Coinbase Lays Off 950 Staff, Cuts Operational Costs by 25% | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Lays Off 950 Staff, Cuts Operational Costs by 25%

blockworks.co

46 pointswslh15 comments

Coinbase seems to have an extraordinary number of managers for the number of engineers who are actually shipping code.

I think there are situations where directors were managing 3-5 ICs while taking home near 7 figure total comp.

This layoff corrects some of the issue, but is likely still not aggressive enough (at least for the management stack) for the market we're in.

Much of the staff hired through the last two years does not contribute to revenue generating products -- almost everything shipped in the last two years has not added incremental revenue to the company's bottom line and the company is operating on lower revenue but much higher costs for the last year.

The amount of bloat they acquired over the pandemic is pretty insane.

I was interviewing for a position at coinbase in 2021 and man, it was the worst interview process I have ever gone through. All technical interviews seemed to be extremely specific around knowledge for tools outside of what I was interviewing for. (Senior/Staff level IAM) I am not sure why an IAM engineer needs to be asked tons of questions about specific big data and ML libraries but that level of bad interviewing made me tell them no before finishing all of them.

The real red flag though was that not 1 interviewer had been at CB for longer than 3-9 months. It sounded like in 2021 alone the company 2-3x'd headcount. I can only imagine the absolute shit show that must've been on the inside.

I still think CB seems like one of the better companies in their sector, but compared to the larger tech industry, I think it still has some maturing to do.

COVID + biggest crypto bubble (so far). I can’t imagine what a sustainable level for them is. For what it’s worth I found their site totally usable if high on the fees but I’ve lost all interest in the fools game of crypto

What's an IAM engineer? Someone that configures AWS IAM policies?

Not specifically AWS, but the entire space of identity and authorization, including organization of permissioning of groups within platform apps and corporate apps.

I'm pretty sure it is stands for Identity and Access Management but could be totally incorrect.

I can’t imagine having much of anything to do if your job is “management” and you have 3 to 5 ICs….

Incident Command (NIMS) best practice is that someone's effective span of control is 3 to 7 people, with 5 being optimal. Beyond that, you lose the ability to easily keep track of people's status.

What qualifies as “track of people’s status”? What they’re doing at any one moment?

Cash a check and browse hacker news.

Willing to bet big that it wasn't the managers who got the axe.

In my experience first level management is treated as expendable as anyone is.

How much? And would you be willing to proxy using LinkedIn tenure-ends?

Big discussion earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34323336

Coinbase has extremely shady international practices. For example, in Australia they have no phone support, no publicly listed head office, and don't bother to even reply to support tickets or emails. If you call the international office from Australia, even in the middle of the night, you get an autoresponder saying that you should send an email.

I once had to recover an account where the transaction 2FA key was lost but I held the drivers license, the current password and email address used to open the account. From Australia, I could not get in contact with anyone to address it.

I don't remember how I got my money out, but years later I think one of the transaction account options changed and I was able to transfer the ETH out to Binance without the 2FA key. Happily deleted my account as soon as I managed to empty it.

Funnily enough in the mean time, we let the email domain expire (the account email was from a failed startup and it was an expensive renewal). But I still had the account password and I was able to clear the account with just the user/password in my 1Password wallet and without even owning the domain.

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