist.

Cutting off access for any IT / OPs / SRE type role when releasing an employee is mandatory, not just typical.

Places where employees have physical keys face a similar problem; what to do to keep an employee that was fired or quit from having access to things of value they shouldn't be able to access anymore. This is a big part of why key fobs are so popular since you can have thousands of unique ones to enable or disable.

I worked at hotel once where I had keys to everything and I would take them home nightly at the end of my shift. When the hotel changed ownership one of the changes implemented was anyone with hotel keys had to lock them up in one of the front desk safety deposit boxes when their shift ended. At the time I thought this was pointless security theater that wasted 10 minutes of my day. In retrospect, it was probably so we could safely be fired if necessary with our keys still accounted for.

In my first job, the company laid off 200 people, and they found out when they couldn't use their badge to enter the building. Corporations love to do that type of things.

My first thought is that there could easily be a malicious actor within the not yet laid off employees who could now be actually incentivized to do their bad deed seeing clearly that they may get no notice when fired.

It’s been pretty interesting watching YC backed Coinbase get absolutely crushed by FTX, which has a higher % of crypto trading volume despite having less than 10% of the headcount.

Crypto is a zero sum game, and the old Paul Graham essays and other tired VC dogmas really only work in positive sum games. FTX was founded by traders which is valuable when the ultimate purpose of the crypto industry is to separate uninformed people from their money.

Yeah. FTX people clearly know a lot more about market making and how exchanges work. Makes coinbase look like amateurs. Coinbase hired their CPO with a 650 million dollar pay package. They should have spent that money on 2 - 5 million a year hft programmers and traders

What do you make of Sam Bankman-Fried describing his business as a literal Ponzi scheme on Odd Lots podcast?

The commentary isn’t necessary to see the insanity but here’s fastest way to get to the relevant content: https://youtu.be/C6nAxiym9oc

Edit: To clarify, though not sure how much a mitigation this is, yes SBF is describing much of the underlying activity he takes commission on as a Ponzi scheme. Sure, he’s not operating the Ponzi itself, just keeping it operational and profiting from its continued operation. Mea culpa.

I listened to that, he even predicted the Luna crash in that interview. When that guy talks, it’s very clear he understands markets. Very different approach to Bryan Armstrong, who’s more of a Bitcoin “believer”. I think the blatant description of a ponzi scheme was a rare window into an insiders thoughts.

What FTX does is introduce financial products that could potentially put downward pressure on a lot of these scam coins. To be fair, he also introduces products that allow people to play around w/ crazy amount of leverage, but it could theoretically be done without as much counterparty risk and interconnections that caused the 2008 financial crisis.

lots of exchanges provide crazy amounts of leverage. Kucoin lets you have a margin loan that's 10x your capital. I'm not sure this is unique to FTX.

The exchange itself doesn't need 1000s of people. Coinbase went on a hiring spree in 2021, but it didn't seem to have a clear strategy for all that headcount.

He described defi yields as a literal ponzi. Sam Bankman Fried’s business is charging commissions to people in the ponzi and trading against them and he does a good job of that.

As an aside, for those who like names as destiny, SBF’s is epic

I.e. Bernie Madoff made off with their money

Nuke Goldstein of Celsius nuked depositors money

You get:

Scam-Bankman Fried

Or also Sam Bank-Man Fried (if they go bust)

This sort of naming thing is more common than you’d think in frauds anyway and if you are placing your money with someone who could chuckle to themselves “hehe I made-off with their money” it is a material risk

I want an exchange to be neutral. I don't want them to pick and choose the products I'm allowed to trade. Outright fraud should be avoided, but if someone wants to buy a shitcoin, they should be allowed to do so.

> I want an exchange to be neutral. I don't want them to pick and choose the products I'm allowed to trade. Outright fraud should be avoided, but if someone wants to buy a shitcoin, they should be allowed to do so.

BTC-e was the closest thing to that, and the FBI shut them down outside of their jurisdiction (RU).

To this day they were the only exchange trying to make people whole after the seizure, everyone else just exit scammed or has had their funds tied up in an asset seizure (MT gox via the Japanese Government).

Relevant to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism (which itself is a probably just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

> What do you make of Sam Bankman-Fried describing his business as a literal Ponzi scheme

Strawman. He described DeFi yield farming as a ponzi scheme. [0] Not his own business.

Nice try though and thanks for playing.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...

HN is about as informed on crypto as some random off the street I've found.

I actually wouldn't mind if mods here removed non-technical crypto discussions.

No need for the snark, thank you for the clarification though!

With the caveat that I'm approximately as crypto-skeptical as they come, (a) the interview snippet in that video sounds like SBF describing how a hypothetical could work, not his actual business - though it's hard to tell with all the interruptions from the host yelling "Ponzi!"; (b) the interview snippet in the video doesn't even obviously sound like a Ponzi scheme, but more like an exploration of collective actions and collective beliefs, which is...not unrelated to how regular money works?

He’s not describing his business at all, but yield farming, which is performed using decentralised applications.

yeah SBF doesn't believe in crypto. He might pay some lip service but he doesn't hold any position extensively.

He is pointing out that it is in fact a ponzi and explaining the mechanism. There are no regulations against letting people trade this type of ponzi so his company isn't doing anything illegal. I think the problem here is that people outside crypto take it more seriously than insiders.

I think people outside of crypto take it seriously because it’s getting to the scale where it will start negatively impacting non-participants or unknowing participants.

> his business as a literal Ponzi scheme

Imagine being this uninformed and wanting to seriously have a conversation about crypto and the underlying fundamentals. We get it, you hate crypto. Why even bother at this point?

Matt Levine is pretty informed IMHO, and he interpreted SBF's explanation of yield farming as describing a Ponzi scheme.

> I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would've described farming. You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.

Yes, yield farming is a ponzi (though technically it's the greater fool theory). SBF's company (FTX) is certainly not a ponzi.

There is also a lot less regulation in the Bahamas.

Coinbase have always been amateurs. Were you here 9 years ago when they melted down the first time? That was fun. That was also when I decided the fix was in and I got out of crypto.

<insert startup name> has always been amateurs.

In this era of cheap money it's been maddening to see how absurdly incompetent companies can be and still push forward with no consequences.

I've seen teams of people working on credit scoring with no understanding of expected default. They literally just throw data at XGBoost, and couldn't understand why they couldn't find a way to profit off a group of people with a 30% default rate when the upper bound of interest they could charge was 25%.

This pattern is repeated all over startup land (I've also never met a company that knew how to model churn correctly, this is an essential business metric and yet again people throw XGBoost at it), but cheap money means that doing anything is rewarded with more money so every idea seems like a good one.

Crypto companies will be the first to go, but hard times are coming for anyone working at a company that doesn't have a profit.

Wow, you aren't kidding

https://dailyhodl.com/2022/05/28/top-coinbase-executives-hav...

I think for a while they were hiring Node.js developers to develop these trading systems

FTX's CEO SBF also doesn't believe in crypto, as far as I can say, but just sees it as a means to make some money for philanthropy (effective altruism). That might make him less prone to succumb to the hype and over-invest.

FTX's success is a bit questionable. They are the biggest buyer of USDT/Tether and shady things are probably going on there.

Does that say much? They're the biggest buyer because USDT is the biggest stablecoin.

Your logic is backwards. They don’t buy more Tether than other stables. (Well they do but that wasn’t the point)

The point is they are Tether’s largest customer. They buy more Tether than anyone else.

I still don't see what the problem is. Their customers want USDT. They buy USDT so their customers can access it. Looking around on their site, it looks like they support USD alongside USDT, so it's not like they're strongarming their customers into using USDT. Calling that shady is like calling a stock broker shady because they're the largest buyers of [insert shady/overhyped company here].

They are tethers largest customer because they're the largest exchange and tether is the largest stablecoin. Stablecoins in general were created because offshore exchanges had trouble dealing with traditional banks since the whole point of being offshore is not following US regulations.

Isn't that reversing the logic? If FTX bought more USDC than USDT, the scales would've changed.

Also, the fact that FTX has never called out Tether or at least pushed for a proper audit is indicative that they are more likely to be in the scam than merely buying from them because they believe to be solid.

FTX is also going to feel a lot of pain when the crypto market crash completes. None of these companies are IMO sustainable without mass interest in cryptocurrencies, which is rapidly fading as people realise they're not going to get rich quick.

FTX is in deep with Tether. I expect they'll pull some tricks out of their collective hats to avoid a complete collapse.

Pulling tricks needs a new sucker pipeline. But sucker pipelines will dry up as old suckers get burned and money is generally drying up due to interest rates.

Don't need new suckers if you're running the largest money counterfeiting operation in human history.

This is the case for most market makers in whatever markets they're in. A crash usually produces a huge trading windfall, and then the subsequent "recession" leaves people with little money to invest/gamble with. FTX's traders are veterans of the industry, and they understand the need to be lean when order flow is light, and the need to make as much as possible when it's hot. Coinbase just watched the best two years of trading pass in front of their eyes, and failed to monetize it even to 10% of its potential. If they're lucky, they will get another opportunity to do things right in 5 years. But the trading graveyard is filled with people/companies like Coinbase who did really well for a year because they lucked into a good position, but who should have done 10x better. But then the real players see the opportunity, and run the Coinbases of the world off.

I have never heard of FTX until reading your comment just now. Is it really crushing Coinbase?

Those who have too much head count and hire aggressively, also fire aggressively.

I'm guessing FTX kept their head count low, so not impacted as hard as Coinbase is.

crushing might be a bit too far, but they are certainly ahead of Coinbase in volume with lower opex https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

I had no idea that Binance is so far ahead. Why do most people use it? Some trust factor?

It has the most pairs available, historically aggressive referral scheme, BNB and BSC also helped a lot. not sure about the trust factor

It also has very low trading fees (~0.1% per trade)

Crushing in terms of their promotion army heavily shilling it on social media - yes. In terms of users no.

Same here until I saw the Larry David's commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo

> Crypto is a zero sum game

How come? The same network effects that work for social networks work here, as more people and businesses use crypto, it's value proposition raises quadratically.

bc there’s not much current use beyond speculative trading on future utility

speculative trading on future price, not utility

also correct but not what I’m saying, thanks for the input

Nobody's using crypto for its intended purpose - its value proposition when it comes to payments is just as dubious as it ever was. The vast majority of the attention for crypto has been for its speculative aspect.

Also if the "purpose" of something is payments and that thing is an investment for you, then you're betting on a deflationary future which means that thing will be less useful as a payment.

I'm receiving part of my salary in USDT, and find it valuable. Traditional banking system doesn't work well for everyone.

That is the case with stablecoins. Stablecoins are the most boring thing in crypto and few people really use it for payments.

What do you use the USDT for? Any type of spending?

I use it to receive money from another country and exchange for USD in a local exchange point. It may sound like a boring case, but if you find yourself in a foreign country without working bank cards, it might save your ass

There are tons of people using it for its apolitical and censorship resistant nature. Afghanistan/Ukraine/Lebanon/Argentina/Venezuela/Nigeria/Turkey/Belarus/Mexico to name a few countries where it is very relevant and useful

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60715707

https://www.financialinclusion.tech/

What percentage range (total value, transactions, etc) would you say counts as "tons"?

Its really hard to get a good gauge on that. There is a lot of data but its all very piecemeal and hard to aggregate. Could spend a week trying to get an idea of it and still not be sure. Here is my couple minute version though.

For 2020 in Mexico alone from Bitso: "Frida Vargas, head of business sevelopment at Bitso, told CoinDesk the company processed about $1.2 billion in remittances between the U.S. to Mexico in 2020. “Our main users are remittance companies, who use crypto technology to improve and make the remittance sending and collecting process easier,” she said."[1]

In Argentina: "Cryptocurrency penetration was at 12% in Argentina, vs. 29% credit card penetration, indicating impressive crypto uptake in that country"[2]

"There is high interest in receiving crypto remittances in various LatAm markets, such as Peru (33%), Argentina (19%), Mexico (15%), and Brazil (8%)"[2]

There is also chainalysis[3] data for small transfers in LatAm showing 1.5M monthly transfers at a total value of 300M monthly volume. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPCfq-LWUAEctzT?format=jpg&name=...

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/video/mexican-remittances-continent-la... [2] https://americasmi.com/pdfs_landings/220211_The_cryptocurren... [3] Page 42: https://go.chainalysis.com/rs/503-FAP-074/images/Geography-o...

I'd guess it is around 1%? Maybe less? Certainly not more than 5%

>There are tons of people using it for its apolitical and censorship resistant nature.

bahahaha. the story never changes but bitcoin is always the proletariat fighting against the powers that be. Don't worry, El Salvador is accepting it as legal tender!

I don't use it for payments due to regulatory headaches. But the supply-side economics is not to ignore.

It is advantageous to Bitcoin. US M2 money supply grew 8.04% in the past year [0], while Bitcoin's grew ~1.75% [1].

Yes, demand has its 80% ups and downs, but each crash was to a level higher than the previous.

[0] - https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_m2_money_supply_yoy

[1] - https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-inflation/

And that makes it a horrible currency. It makes it highly deflationary which absolutely stunts the working of an economy because no one wants to spend anymore.

Good currencies are not stores of value. They are means of exchange. And crypto is a horrible means of exchange.

It may have some use as a store of value (i.e. digital gold), but it's not clear to me why I would store my value in digital gold, which will require people to altruistically spend money on energy after 2040 or so when no more Bitcoins are generated for miners (in practice much earlier as each mined BTC gets increasingly expensive), to maintain the blockchain, as opposed to investing in real gold, which can literally sit under my mattress and not require a network of planet burning computers for it to not vanish.

It's funny that you believe the nation states' excuses for de-basing their currency. People just use fiat because it is dominant and has a legal system attached. They de-base because they can.

The fact that they thought M2 and its equivalents across the world could rise faster than inflation in perpetuity is just silly in retrospect. They're the same thing in the long run. It was used to get around the lack of ability to enact fiscal policy and to make old people rich, and you bought it, hook line and sinker.

> because no one wants to spend anymore

Computing prices have been going down in the past half-century. Yet it's full of computers around us now. And the biggest companies are computing-related. I wonder why.

The main value proposition is to sell to the next person for more than you paid. Everything else about banking the unbanked or other vague goals about being better than fiat are to convince the next bag holder.

> The main value proposition is to sell to the next person for more than you paid.

I agree. But I genuinely believe "bagholders" will be better off compared to saving in their own national currency - provided they manage their risk correctly.

This is because national currencies keep inflating, so even a decreasing demand might maintain the same price, given the supply inflation difference.

Since the pandemic, BTC has acted like the S&P500 with 4x leverage, but no margin calls (loss limited to what you invested).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

This has held for over a century in the case of gold, since the USD kept readjusting its peg and eventually suspending convertibility.

https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

USD dropped the gold standard almost a century ago. How is your comment relevant to the greater fool theory and crypto today?

So what you're saying with that example is that even with the backing of many governments that have a vested interest in doing anything to stop the bubble from bursting (something Bitcoin doesn't have), the greater fool theory ultimately was correct in that eventually the bubble burst? (I don't agree that the USD-Gold peg was an example of greater fool theory, just an example of how pegging your currency to gold as a sovereign government with a central bank is not a reasonable way of doing monetary policy. The gold standard is an outlier in the human history of monetary policy, the only reason it's so notable to us today is because it was in use during the development of modern economics.)

Cryptocurrencies do not produce anything and any actual transactions done using them (as opposed to speculative trading) are a rounding error even after more than a decade. There is no mechanism for them to be anything other than a complicated greater fool scam because ultimately the only way you can make money from them is if you can sell them to someone else for more money than you bought them for -- which is what a greater fool scam is.

>This is because national currencies keep inflating Now consider the (dominating) 2nd order effect that the price of the "bag" was inflated by leverage and speculation.

Definitely worse than most national currencies outside of select countries.

Speculation is healthy in a market. For example, futures contracts let farmers hedge themselves against bad weather.

But I think leverage is insane with the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.

The inflation rate in bitcoin over the last 6 months has eclipsed the inflation of $USD. Anyone who got paid in $BTC these past few months lost more than 50% of their earnings. Nobody is interested in that.

Gains from trading are zero sum - whatever anyone takes out (when selling), someone must put in (by buying). More specifically, it is a negative sum game, since exchanges and miners want their cut.

So, the assertion that crypto as a whole is zero sum hinges on the assumption that for the vast majority of people, the utility of crypto comes from capital gains (buying and selling for a higher price), rather than, say, the utility of buying drugs or paying off ransomware.

No. If I buy Monero on an exchange, I pay only the marginal buyer’s price. The ability to transact privately may, however, be worth much more to me than that price.

Monero and its ability to transact privately is only valuable if you're participating in criminal activity, which is not the vast majority of people.

You may say that, no, hypothetically you are a privacy-enthusiast and like monero as a hobby money, but in reality most rational actors on Monero as evading taxes and using DNMs.

(I would also argue that Monero is the only crypto that is more currency than any other crypto today bc of this, but it's not a selling point IMO)

It absolutely is not only for criminals.

A simple example: you go to a store and buy something with BTC. All good so far.

But the store owner can see on the public blockchain that the wallet you paid with contains a lot of Bitcoin, and that you were in fact a crypto multi-millionaire. And he and his buddies will now target you in a nightly visit where they'll torture you and your family until you give them your coins.

Or another example: you're the business owner but the customer pays with tainted bitcoins, coming from child trafficking. Now your Coinbase account will be frozen if you send the coins there, or you'll be unable to use them in other ways because they're tainted.

The ability to transact privately is for your personal safety and to be able to transact with other people without being branded a terrorist or pedophile and have to deal with those false accusations.

>You may say that, no, hypothetically you are a privacy-enthusiast and like monero as a hobby money, but in reality most rational actors on Monero as evading taxes and using DNMs.

Again, your hypotheticals diverge from the reality.

The added value you're referring to accrues almost entirely to the exchanges.

People and businesses are not buying crypto to spend on things. They are buying it to trade it back and forth. No value is being created except for the fees exchanges can charge for processing transactions, which is a markup on the fees already charged by miners.

A large percentage of Americans were onboarded to investing via brokerages in the 70s-00s. Did that make day trading any less zero-sum than before?

I agree and am in general a big fan of FTX and the guys that work there. The CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried one of these HFT guys from Jane Street and his net worth shot up from 0 to $24 billion in just a few years. He kept things super lean and focused. But in the last few months it looks like he's hired a PR team and is all over the place: podcasts, obviously planted news stories, etc. He even hired a head of fashion and luxury partnerships and even has an ad out in Vogue.

I get that he may be looking forward to spending his wealth, but I feel if he doesn't keep focused his company will decay and he'll get sucked up into celebrity BS.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/ftx-bloc...

Why is being a celebrity BS? After a few tens of millions (or maybe $100M) dollars money doesn't matter at all, it's all about status, and money is just a tool to achieve it.

Sure, for some people. But I was hoping the Sam Bankman-Fried had higher aspirations like building a product and team he could be proud of. I don't think celebrity status is good for you. It's very unnatural to be surrounded by yes men and people that just want to use for your money or status.

> was hoping the Sam Bankman-Fried had higher aspirations like building a product and team he could be proud of

This is Armstrong. It’s why he’s failing. Bankman-Fried recognises crypto for what it is. It’s not somewhere to do things to be proud of. It’s a place to make money while it lasts.

>I get that he may be looking forward to spending his wealth

On Philanthropy maybe. He's pretty dedicated to the EA movement and has explicitly said he intends to give everything away.

If Coinbase allowed you to pay in fake dollars I'm sure they would get more volume too.

Alameda is the single scariest entity in crypto. They're absolutely brutal. I exit every trade once it becomes apparent that Alameda is in.

If I was a VC firm, however, I would back anything SBF was doing. He's a genius when it comes to making money.

Sorry, what does SBF stand for?

Sam Bankman-Fried, guy who started FTX and Alameda Research

Sam Bankman-Fried - the founder of Alameda

Not sure I understand your comment. If they are so good why would you exit the trade?

Compare and contrast CB’s hiring with that of FTX[1]

Coinbase

“ We have now exceeded the limit of how many new employees we can integrate while growing our productivity. For the past few months, adding new employees has made us less efficient, not more. We have seen ourselves slow down considerably due to coordination headwinds, and difficulty fully integrating new team members.”

FTX

“ It’s a race–between how quickly new employees understand the company's culture, and how quickly people are hired. The faster you hire, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page.…. we wanted to make sure we could actually integrate everyone we hired into FTX's working culture.”

[1] https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1533946713366568962

The FTX quote applies in so many circumstances. Tons of companies, organizations, and even teams have boom/bust hiring. No headcount for ages and then BOOM suddenly piles of headcount. This makes culture and knowledge sharing almost impossible.

FTX is interested in being a real business. I think a lot of people the past several years have failed to try to become a real sustainable business, and instead have been pawns in Benchmark's and Tiger Global's schemes to flip companies into the S&P or into a F500 acquisition. CEOs in the former build responsibly. CEOs in the latter build fast to scare the incumbents into an acquisition or co-investment to push the price high enough to get it into the S&P.

It is fascinating just how quickly sentiments can change (both in the broader market but in crypto it seems to be exacerbated). That said, it's obvious that companies like these dramatically overhired and overspent on talent and were growing far beyond what the market could bear except in an extremely bull run subsidized by government largesse. Now that investors are losing their shirts on crypto and retail people who were playing with fun money have sports to bet on again and can go outside, I imagine the trading volume is going to keep declining dramatically, and they basically missed the NFT craze since their marketplace was late to the party. Hope their employees who have been with them for a while were able to sell at a reasonable time after IPO and aren't still in the lockup period.

“It is fascinating just how quickly sentiments can change”

Sounds like a classic bubble that people have been warning about. Tulips all over again?

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/02/warren-buffett-wouldnt-s...

Beanie Babies all over again

Worse, at least the Beanie Bros had warehouses full of stuffed toys to remind them of their mistakes in the end. All the cryptoists get is a lousy set of characters for their trouble.

And you still could use them for their original purpose: as a toy.

A few months ago I read a post on Reddit who someone who is now a teacher uses them as a occasionally gift for pupils: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/s5rz7s/c...

They’ll be fine. There’s another sucker born every minute (although, you know, declining birth rates).

No-one learned their lesson after 2018, so they aren’t about to start now.

People like easy money. If you tell them the truth, they’ll just accuse you of trying to trick them into staying poor.

It’s a can’t lose business model!

Sarcasm aside, the total return of Bitcoin since the peak in 2017 is now approaching 0% ($20k peak). I suspect that alone will do more to break the spirit of the twitter hype mafia than anything else.

Even after everything that has happened lately, regular old S&P 500 index funds are up about 65% in that same time.

The problem is that people have started to invest other people's money in crypto. Quebec, El Salvador, and probably a few private funds now hold crypto and crypto-related assets.

Then there are people who simply don't know better and were conned into throwing money at crypto.

Case in point: OpenSea's monthly volume: https://dune.com/rchen8/opensea

There's no hiding on the blockchain. Monthly volume has gone down from a peak of nearly $5B in January to $372M in June so far.

oooof.

I see the point and I agree with you. But let me point out 2 things for the sake of being scientifically correct:

  * we're just at the middle of the month
  * the price has dropped 4x, those charts are in USD

So comparing June (14 days) to Dec is not entirely fair.

Your point still stands.

That's the problem - your expenses (salaries, rent, hosting, etc.) are paid in USD.

Meanwhile, your revenue is in ETH.

Even if you can maintain the same volume, your revenue can drop drastically if ETH price drops.

A 100 ETH sale earns you 2.5 ETH. In January, this was worth $7.5k. Now, its worth $3k. Your revenue dropped by over 50% but your expenses are going to stay the same.

I can't see how the economics of businesses like this can work out.

> your expenses (salaries, rent, hosting, etc.) are paid in USD.

nobody (sane at least) would mix expenses and long term, high volatility investment as crypto. I own some crypto and I don't care today's price, it's a 10y investment.

Except in this case, its unavoidable - unless your employees and landlords and hosting companies accept crypto. Your revenue will always be in ETH (or other native tokens). Your expenses will always be in USD (or local currency). Which is what makes this model unsustainable.

Unless you're immediately converting crypto to fiat.

how does that matter in this situation? You get paid in ETH. ETH was $3k in January. Its $1.2k now. Ergo, your income is now $1.2k, not $3k since your fee is fixed.

Those charts look way less dire than I would have expected. June isn't halfway through yet. So I'm not sure what to think of that.

But prior to June, they had been doing ~$200M in "fees" monthly -- fairly consistently, for almost a year. That's more of a "business" (and more stable) than I would have guessed.

Most of those $200M in fees are Ethereum gas fees that are being burnt on-chain. Those aren't income for OpenSea, they're costs incurred by all parties as part of doing business.

Even then the dollar value is only the magic fantasy price you'd get if you could turn those coins into dollars but not affect the price by the fact of that sale.

ETH has enough liquidity to easily absorb that volume tbh.

I suppose those fees would be the lower limit of the subjective value provided to the participants.

Otherwise they wouldn't trade.

I do not think they are gas fees, that wouldn't make sense. The description on that chart states: > Combined OpenSea and seller fees

Opensea takes a % fee, and the seller takes a % fee. Can you prove it's also including gas fees?

OpenSea's fees is 2.5% of each transaction. There's a creator fee on top of that which the creator can decide. It usually ranges between 2.5-7.5%.

On average, you should assume that OpenSea takes around 30-40% from this 200M fees.

If we follow the weekly updates:

1. First a hiring "slowdown".

2. Hiring freeze and rescinded offers.

3. 18% layoffs.

What's the reason behind announcing it in stages? Don't they receive much more negative publicity this way? Or are they really making decisions from one week for the next?

It'll all be forgotten when they announce withdrawal freezes. Don't worry, it's for the Safety of the Network ™

Not your keys, not your coins. Don't keep your assets on an exchange.

Yeah, off to do my evacuation to paper wallets and wait 4 years to go back.

> Or are they really making decisions from one week for the next?

I'd say this is the most likely explanation. The weekend was brutal for everyone in crypto.

Because everyone does it in stages as listed above (some more loudly than others), if you jump to step 3 without going through 1 and 2 people will assume it is your step one and things must be really, really bad.

We have to finally accept the fact that the clowns are indeed driving the clown car.

4. 100% layoffs.

between 2 and 3, the bls released a new inflation report, and there was a subsequent market crash.

Just 3 months ago many people thought the markets could potentially bounce back (e.g. if the ukraine conflict didn't escalate and if inflation came down on its own - neither of which happened).

Not so long ago, CNBC was still talking about the probability of a recession a quoting probability percentages less than 50%.

I think the reality is that 2-4 months ago, very few people thought things would get as bad as they are right now.

In an environment of extremely high unpredictability, sometimes week-by-week decision making is the only way to operate. Re: your point on publicity, I think they will get less negative publicity now that they're announcing layoffs after many other companies have already done the same

Hedges started shorting the S&P 500 in 2021. Surely if you are a high level executive, your data shouldn't come from CNBC.

Technically they started years before that and lost a lot of money. If you are a high level executive, your data shouldn't come from hedge funds.

Um, just a month ago, in the earnings call, he reiterated continuing to grow and invest. For those following the markets and economy closely (like any public company CEO should), literally nothing in the last month has been a much of a surprise. So, to go from, 'we're so totally gonna hire to' to 'pause' to 'cancel' to 'fire' in a month doesn't seem to inspire much confidence in them.

I think you're really asking about a continuous vs discrete management approach.

In a continuous approach, you run the company according to control-theory like laws. Ie. you want to maximize profits, so you adjust the workforce up and down gradually to maximize profits. If labor prices go down 3% you might increase headcount by 1.5% to stay at optimal profitability. All parts of the company get optimized to the best of your ability like this, with signals giving a proportionate effect to the levers you control.

In a discrete approach, you recognise that some actions will have dramatic non-linear effects, and therefore it's better to announce a 10% downscaling rather than ten separate 1% downscalings.

The downside of the discrete approach is your response to signals is delayed, because you want to group together the bad news, and don't want to pull a big lever based on uncertain information.

In practice if you fired people weekly/monthly/quarterly (pick a small enough discrete period to approximate “continuously”) at % you wouldn’t be maximizing profits due to other costs. “Non-linear effects” is carrying a lot in your description.

Take a high performing team, fire them, and then rehire tor it, retrain, etc. the cost it took to get to the previous level of productivity is the “knowledge capital” that was squandered. It usually will be more than the labor savings, unless we are talking about huge disparities based on decades of seniority: older workers with higher pay and defined benefit pensions etc vs younger workers with defined contribution pensions, is about the only case I’ve seen this make sense, and it was a once-in 30 years kind of thing.

Then there’s the reputation and morale hit: people won’t want to work for you if you have a reputation for regular layoffs.

Amazon for example is struggling with employee turnover and morale because of its aggressive approach to annual PIP and layoffs.

Labor costs also tend to be sticky downwards - people will accept getting laid off but won’t accept a pay cut.

Of course there are industries with seasonal or overflow workers etc where this is an understood job characteristic, but that tends not to be the norm…

It's called denial. Also the slow release of bad news is an attempt to stem the losses of employees leaving a sinking ship. Controlling the press narrative. Lots of reasons for it. And no, tech "journalism" doesn't work as it used to, so drip by drip of this bad news doesn't hurt any worse than ripping the bandaid off.

I've seen it once due to the executives being disconnected from reality and not willing to accept that things are now truly f-ed. They were believers more than executives. In that case it took the board telling them "no, that's not enough cuts" multiple times.

1 and 2 are signaling to the stock markets that they are doing something to cut costs and internally to warn employees that layoffs are imminent so that they start looking out. Helps companies reduce severance payments and the logistics hassle.

Unfortunately it takes time to be able to actually to change expectation, craft and execute an exit plan properly. Also going through the motions signals what's happening for better or worse.

There's two ways you can announce a big corporate change:

1. A fully formed announcement, where everyone learns their fate on day 1. People will complain that it came out of nowhere, they weren't consulted, and that skulking managers sharpened their knives in secret.

2. A gradual announcement, where everybody knows well before the big announcement that something is coming. People will complain about uncertainty and sleepless nights spent fearing for their jobs.

(Neither option is complaint-free, because there's no way of firing 18% of your workforce without putting people in the mood to complain)

What struck me about this announcement was that the CEO states a couple of times that he is accountable for the decision, but doesn't say what form that accountability takes. I try not to be cynical, but I suspect in this case that there will be no actual, real accountability.

It's his fault and the buck stops with him, but guess who is remaining employed?

I mean, it's his company. Kind of a weird comment to make.

> I mean, it's his company. Kind of a weird comment to make.

Its a public company, so it belongs to the shareholders. Brian Armstrong is one of the founders, and is the largest share owner, but a cursory google suggests that he owns just about 10% of the shares by value.

...and the shareholders literally determine his salary.

Why do you care what these people pay each other?

That's like saying that US citizens vote for the Federal swamp.

99% of them are totally against the swamp, yet the swamp continues.

Voting doesn't matter if there's no real ability to vote for real change.

If there is any truth in this world it is that shareholders absolutely call the shots. Anyone with any experience in finance can produce tens of thousands of examples of this - from shareholder lawsuits, to activist investors, to hostile takeovers, to board shakeups... The list goes on and on and on and on...

What do you have in mind for "real accountability?"

He could've deflected responsibility or hid behind a proxy, which happens all the time. Now, he gets more judgment good/bad directed at him from shareholders, the board, and customers.

https://www.theblock.co/linked/96078/coinbase-ceo-brian-arms...

Taking a pay cut in addition to the layoffs would be a good start

Bonus and Salary cut would be a good place to start.

> What do you have in mind for "real accountability?"

Reduction in pay and/or bonus. Loss of options. Reduction in his health cover to the same amount being offered to the people being sacked. Temporary or permanent removal from the board (probably not legally possible, but...).

Obviously none of those things will happen because, short of gross misconduct, they basically never happen to people in the executive layer - especially founders.

> He could've deflected responsibility or hid behind a proxy, which happens all the time. Now, he gets more judgment good/bad directed at him from shareholders, the board, and customers.

I think it would have been better for him not to claim personal accountability when everyone knows there is none. It's false and un-empathic. He has a net worth of $2.4 billion: there are no consequences and so no accountability.

Now, far be it from me to claim that there wasn't bloat in their workforce that generally needed to go, but if money is an issue, I'm pretty sure the CEO could use a house that costs a lot less than $133 million.

Well, Brian has lost billins in personal wealth. That's certainly something.

He just bought a house for $133,000,000. That's enough to give everyone who was laid off slightly a severance of more than $120,000. Somehow I'm expecting accountability to be significantly less than that.

I had to look this up after seeing that eye popping number. Apparently 9 figure homes is a thing amongst the billionaire class:

https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/finance/brian-armstrong-...

While simultaneously, Coinbase says that "managing the burn rate" is a primary reason for layoffs. If my eyes rolled any harder they'd be popping out of their sockets.

Imagine what the burn rate is on maintaining a property with 25,0000 square feet of living space that sits on 4.5 acres of hilltop land in place that gets quite hot and is currently experiencing a mega drought.

this man bought a minecraft home for 133M dollars

I'm a regular reader of high-end real estate blogs, so frequently see these types of purchases. I don't begrudge anyone for being wealthy (so far they made money legally and "ethically"), but I like imagining what I could alternatively do with such sums.

For example, look at this beautiful school campus in Russia - https://archive.ph/z5x01/26aa0da221582b152ab472fafafe811a483.... It was built at cost of $80 million [1].

But, somewhere across the world, someone spends way more than that on an individual home. It gets more real than that...Marc Andreessen (also a major Coinbase shareholder) spent $177 million on a Malibu manse, dropped $45 million on a second one, and $34 million on a third one [2]...Jeez

1- https://archive.ph/z5x01

2 - https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/tech/marc-andreessen-hou...

There is no limit to the spend 10-30% on your home rule of thumb of portfolio allocations I guess. Your home has some features of self custody that bitcoin enthusiasts would appreciate. some people even buy islands in Hawaii as homes.

Mostly blame taking.

His accountability comes in the form of the drop in price of the shares of the company. That is the ultimate accountability for any CEO or other shareholder.

His net worth was about $2.4 billion. Coinbase is currently down ~3.5% on the day. So his net worth is now about £2.3 billion†. I don't see that inconveniencing him much.

† Or maybe a bit more if he was foolish enough to hold some of it in crypto.

Zoom out, down 85% since November

He's lost literally billions during this correction. Losing over 50% of your net worth in just a couple months is definitely the ultimate accountability.

Still, he doesn't mention the ultimate reason for all this, which is that crypto is not sustainable and is a glorified vaporware that pretentiously tried to convince the world that it was a solution while, in reality, became simply a different problem.

I don't think we are now in a better position than before crypto. I honestly think that we wouldn't miss it if it was gone.

Sorry, I had to finally vomit my frustration about the subject.

Is that really relevant to Coinbase's business though? They're a fee collector - they can do great as long as they're collecting more in fees than it costs them to run the business, and that's true regardless of the net societal value of cryptocurrencies.

Pretty relevant no? If more people realize it’s not sustainable and is a energy wasting scam, the less people trading leading to less fees.

The whole industry around it is just making it worse.

Did this get buried by moderators? 610 points / 504 comments in 3 hours yet already down to #38.

Was wondering the same, looks quite suspicious

Probably yes, and it’s also the right call. There have been many recent articles about the economy, especially with regards to tech (and doubly so for crypto). Coinbase being a YC co doesn’t mean that layoffs are automatically worth a front page slot for more than a couple hours.

It’s boring news, too. It gratifies no curiosity.

I personally find the whole thing fascinating and a relevant intersection of tech and society, perfectly fitting here.

A type of distributed database software quickly gains mass frenzy, people bidding up the price of the database entries, leading to a cambrian explosion of scams, fraud, hype, environmental destruction, ransomware and terrorism, and now undergoing what seems to be a catastrophic (and well-deserved IMHO) collapse.

Submissions with lots of comments get deranked by the anti-flamewar algorithm to push them off the front page.

Don't worry, you'll be seeing plenty more stories about crypto businesses doing major layoffs over the next month.

Seems absurd that 18% can be laid off without an extended consultation period, proper notice, proper protocol of who should be laid off, etc.

If any UK staff are affected, then I would talk to citizens' advice (or a solicitor if you can afford it) asap.

Know your rights: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

You’re entitled to a consultation with your employer if you’re being made redundant. This involves speaking to them about:

  why you’re being made redundant
  any alternatives to redundancy

If your employer is making up to 19 redundancies, there are no rules about how they should carry out the consultation. If they’re making 20 or more redundancies at the same time, the collective redundancy rules apply.

I suspect most of the layoffs are in the US, where no such protections apply.

> California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN Act). Under this Act, the right of employers to lay workers off for reasons bordering on business necessity is curtailed. Employers who plan to lay 50 or more employees off within a 30-day period must give them a 60-day notice before taking such actions.

I'm not sure about California, but the federal WARN act and many state laws have an exemption for "unforeseen business circumstances" – a hole big enough to drive a truck through.

California's WARN Act does not have that exception.

Employers typically get around this by giving the laid off employees 60 or 90 days worth of severance pay+benefits.

As they are given 14 weeks severance, would it not be possible to give them 60 day notice (=9 weeks, say), which they are required to be outside the office, and then the remaining 5 weeks severance?

I suspect you're right, but Coinbase does have a reasonably large London office from their job postings. If anyone there is affected it is important they know their rights.

I have worked for US companies going through a mass redundancy where they just avoided any UK based redundancies to avoid the headache.

I also value making clear to US-based readers that such protections are important and do make a difference to how companies behave. If readers don't like living in a world where they fear very immediately being cut from their job then they should know there is a different world out there and they should lobby their representatives for change.

Unfortunately that world also leads to overly bloated corporations that are never able to clean house.

Respectfully I disagree. Redundancy is entirely possible, it just has to be done fairly and in a manner that respects employees.

A 45 day consultation period when making over 100 employees redundant doesn't stop redundancies.

Which corporations do you consider bloated and unable to make employees redundant?

You're right about consultation, but there's a sneaky trick to get around it.

Simply tell the affected people they've been selected for voluntary redundancy, which comes with a much more attractive severance package. If they don't volunteer, you then forcibly make them redundant -- with a less attractive package, they can then enter into consultancy if there are enough of then.

When this happened to me, 30% of the company was laid off, everyone took the "voluntary" package, no consultancy took place.

I don't really understand why anyone would want to continue working for a company that doesn't want you.

Give me my severance (14 weeks for Coinbase) and let me go find something better to do.

To everyone: 2017 had the exact same pattern. Coinbase is suffering this time because they didn't learn at all the lessons that happened to the companies in 2017. For example, you will not see this happen with Kraken.

This is normal, nothing to see here.

Coinbase has survived something like 4 downturns before, the previous ones on the same strategy that they are employing now. So not sure what lessons they are not applying, that others are?

In which prior downturn did the valuation of Coinbase (and other unicorns) get nuked -90%?

Coinbase is the only publicly traded exchange that I know of? Coinbase wasn't public until early '21. So sure, VCs might have piled more money into Coinbase at higher valuations, but all of that VC activity and valuation is an inexact science without a liquid market.

At any rate, off the top of my head, the dot com era had a similar vibe. And several tech firms are down 75+% this year so far (Netflix included).

In which prior downturn were they even listed?

Does it really matter? It's almost assured that private valuations will get written down with a lag (already underway). Favorable public markets are what allowed VCs to foist the turd on the greater fool for a decade.

Coinbase has not, however, been through a bear market. Nor has crypto

That's true. But that still makes me wonder, what could Coinbase do in this case, that other companies are already doing? Do other companies not perform layoffs when there is a bear market?

Why won't one see the same thing with Kraken?

It's already happened to them in 2017 and during my interview with them (after the 2017 crash), the interview was basically me interviewing them asking them what they're doing and it all checked out. Their biggest mistake was growing too fast and too much liquidity in crypto. All fixed now as far I can see from the public eye now

Anyone thinking this is like 2017 and hodling or investing on that basis needs to pay a lot more attention the global economy.

Puts in stark contrast the relatively recent ad they ran for the NBA finals mocking crypto skeptics. Hmm, I wonder how much that ad cost...

It was probably a rhetorical question but about a 30 second ad slot for the super bowl this year cost $7m so quite a lot

So when the CEO said "leave". He was trying his hardest to get get his employees to leave so he doesn't have to pay severance.

I don't think so. I assume that he asked people to leave because he wanted fewer people included in the layoff who actually care about the company.

The above statements are not mutually exclusive.

Severance is chump change to a company like Coinbase. It was a filter to find the disgruntled employees.

I've seen companies do really stupid things over small amounts of money. It all depends where budget is allocated.

Crypto is clearly crashing but I’m more curious if a reckoning will hit FAANG, particularly Google. I know one person there who is the spouse of a good friend, and they make nearly 7 figures as a middle manager (although I’m unsure what happens with the stock declines and RSUs).

Can these companies support legions of absurdly highly paid people? GOOG is down 25% this year, what will happen when it drops 50%?

I believe that most grants are "money value of stocks at time of grant" so if you're getting 1m over 4 years, you get however many shares 1m would have bought at the time of the grant.

This of course means that if you were granted just before a downturn, the "reason to stay" isn't as powerful as it was before.

And I think the big names will start slowing down hiring and offering less, probably salaries stay the same but the grants start to decline.

Google makes millions per employee, they’ll be fine until people stop buying ads and they stop making money.

Technically ~$1.6M per employee: https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html

Netflix is likely the one getting in trouble. Rest likely will do somewhat stable, though stock price might be flat or downwards for a while.

Not too hot about Meta. TikTok has been eating their lunch and they can't seem to catch up.

IIUC, RSUs are printed out of thin air.

RSU pay - especially at higher levels - makes up >50% of total compensation.

If stock prices go up or down - you'll certainly make more or less money. But the effect on the company is minimal.

Revenue is what matters to be able to afford to pay the base salary and bonus.

Google made $18000000000 profit last year. It could pay employees out of cash revenue, not out of stock prices if it wanted.

I don't know about Google in particular but I think RSUs are generally issued in terms of an amount of stock, not a dollar amount. As the share price goes down then Google becomes less competitive against companies with a more stable stock price who also issue RSUs.

Share price falling makes RSUs more attractive for new employees, assuming the company continues to issue the same number of shares.

It's bad for existing RSU holders though

Google also makes a huge amount of profit. In 2021, they made something like 350,000 of profit per full time employee. Ads are not nearly as fickle as crypto.

Somebody making nearly 7 figures as a middle manager is only doing so because they are including stock appreciation in their compensation. That isn't the norm steady state, even for L7s.

I don't think you understand how much money google makes :P they might slow growth, but I really can't see them laying off people

Google is a solid business with a bright future.

If they actually worked out their cloud offering then it would be even brighter.

Crypto is not comparable to companies like Google. If you’re looking for tech companies that might suffer, you’re looking for one trick ponies that can’t innovate - maybe look at Facebook.

Google has a strong focus on engineering and academic smarts. That has big downsides that might prevent them from making truly great user-centred products, but it’s also a robust philosophy that will ensure that they endure. I expect Google to be around in 2100. Facebook no. Coinbase absolutely not.

As soon as you started seeing projects like NFTs of jars full of farts you had to know the end was coming.

Is there a single YC company which is doing good in public market? It seems like all YC companies are net loss making investment for the retail investors have they bought the stocks in IPO.

What tech company that IPOed in the last 5 years is even above IPO price at the moment? This is not unique to YC, but maybe unique to the pump and dump VC scene that was cultivated in this bull run.

YC was peak funny money. I work extensively with startups and it was increasingly apparent in the last few years that the main objective of the startup was to raise funding, not to build product or deliver value.

The number of "unicorns" that will be around in a decade is likely in the low double digits at best.

Starting one unicorn is a big achievement. Helping start 12 is incredible.

That’s over 12 billion dollars by definition.

The decade plus of easy money from the government is ending. Unsure but we might start seeing a major cull of all these unprofitable companies that have been propped up.

I don’t think it’s just about the easy money. I think it’s about confidence and a bubble. Crypto is the biggest bubble of all, and everyone knows a bubble is going to pop. It lasts until the big guys lose their nerve and start pulling out, which is what we’re seeing now. They’re losing their nerve because they can see the economic tsunami coming from a variety of directions.

I’m concerned that the decadence of the west has now led to a series of get rich schemes that create bubble after bubble, providing successive paper booms that are bailed out by governments. The problem is that the consequences of each bail out accumulates, so this broader cycle seems itself unsustainable.

Western economies need to get back to real wealth creation. A good test of that is - can your economy solve real physical problems? Can it feed itself? Can it produce what you need in a pandemic? Are there goods and services that are universally in demand over the long term, which you produce better than anyone else?

It’s like growth of GDP has become this silly KPI that our governments obsess over whilst ignoring what’s making that happen. You can grow GDP by destroying the environment or running a Ponzi scheme, but what you really care about is the underlying strength of the economy.

The U.K. was heavily exposed by covid, in terms of its manufacturing capability and its managed response. We looked weak and disorganised. Now we need to learn from that and focus on growing a diverse and solid economy that is powerful and flexible enough to respond properly to challenges like the energy price hikes.

But I suspect the next bubble will grow just like crypto and our government will continue to pretend everything is ok.

If you're talking about literally the companies that bought as part of the initial IPO then yes, most are trading below their opening day prices. But all YC companies IPOed during the post-GFC bull market, and are now being valued in a different regime, so that's not unexpected especially with the YC hype.

DBX and ABNB are doing well (they're down relative to the highs of the last year or two but so is everything in tech). GTLB also looks like a pretty strong company given their solid market positioning and quality enterprise SaaS metrics. I'd classify those 3 as doing well overall.

I am not taking about now. Look back a few months. It's still the same case.

Anyone affected by this action and looking for work feel free to reach out. The folks I met from Coinbase are stellar and would love to work with you!

Can't believe they are still airing the Long Live Crypto ad during the NBA playoffs. Just saw one last night.

That money has already been spent. No way they'd be getting that back.

Right before inflation takes off, “staples” stadium was renamed to “crypto.com” stadium - at once a comical metaphor and omen.

and Crypto.com laid off 5% of its workforce just yesterday

It's crazy how much of a marketing footprint they have considering they're only the 19/20th largest exchange

I think the chances of them seeing out their stadium sponsorship are near 0%

I was amazed they are so prevalent in the Formula 1 races. I've seen them and OKX plastered around race track and cars.

reminds me of the phenomenon of a new record for tallest building in the world signals a major recession.

It’s also funny that all F1 teams have crypto sponsors and half the tracks are sponsored by crypto.com this year.

It's shocking to me that people keep fucking up these money printing machines (read: crypto exchanges).

Your incessant need for growth and share holder value completely rots your brain and you take a golden goose and burden it with so much overhead that it becomes unsustainable. Why?!

Just sit back and collect exchange fees, become rich beyond your imagination (see FTX).

The "money printing machine" relies 100% on inducing new suckers to participate. If you sit still (i.e., don't spend $$ on customer acquisition) the whole system dies.

Yeah, you can have a marketing budget. No one said you couldn't. But the kind of growth Coinbase was going for was far beyond the scope of just "customer acquisition".

> Minimum of 14 weeks of severance plus an additional 2 weeks for every year of employment beyond 1 year.

This feels super generous to me. Is it standard par for growing companies and Silicon Valley?

Yeah that seems huge. After 3 years at an SF-area company (not SV), I got 4 weeks severance. Barely enough to make it until unemployment kicks in, or get the ball rolling on interviews.

> Coinbase has survived through four major crypto winters

I don't understand - has crypto been around long enough to have winters? When were they?

You ever get the feeling cryptocurrency-related companies and a large chunk of their customer base live in their own reality? I think they have seasons now.

If we're talking Bitcoin:

- Early 2014 ($1,000 -> $300)

- Late 2018/Early 2018 ($19,500 -> $6,800)

- April 2021 ($63,000 -> $35,000)

- Nov 2021-Now ($67,000-> $22,000)

I think 'winter' implies a long period of dormancy. The 'AI winter' was like a decade long. These were normal corrections.

in each case there was a 3-4 year period of relative dormancy because the next hype cycle

Sounds like typical market swings and gyrations in highly speculative markets. Happens in other boom-bust speculation assets from gold to oil to tulips. Are these "winters" or just wild market swings?

This one will probably be a lot larger though; crypto hasn’t seen a real economic recession as such and so many people believe (but in religious way) that it can weather it. If might survive but so far it just crashes together with everything and we will see below 10k this year for btc as people want and need cash and inflation hedges.

In full agreement here. Crypto will really crash when people who have money invested in crypto really need that money.

The past few "crashes" were just emotion driven, but for the most part people had plenty of money on hand (at least the current cohorts invested in crypto). This time we have a lot more everyday people invested and they have much smaller buffers to handle financial crisis.

They're going to want to get their money out of crypto, not because they're nervous about the price, but because they have other bills to pay. My guess is that will lead to the ultimate crash of crypto where it will return to a hobbyist activity for a few curious technical people.

I read that and had the same thought. "Winters" at least in the context of AI which is where I believe the term in this context originated has been closer to 10 years [1]. It seems as though downturn would be more appropriate. Perhaps "winter" is becoming the preferred nomenclature because it's less alarming sounding?

[1] https://www.actuaries.digital/2018/09/05/history-of-ai-winte...

Their business is mostly based on tx fees, whereas in the “old” financial system tx fees are no more.

Orange is the new black?

I don’t see how they can build a long term sustainable business. They were lucky enough to go IPO during a BTC super hyped bull cycle. It is all downhill from here.

If I was working at CB I would have probably cashed out post-IPO and moved on. I see no reason to work there post-IPO.

>If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.

Very interesting!! Cutting nearly 20% of your staff but not giving any opportunity for workload transitions take place.

Wow. The language is nice but the behavior is horrendous. Also illegal in many parts of the world: IDK if they have employees in Europe but if they do it will be a big mess.

Suddenly cutting off an employee from a company, with no way to even say goodbye to their former colleagues, is despicable. It really shows who you are. Let's hope they will have a hard time hiring back anyone in the future.

Edit: as pointed out in many comments in this thread, this is apparently "normal" in the US. Point taken. (But if it is, then it's a little strange that the CEO felt the need to justify it.)

It’s totally normal here and done to protect the company. It’s one of the reasons Americans are paid considerably more than Euros. Companies can take on more risk and pay more because they aren’t burdened with strict employee relationship laws.

What Coinbase is giving in severance is quite generous. They don’t have to do that but it’s really nice and I’d say it improves their reputation. These types of things (layoffs) happen and they’re taking care of their ex-employees.

most US companies wouldn't be giving severance anywhere like this, much less severance at all

Right, which is why I said it improves their standing for future employees who know that if something goes south, they'll take care of them.

It’s incredibly common to walk employees out in a layoffs in North America, like 90% of the time. You might get a chance to pack your belongings, but sometimes they’ll pack them for you and mail them, or you can book an appointment to do this. given the pandemic, this is less of an issue.

Not saying it’s great, but this policy is the result of historical sabotage other problems of prolonged layoffs.

2008 speaking: It is totally normal. We fly high ($$$) and it's part of the game. It's not personal, the company is in trouble and they're making moves to save themselves. Many places will be happy to hire ex Coinbase people.

Isn't this practice pretty common in Finance? I've heard of people who when they resigned (or fired) immediately got their access revoked and were escorted out the door by security (or if they were lucky, swing by their desk to pick up their stuff).

It's very common in Finance or anywhere where employees have "potentially unreasonable access". Often you get perp-walked or called to the boss's office, and someone boxes up everything in your desk for you, and you'll be escorted offsite afterwards.

Most will pay you your two weeks or whatever in cash, the risk of an employee using their access to do harm is considered too great.

For many other types of jobs, including potentially software development, the risk is considered minor (all code is backed up, everything is in Git, transitions need to happen, etc).

> Most will pay you your two weeks or whatever in cash

Really? I assume you're in the USA, and in finance that could be several thousand dollars of cash you're handed.

Everywhere I've worked (UK/EU) would pay you in the same way as they were already paying you, i.e. electronically, or decades ago by cheque. Isn't this much easier?

Ah, by "in cash" I meant in funds immediately, which, yes, usually would be the last direct deposit they send you.

They don't literally hand you a stack of hundreds, though that may happen in some manual labor jobs.

Pretty standard when layoffs occur. They happen and people are told to pack up and leave. System access is usually turned off while the announcement is being made to prevent disgruntled from harming the business.

Coinbase is probably still mostly remote, so it's about the same thing as shuffling everyone into a conference room and turning off access.

It’s also a sign of a terrible company. Rolling layoffs are almost always better for the organization.

As a public company, are they not required to plan layoffs in advance? i.e. does the WARN act not apply here?

I think this is too small of a layoff for WARN to kick in. It has to be 33%+ at a given site/factory.

And generally if it’s in question they’ll just give people 8+ weeks or more severance. Here Coinbase is giving 14 or more…

They are giving everyone at least 14 weeks of severance, so that fulfills the requirements of the notice period.

Effectively, they are still employed, just not being given any work to do.

So they scaled from 1000 to 2000 employees in a year because ...

    There were new use cases enabled
    by crypto getting traction practically
    every week. We saw the opportunities but
    we needed to massively scale our team to
    be positioned to compete in a broad
    array of bets.

...yet they have not enabled their users to use the Lightning Network?

I wonder why. The LN would enable all Coinbase users to do nearly instant and nearly free transactions. Wouldn't that help crypto adoption big time?

They make their money from the large cryptocurrency trading market and focus on allowing more speculative tokens to be traded. They probably correctly assess that the market of people who want to use Bitcoin for daily transactions is comparatively insignificant.

Probably because they see that the vast majority of their users never withdraw their coins, and they probably prefer it that way.

Out of my circle, the only people I know that actually spend BTC as BTC for transactions, usually for things like personal domains, hold their own wallet and don't touch exchanges.

The people that heavily use exchanges hold it purely for speculation and/or gambling and have never once "spent" BTC.

Coinbase has over 5000 employees. They hired 1200 employees in the first three months of this year. That's about the number they had in total just 2 years ago.

Brian also posted a short explanation on twitter:

> 1/ Today I shared that I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team at Coinbase by about 18%. The broader market downturn means that we need to be more mindful of costs as we head into a potential recession.

> 2/ We also grew quite quickly over the past two years and have begun to operate less efficiently at our new size. It will take us some time to adjust to this new scale before growing again.

> 3/ We've put some key programs in place to try and minimize the impact to our affected employees. Here is a note that I sent to the company earlier today with more information

https://nitter.net/brian_armstrong/status/153668976014760345...

5000-6000 employees for coin base ? How ? What do they do ? A good 50-100 programmers could not have built it ?

Why would one choose to work in a company (& industry) that's so volatile & unstable, that has gone through 4 major downturns in just 10y?

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/COIN/financials/annua...

See 3000% debt growth in FY 2021. IANAE but that doesn't seem too good and probably explains their poor stock performance (down 85% since listing on Nasdaq)

Why has the crypto boom and bust lined up so closely with the COVID pandemic? Is it a coincidence or is there some underlying cause?

People needed a hobby, I think. Now they're outside again.

Also, an outlet for gambling urges while a lot of sports events were cancelled. Now, they're betting on sports again.

Of course: governments around the world flooded markets with stimulus cash and it all had to go somewhere. Now they are unwinding stimulus and it’s going away. Every reasonable observer has just been waiting for this to happen.

I thought crypto would collapse every year for the last 14 years, and I've been proven wrong every time. So I'm wondering why this time I'm right.

It does seem people struggle to learn from their mistakes. The last year has been marked by the institutionalisation of irrational exuberance.

Just look at that whole GME saga. A mob of people attempted to short squeeze a bunch of hedge funds, but got carried away and kept pumping up the price long after all the short sellers had closed out their positions.

GME is still riding at 24x the price prior to the short squeeze began (and about double its all-time-high prior to the Reddit intervention). Who are they squeezing now?

Crypto has had worse crashes in the last 14 years. What do you mean by you are right this time?

It has crashed many times but don’t forget; the last real recession was 2008; that’s 14 years ago; we have not had a financial crash since so we don’t know (well we do but the pundits say we don’t) how it will hold up. I think if ‘22 turns into a recession like I think it will, crypto might collapse; if not collapse, then at least fall further than believers would ever think. I would say btc will be a few k or less if a recession happens.

The question is: can you double the pool of people that pay in (the base of the pyramid) one more time? And for the longest time you could, but the end of the line might be reached soon. (Think about how much marketing crypto firms are throwing at people - the stadiums, commercials, ...)

My theory. There was substantial DeFI loans being taken out to invest in Luna/UST. When UST de-pegged, you had these DeFI loans get margin called putting further pressure. This then caused a bank run with significant sell pressure. This caused roughly 40Billion of assets lost. Some exchanges and DeFI lending platforms had user funds either through loans or by the exchange itself invested into UST/Luna and suffered losses. This caused a broader bank-run to many interest baring platforms out of fear. Celcius just recently had a bank-run leading to a liquidity crises and pausing withdrawals. Celcius started selling it's assets to cover withdrawal pressure, further pushing the price down. Binance paused withdrawls for a bit further causing fear and continuing the bank run, leading to sell pressure.

Personally, there's many Crytpo platforms which do not have enough funds to cover user deposits. As the bank run continues fraud will be exposed and continue driving more sell pressure, in a positive feedback loop. By the end of this large players who survive will come out much stronger.

Because this time the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and reducing the money supply, which has never happened before since Bitcoin was invented. Low interest rates/quantitative easing/increased money supply (all same thing) is what fuels asset bubbles, including crypto. Take it away and the asset bubble deflates.

The war is probably also a big cause of the crash...

Boom was about the money supply; bust is about rising interest rates to fight inflation.

COVID was the cause of the money supply, and now COVID is also the cause of ongoing supply shortages (in addition to money supply hangover), resulting in high inflation.

Central bank action. The federal reserve drastically cut rates at the start of the pandemic, so a lot of people were stuck at home with cheap money.

Now, inflation is spiking, so the federal reserve raised rates and money isn't as cheap as it used to be, therefore people are pulling out of the market.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

Add the helicopter money they gave people in many countries, that was also put straight into risky stocks or cryptocurrencies by many people. The monetary policy massively inflated asset prices and now the rug is being pulled under the retail investor's feet. Crypto is only the most obvious because the volatility is so extreme but the same happened in stocks. Almost like it was done intentionally. But who would benefit from such blatant market manipulation?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-07/pandemic-...

Matt Levine's theory (regarding Robinhood mostly, but maybe applicable) is that people were bored (no sports to watch, can't go out, no cinema, no pubs), and so they started gambling on the markets. Additionally, many people reduced their spending (can't go out, no cinema, no pubs), and many of them retained their income or even augmented it (stimulus checks).

So, discretionary income and fewer choices on what to spend it?

When covid started sporting events were cancelled and the general population received cash stimulus and with the ease of use of iPhone apps a lot of people that were used to gambling on sporting events switched to crypto. This led to an increase price which then attracted the second set of people and so forth.

Apart from the good economical explanations other replies have brought up, there's also a link between crypto and Covid-19 via the rise of conspiracy theories.

Crypto is associated with some types of conspiratorial thinking: goldbug libertarians, ramblings about globalist bankers and George Soros, etc. The pandemic gave a boost to conspiracy theories overall, and crypto was a beneficiary.

It's a wealth transfer.

how can anyone still trust this company as a prospective employee? I guess if they aren’t hiring it doesn’t matter but long term it’s not a good look

It's nice that you think Coinbase actually has a "long term" to worry about.

I never really understood why people wanted to work for them in the first place. I knew they had large RSU packages (probably rather depressing now for the people tempted by it), but their culture always sounded horrible. Everything I saw screamed "you'll be expected to work > 40 hours every week", and even when they talked about culture it was hustle, make the company money. Which is probably more honest than most companies, but being so on the nose with the exploitation normalizes the expectation.

I wonder how many cryptoexchanges stop withdrawavals "for technical reasons".

Many/all of them might throttle withdrawals for actual technical reasons, if many customers run for the exit at the same time.

The question is, which ones catch up and resume... and which ones actually ran off with the coins long ago.

Maybe someone should make a betting / prediction-market site for this. Traded in boring USD please :-)

Aside from this, do people think of Coinbase as the Google of crypto-currency?

As in monstrous in size, and where your account, wallet, and coins are not really safe, and perhaps only yours until Coinbase decides otherwise?

Brutal. Not even the quintessential mass zoom call?

I’ve had video conference calls worse than a cold email with the facts.

Absolutely, both awful, but I don't know, I personally would at least want to be "told live" what was happening and in an avenue where I could potentially ask some followup questions synchronously.

> Brutal. Not even the quintessential mass zoom call?

Bravo, Armstrong just put himself in good company of uncouth CEOs: I hope now no self-respecting person EVER applies to CONbase ever again and they die a slow irrelevant death.

Did coinbase pay employees in dollars or crypto?

Paying employees in coinbase-coins sounds very attractive, and if there is any group of people who would want that it's employees of a crypto company...

I would assume they got paid in real currency. If they received crypto as a benefit, that's a whole other story.

I think they do/did - iirc, i read something in a thread on Reddit from one of their employees...

Cash and stock

Hope no one was that stupid.

Don't know if they still do it but ~8 years ago they were offering salary in bitcoin.

I guess that petition didn't work.

In a surprise to noone.

When a CEO announces a "if you don't like us leave" or something crazy... I expect big layoffs happening. Its just a way to lay off without severance.

Why did this thread disappear from the frontpage? Shady.

Because it’s boring news. The primary goal of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity.

> Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information

This seems like the real news. Coinbase's CEO just admitted that their security posture is underdeveloped.

> it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.

Not only that, they don't have a way to prevent malicious internal actors.

I find it weird/irresponsible that they could not foresee this. Did they really expect the market to grow forever without downturn.

Maybe the letter last week was more right than it was wrong.. they only forgot to include Brian in the list himself.

Isn't the promise of the web is that it's supposed to scale without a commensurate increase in man power. If so why are companies laying off staff when things get rough. Were these staff not needed to start with if so why were they employed to start with. Or are they eating the seed corn so to speak?

The first thing I check with these layoffs is the proportion of engineering vs not engineering layoffs.

So many folks on payroll for such a fresh starter company. It is unbelievable how these companies grew at such speed in the last 2 years. Were most roles sales/MLM model to generate influence?

18% Coinbase - 1100 20% BlockFi - 170 5% Crypto - 260

But they had money for an NBA finals commercial and can sponsor F1 racing. Looking forward to cancelling my account. If they'll fsck employees I can only imagine what they will do to customers.

Are crypto assets held by Coinbase at risk if this continues?

The old adage, store it on your own wallet, has its own disadvantages (like proving ownership more than 12 months and losing it).

Well, they say your assets are "...protected, secure, and yours" [1].

Does that statement really holds up when the company goes bankrupt? I personally don't think so

[1] https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/top-of-mind/top-of-min...

Why would they announce a hiring freeze and do this after two weeks instead of doing only one. As if one bad PR isn't enough. you need two!!

Presumably they wanted the distance from layoffs to communicating exactly who was laid off to be as small as possible and that required more work than simply freezing hiring and rescinding offers. They were likely discussed in parallel and announced as quickly as possible.

This is sad. This was avoidable. There’s no recession as far as the eye can see. There’s a crypto recession.

Let’s go back to building real tech.

>There’s no recession as far as the eye can see.

Back your pardon? The Fed is expected to raise the interest rate by 0.75% in September, IIRC. If that's not a recession on the horizon, then what is?

They might actually do so this week if the news is to be believed

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/13/markets-are-now-bracing-for-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/13/fed-reportedly-may-hike-rate...

edit to add second non-paywalled link

I was about to say that waiting till September might be not ideal when it comes to battling inflation.

Raising rates has a lagging effect. That results in the economy won’t be felt until next year.

One of the benefits of crypto was supposed to be that it was uncorrelated to the market, etc.

“Money” shouldn’t change in value so quickly.

> One of the benefits of crypto was supposed to be that it was uncorrelated to the market, etc.

Crypto may or may not have its own issues, but all assets tend to suffer 'correlation breakdown' during market volatility.

We would still be below 2%. Interest Rate in the United States averaged 5.44 percent from 1971 until 2022.

Still waiting for the banks to raise my saving's interest rate to 70's level. ½ percent doesn't cut it.

Buy I Bonds. 9.62% https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...

Limited to 10k/year

$15k; you can buy $5k with your tax return. $30k if you've a spouse.

Ha ha, what tax return? Thanks, though. Setting up an account today.

If you want, you can overpay taxes by $5k to get a refund to put into I Bonds.

Unfortunately limited to $10k per year, but at that rate everyone should be buying up to the limit.

Is there a "recession" in the rest of the tech industry? I took that to be the point of the person you are replying to.

Yes? Many stocks are down >50% and companies are announcing hiring freezes

How is that a recession?

Yeah, It is not exclusive to crypto is it? We've already seen that even Tesla and Netflix announced layoffs. So, there's that.

They raised interest rates several times over the last year. Of course from any point in time a recession is “on the horizon,” but this is not the cut and dry predictor you’re making it out to be.

Two straight quarters of declining GDP. Merely raising interest rates to a sane figure (still below 3%!) isn't recession-causing in any sane economy.

> This was avoidable. There’s no recession as far as the eye can see.

Can you elaborate on how the situation we're in was avoidable? Also curious why you think there's no signs of a recession.

The avoidable part is pretty obvious: don't invest in, work for, trade in crypto.

The recession part is of course debatable.

upper middle-class tech workers live in their own bubble.

> Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2022

Any bets it's going to be positive in Q2 with the ballooning oil prices?

>There’s no recession as far as the eye can see.

You cannot print money nigh on end. If you did not see this downturn coming in the markets, I have a bridge to sell you.

Where do you live?

> There’s no recession as far as the eye can see. There’s a crypto recession.

Don't be the guy who replied to my comment, waiting for the results to tell you that it is a recession. [0] If you are preparing now, you're almost too late.

Only the paranoid survive.

> Let’s go back to building real tech.

Like the spyware laden software made by the likes of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon that they are building? No worse than crypto I'm afraid.

The free-software foundation are still waiting for you and others for 37 years to stop building non-free software riddled with surveillance and tracking. But neither that nor crypto is going to stop is it?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710

The yield curve says otherwise.

You won't feel it until Q4 2022 or Q1 2023.

Have you seen stock market? They are crashing also, this is recession.

Better believe in recession, you're in one.

Credit to Coinbase, the severance benefits are generous, including the 4 months of COBRA health insurance.

4 months of COBRA? I thought 18 months was required by federal law?

4 months is the payed portion of COBRA. After that the former employees pay themselves.

Under COBRA you're eligible to remain on your employer-provided health care coverage for 18 to 36 months, employers aren't required to pay for any of it (and most don't)

They are paying for the first four months of COBRA.

Oh thanks that makes more sense, and is quite generous.

Nothing to see here, Schumpeter's gale [1] in action, actually good news for Bitcoin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

I assume engineers will be part of these layoffs. Won't that mean there's a huge loss of knowledge if they're cutting their access right away?

Even 2 weeks of notice often isn't enough for people to finish knowledge transfers.

Workforce size correlates with price of Bitcoin

It's like decimation, but harder

Taking this news in stride with the recent employee petition and the Twitter rants from leadership, the writing was on the wall.

smh

> I am the CEO, and the buck stops with me.

I assume that means Brian is part of the 18% then, right?

tulips,,,,fresh tulips,,,tulips,,,one dollar only,,,,

Coinbase is such a trash company...It's exec's running the company have no idea what they are doing. From a consumer standpoint it's been a nightmare...They basically locked my account for unknown reasons to me, then stated they can't disclose there reasoning. I then had to open multiple support cases and wait a month before being able to move USD back to my bank...

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