Execs often hold too much power in tech companies, and I’ve worked enough to see how condescending they can be to people even just 1-2 levels below them.
If the choice is between many the of employees that are actually building the company and a few bad execs, it seems easy to me.
CME Group has a market cap of about $70Bn. I would say that COIN looks like a good acqusition target in the 5-10Bn range. I could see that as a good exit strategy for a company like coinbase.
Unfortunately COIN is currently worth 15, and was worth around 70Bn last year.
Wouldn't the shareholders usually do something like this? I mean Coinbase's stonks have been going downhill for a long time now (mainly starting from Nov 2021), losing 4/5ths of its value from then. That's usually more than enough to dismiss / replace senior management.
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down - unless I misread it - which is a lot less invasive or "ratty" than most employee review systems I know.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
I think "Black Mirror S03E01 - Nosedive" gives a good perspective on how such a system can go wrong, but on a country level. I think that the same would apply in a company though: it would exacerbate the misalignment of incentives instead of improving the situation.
> I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down
Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
>Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this person a good teammate, yes/no?" and the person gets many no's...perhaps it's something to look into?
> So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever).
If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I should intervene. In this case, I will contact them directly trying to understand them and solve the problem in an amicable way, without involving any external party. This helps in a vast majority of cases. Only in extremely rare cases, once in a few years, the problem becomes so grave that another person needs to be involved. In any case, giving anyone a thumbs down doesn't solve anything.
That's fine by me. I have never applied to coinbase nor intend to. I do agree I am a somewhat negative nick as well since I tend to comment on stuff I disagree with on HN. Thanks for the heads up though. I shall see if I can improve upon it.
For what it's worth, this is progress. The previous default is a 24/7 inquisition trying to find and destroy any co-worker not on the cutting edge of woke - whether outside of work or at work.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
I lived it. It sucked. Only the dumb ones got cancelled. The smart ones kept their heads down or got new jobs. The team was defined by mediocrity. Mediocrity in hiring, in execution, in quality. But oh were they ever so woke.
What kind of company was this? I do contracting and have worked a lot of places, big and small, but have never seen anything remotely like this.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?
I think your phrasing and appeal to authority indicates a strong correlation with wokeness.
The issue with wokeness isn’t the problems they choose. It’s how they go about it, and how easy it is to get swept up in moral issues. I suspect the person you’re replying to worked in the valley, where the problem was so severe that not even Sam Altman could escape the effects.
It’s highly dependent on location. Or at least it was. Post-Covid, the situation seems more prone to develop anywhere. There’s currently a movement to cause Yannic some problems for being involved with fine tuning GPT-J on 4chan.
This is a venture backed enterprise software company.
Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.
Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.
I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.
Damore was cancelled and a woke NLRB lawyer making things up to ensure his cancellation stuck doesn't mean anything beyond the NLRB being just one more corrupted organization on top of so many others. Obviously, if you think Damore is actually a terrible person then you're a part of the problem, and not going to perceive anything as woke regardless of how many other people find it crazy.
Damore was canned by Google for exactly one reason: he had become a liability to the company. If he became a manager with a report who was a woman, or even worked on a team with women, any negative feedback would be suspect. He had literally written a treatise stating that women were not as predisposed to working in tech as men. Any woman could challenge him as biased. And Google would have to deal with the fallout of that, which would be a huge time sink and PR disaster for them.
Bridgewater's approach sounds interesting, albeit not for everyone.
Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.
One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.
AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.
That's a cherry-picked example by a person promoting himself and his own system. Not really a useful data point, more an example of an aspirational goal.
360 feedback usually happens a few times a year while Dot Collector feedback seems like it's for every meeting [0][1]. This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" where everyone is rating everyone for every social interaction (e.g. saying "hi" or paying a cashier).
Like others already said, this is just another variant of the commonly used 360 degrees feedback system.
I don't think that system is bad in itself, I've been in companies where it worked very well. I've also seen a company where it was being used by some to rat on colleagues, but in that company there were lots of things wrong already and the reviews just made it worse.
So I guess there were many underlying problems in Coinbase already.
> how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
To paraphrase the economics joke: Coinbase doesn't have any value(s). It has ten prices, none of which are correct, and it doesn't know the difference.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
I disagree, emotional work is work, and « positive energy » sums it up quite well.
Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work, because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance.
One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.
I was a successful retail and enterprise salesperson earlier in my career. I also suffer from lifelong depression.
I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.
That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."
I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.
Strong disagree, I did sales (I would like to think successfully) for a long time as someone who struggled with depression and anxiety, there's far more to it than just having a fake smile plastered on; people like those who can empathize with them, understand their needs, etc. and sometimes a no-bs straightforward approach talking pros and cons directly instead of a fake used-car salesmanesque over the top approach is far more effective.
The most successful salesperson I know has a pretty flat affect but knows her product super well and is excellent at needs analysis. There’s definitely a lot more to sales than glad handing people with a smile.
I did non-commission sales for a while as well, and made no effort to appear more happy than I was. People appreciated my candor and knowledge, rather than being won over by my charm. I sold a lot of stuff, and there was even a time that a customer found out I wasn't in that day and decided to come back another day instead of dealing with anyone else, even knowing there were no commissions.
My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.
I don't know anything about coinbase, but you're taking the least-generous possible interpretation of this. A really simple re-statement is that your bearing has consequences for other people, and if you're having a shit day and feeling miserable, you can either conduct yourself in a manner that poisons everyone around you, or you can try to keep yourself together. "Positive energy" is, I'm guessing, one way to get at this idea, though it's not how I would frame it myself.
As an aside: I assume that you know this from your own life, and appreciate when people behave in a manner that cares for the emotional commons of wherever you are. Is your objection to it here the fact that it's a giant stupid company ostensibly trying to curate your feelings, and that's annoying and (probably) hypocritical? Or do you really object to the premise?
Sounds like hell. I can't believe companies use such systems to manage their own employees. It tells a lot how bad managers do their work, which is basically know every employee and care for them.
A lot of what larger companies do is find ways to take mediocre or bad staff and make them more useful by giving them structure and tools that help them do their jobs even if they're bad at them.
This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.
There are a lot of replies to this comparing Dot Collector to TV shows. Can we not judge these things on their own (de)merits with more nuance than just saying it reminds us of some popular media? This happens in a lot of tech discussions - usually using 1984 - to argue that a surface-level resemblance means something is bad. I agree that I don't want to work in a place like this but if this is an acceptable line of reasoning then it extrapolates to good-boy-points used for children being dystopian. Using stories whose morals we agree with as a gotcha enables the use of stories whose morals aren't agreeable or sensible - perhaps democracy reminds me of the senate from the Star Wars prequels so we should revert to feudalism?
There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?
Because you don't know how this information is going to be used and whether it's going to be used against you? Because it's weirdly reductionist: no longer happy or unhappy with or about anything, just a number in a vacuum?
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
I see you've never worked in a toxic organization (or at least not noticed).
My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.
I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.
The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.
I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.
My most recent gig was pretty toxic, which is why the framing of the OP (and some of the reactions) is so surprising -- most managers at our place wouldn't have noticed when the employers were spiraling into a funk, and certainly wouldn't have sat down with them individually and asked them how they were doing, as per OP. So to me, that sounds like someone giving a shit and trying to do something about it. If it's an evil manager situation, you can grind people into dust without the theatre of trying to help them. All that said, your example makes sense. I guess it depends on the particular pathology of the place and how it manifests.
I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was.
Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?
And if you manager had been regularly checking in with how you are feeling then this would have been... worse? I suspect that, given a manager with as poor people skills as yours has, your manager initiating the contact and asking you instead of you going to your manager may have instead made all the difference.
It doesn’t really matter. In a toxic work environment - any dissenters are immediately pushed out. This is because toxic work environments have no intention of changing and need everyone to be a yes man. If you are not a yes man - you are managed out or fired.
It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…
a company I worked at tried this. it didn't work out for these reasons:
A) it's a strange request
B) it's an imposition
C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly?
D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.
> your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you.
I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.
Ditto. We do this at my company today, but it's done as part of a culture of trust and openness. (Which culture – I might add – is one of the biggest reasons I'm still there.) And it doesn't displace 1:1s where my manager can talk in person about how I'm doing either. Why wouldn't my manager want to know if I'm happy at work? This seems like one of the most basic things your manager would want to know, and often enough to use a tool to automatically share this regularly.
The same as with any data you'd collect about anything -- it's part of a larger ecosystem, and no reasonable person expects one number to be the ultimate fount of all wisdom.
I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.
Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.
Because at the same time the Vice President was telling us to lie to our customers, which we were all extremely unhappy and open about, and our direct manager and up already knew that quite well, so he didn't actually have to ask how numerically happy we were, since he already knew, because we'd made it quite clear and unambiguous to him and the VP already.
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to the VP (in the context of Sun's desktop productivity suite "MailTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and our group's own "PizzaTool", etc) that he was currently working on "ResumeTool". This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest!)
It was obvious that this ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made very clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who to fire first.
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.)
"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]
That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade".
He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.
The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2
Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.
Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.
To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.
I can see how this went sideways at a toxic company, but as both a manager and an individual contributor, sharing this metadata with your team _can_ be a healthy outlet, as long as:
- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow
- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances
- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)
During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.
If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.
(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).
I've been in situations like this before. The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on.
They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Just imagine if all companies were run like your high school social hierarchy, except that this also determined whether you kept your job or not.
> humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Great insight! It's like an ouija board. It feels like you're making independent decisions and a gestalt outcome "appears", but it's much more social than we perceive.
>with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings,
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
> Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is.
Depending on who is it that people do and don’t want to work with, we might call it “discrimination against a protected class”, which is at least bad enough that it’s illegal in many countries.
It comes from life experience. I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs.
That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when you have the clout to do so, because there's no manager to protect them from the bullshit anymore. It's basically inviting these sorts of shenanigans rather than forcing saboteurs to do a lot of extra work to get people fired.
>I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs.
Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actually were the asshole here? Wouldn't you be saying the same thing? Maybe this incident made people realize that "you" weren't a good person to work with?
If you were on the other side, isn't that a good outcome?
You don't "suddenly" notice that someone is an asshole. You just know it, and avoid them as much as you can.
If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.
When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.
If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.
Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.
I mean, by the same logic, you could also say it's also a cynical interpretation of the high school clique...
Another way to look at [high school cliques] is that people who other people want to be around get high [social] ratings. Is that bad?
From experience: yes, it is. The fact that this criticism can be reframed in a way that hides the problem, that something we've all experienced becomes invisible, shows that it is a problem. There is a kind of problem with group social dynamics that can't be easily ironed out; the real experience of existing high school cliques is proof of this. Unsurprisingly, this same problem that comes up in high schools appears in workplaces also.
Externalities, Nash equilibria, and fairness are good keywords to start understanding why the “natural state of affairs” can suck for the majority of people.
> The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on.
Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social acumen can easily see.
Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones. The quarterback’s popularity doesn’t rest on whether or not he’s pretty.
Whether or not the social dynamics of big established companies and high risk startups vary due to this is interesting to consider.
So, because it’s a base human urge, we shouldn’t ever try to improve on it or do better?
Sounds very defeatist to me. Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
> Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones.
I think it’s telling that your example here is high school. IMO the focus is always on who has the most power. In high school, yes, the pretty girls have power, because of the way the boys treat them. I can’t say I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in adult workspaces.
> So, because it’s a base human urge, we shouldn’t ever try to improve on it or do better?
Sounds very defeatist to me.
Improve and do better for whom? Those of us with adequate social acumen can deal with human nature just fine.
It is observably true though that low status persons often fantasize about somehow turning over the social order such that when it all shakes out they come out on top. It’s so common that it’s a well-known and frankly overworked trope.
The world has seen plenty of revolutions and other social disruptions and every single time those with a good grasp of human nature come out on top. You can fight reality if you wish, but you can never beat it.
> Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
And it’s telling how reliably chumps fall for that story. The process is observably no more than a fig leaf covering office politics except perhaps at the levels where nobody with influence gives a fig.
We had something like that at one of my jobs. The most senior engineers there were myself and the founder, and everyone else was either fresh out of college or fresh out of high school. The founder had to spend a lot of time on business stuff so most of the things that required a senior engineer were done by me.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. They way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
This is a fantastic example in how incentive design can go awry! Would love to hear any other stories like this one (from you or anyone) to learn from.
Had a similar thing at Deloitte that they called "Scatterplot". There were questions like, "if the money were yours, would you give it to this person to work on projects?" They take your rankings from multiple people over time, plot them, then generate a trend line. The thinking is that, in an org like Deloitte, you'll end up working with so many people that any interpersonal friction will winnow out as noise. This is said to be "scientific".
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
That makes sense, though, for the business. Consulting companies sell a brand image. If Justin Bieber's backup singer got more famous than Bieber, it would mess up the brand dynamics.
No, that analogy does not make sense. They weren't competent at their own marketing, so their own efforts weren't successful or a respected part of the industry zeitgeist. It'd be more like getting upset that one of the sound engineers that worked on the Rebecca Black's "Friday" was getting famous amongst sound engineers for talks on sound engineering. I didn't ask them to make me a part of their marketing. I just wanted to continue doing the talks I was already doing (mostly just local enthusiast groups), completely devoid of any of their involvement. Hell, we had even discussed these talks during my interview and they had said they wanted to encourage me to do more. They wanted me to get approval for all talks of any kind and once I got in they would not give approval for any.
Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.
Ok, but how are the results used? For improving work behavior or for employment decisions? Are they disclosed to the employee or the manager or everyone?
I have a hard time not imagining the shoe Community (season 5 episode 8) where the college starts using an app that rates every interaction between people.
You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together.
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
Isn't Bridgewater a very high performing organization? How has the company not completely collapsed at this point? Or is there a ticking time bomb coming that will end up destroying Dalio's supposed "reputation for excellence"?
Calling any hedge fund "high performing" is pretty meaningless, as once they've figured out their core trade their main job is to 1) keep the core trade secret, 2) try to find some other bet, 3) try to trade bigger/faster/stronger, in that order.
They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs.
This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above.
A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
The modern tendency is to codify and systematize all management decisions.
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
If your classics included the Greek ones, that probably led to the aristocrats getting shipped to their demise in WWI. There might have been something akin to single combat bwtween champions in India, but that was something probably too much to expect in Belgium.
(: I guess you realized that they should have joined the nascent airforce— it was the last truish example of single combat between champions, one, ironically, enabled by technology—- the continental aristocrats did :) (eg Baron von R) (maybe they had a better-faith classical education, considering their generally more accurate transmission of the classic pronunciations)
This is not what the Dot Collector was intended for. It was intended for live discussions debating market conditions. Bridgewater would use it so participants could rate and then aggregate.
For instance there are 10 people in a meeting and Person 1 is talking about the Bank of Japan effect on the EUR/USD. The other 9 would rate that person on this specific topic in terms of "credibility, experience, etc...". The results would then be displayed after all people talked and were given so the team could come to a consensus on correct action.
Brilliant if used correctly. Does not sound like it's being used as intended.
It's not as simple as this rating system, there's a lot more principles and frameworks that they used in their culture at Bridgewater outside of just this dot collector piece. You can find deeper material on this in Ray Dalio's Principles book.
But yeah that alone sounds like hell.
Also, Bridgewater associates were being paid ridiculous amounts (I think, haven't run specific nubmers on this) by someone widely regarded as a visionary, so they were much more incentivized to stay and deal with this stuff. I suspect that there wasn't a comparable job opportunity for them at the time, whereas with Coinbase in a market downturn...
While I'm sure that there's a lot of truth in this (and love the petition, as it focuses on shareholders, not the employees), the margins Coinbase was having for trading cryptocurrencies was unsustainable, and the company was overvalued.
Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captured over IP protocol, with Bitcoin I expect the base layer to capture most of the value, and not the companies on top of it.
Correct. If anything, Coinbase's value should be tied to the volatility of the crypto market. Doing a quick search of various crypto volatility indexes, this appears to check out, roughly.
I don't understand how there can be such a push for a vote of no-confidence in three C-level people with no mention of the CEO that ostensibly chose, managed, and retained them.
> I don't understand how there can be such a push for a vote of no-confidence in three C-level people with no mention of the CEO that ostensibly chose, managed, and retained them.
The CEO and his C-suite all have agency.
If one member of the C-suite misbehaves professionally, you are suggesting that the one who hired/managed him/her should be punished alongside the errant person by virtue of association, rather than by establishing concrete evidence that they both acted in concert?
I am assuming/suggesting that if NOT one, not even two, but three core members of the C-suite fail to do their jobs correctly--jobs that are described as fundamental to the company: defining product direction and allocating corporate resources--then it would seem strange not to cast at least some blame on the person who leads them, whether for having chose them in the first place, for having managed or directed them incorrectly, or for having continued to retain them to this point... if this isn't the CEO's fault, then what even is the CEO doing? Is his job just to make controversial statements on Twitter?
Well, the whole post was written by one or more faceless individuals [1], so rather than allow my emotions lead me to make premature judgement in the face of incomplete information, I decided it was best to suspend judgement [2] by treating the claims made as what they truly are: allegations.
Premature judgement is what is causing a lot of commenters to elevate these anonymous claims to the level of facts, rather than wait until an interested party (like an external investigator commissioned by the board of directors, or a regulator like SEC) is able to substantiate any or all of the claims.
I don't work for Coinbase, so I am in no position to speak on whether the CEO is at fault or not. Any attempt to do so as an outsider with limited information would be pure speculation.
It's simple. The CEO is the founder and built the company from the ground up and has the most skin in the game. Execs keeps jumping between the companies for better resume and compensation and don't generally care about long term results.
If the CEO manages the three people and has the most skin in the game, this petition is actually a message to the CEO saying: you're doing a bad job / don't know what you're doing.
Notably, the CEO was not mentioned in this petition. Putting on my tinfoil hat, could this be a ploy by Armstrong to continue purging the political activists within the company?
Interesting that they mention the Chief Product Officer, Surojit Chatterjee.
I remember reading about him as the guy who got over $600 million [1] in compensation for 15 months of work (factoring Coinbase’s high share price at the time of its direct listing)…mind-blowing
If it's any consolation, that compensation was in Coinbase shares and options at the IPO valuation of ~$320/share, meaning it's been slashed to under a fifth of that at the current $64, possibly less if the options are under water now.
Either way, if I ended up with $100 million ($600 million * stock crash) I’d probably retire. It’s mind boggling to me when people with such wealth want even more. Take the guy who stole tech from Google and went to Uber. Google gave him enough to live out his days doing whatever he pleaded for the most part. Yet obviously he felt like he wanted more - whether that was money, recognition, etc. and lost it all. It’s crazy to me.
Levandowski supposedly left Google for Uber because Kalanick promised him more resources to commercialize self-driving vehicles and make them a reality, but that’s probably a “principled villain” depiction of his crimes (as seen in Super Pumped).
Money is a highly visible, easily comparable, unambiguous “point system.” It’s not to feed their family or anything like that, it’s to prove that they can earn more points and that’s it.
This is a pretty vague and poorly thought out petition. It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable; and much of the phrasing like "the wisdom of the crypto industry" (lolwut) reeks of amateur hour. If the goal is to convince the board or shareholders to vote them out, this is not the way to do it.
The one valid criticism is that they had a wildly ambitious hiring plan that they had to scale back in a hurry, resulting in severe fallout. However, any such plan had to be approved by the CEO, it's not clear to me why the Chief Operating, Product and People Officers specifically should be ones falling on their swords here.
Yeah lots of vc backed startups were overvalued so exceptional risk was needed to be taken to match such expectations. It’s easy to blame people at the top but they’re not the ones evaluating the company and they can’t control: the fed, the war on Ukraine, oil prices
While it looks like coinbase had a toxic work culture I have no sympathy for those “mercenaries” joining companies on exceptionally great times then complain when things get back to reality
Following seems to be squarely the responsibilities of C-Suite (including that of CEO).
- The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
- Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
- A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
- Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
> ..fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable
Feedback like 'apathy' and 'condescending attitude' are very legit for employees and even to the interview candidates. Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
> The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
It comes down to someone's judgement call. It's usually not possible to quantify if "certain products" should be prioritized over "other important issues" or vice versa. Particularly so for someone who does not have the full picture.
> Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Is it objective or just an opinion? If objective, how is it measured?
> Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
Because
"Someone anonymous said some of you were generally apathetic and sometimes condescending".
"Well, can you give specific examples? No? Then it's fluff and not actionable".
The petition is immature and maybe 'condescending attitude' towards petitioner is deserved.
coinbase's nft marketplace has <0.01% of the marketshare. they launched without using their key advantage- custodial relationship with the customer. coinbase nft should have been a custodial marketplace. this is definitely on someone in product, though it's unclear whether it's on surojit.
>> It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault;
It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g. vs. Open Sea), and how to minimize risk, and maximize success (e.g. adoption).
Investing too much in new initiatives, while not building the right platforms, and tech infra for it, will lead to even higher tech debt and more chaos - so they seem like logically reasonable complaints. Whether they are true or not I have no idea but the points do not seem vague at all.
What I'm saying that even if Coinbase had become the market leader instead of OpenSea, the entire NFT market is rapidly collapsing. Of course you could argue that this outcome was obvious and Coinbase shouldn't even have tried.
I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products. Sometimes one person can be much more productive than a whole team. This is obviously unscientific, just a feeling I’m getting lately.
I also found working in smaller companies more effective (worked in 20 people, 500 people and 30.000 people companies).
DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams).
Do you believe we're favorably headed that direction already? Or would it require a lot more conferences highlighting this, getting mindshare buy-in, etc?
People don't want to have meaningless jobs [1] and want jobs that make sense to them. But the other force is VC driven startups where the mantra is "Scale, scale, scale" by hiring hundreds of people - with the goal to make people rich. I do assume for more and more people money is no longer a substitue for sense though, several of my coachees want new jobs with less pay but more sense. I do believe this becoming a mega trend for the next decades (AI, 3d-printing, ... will accelerate this trend). We're at the very very beginning.
> I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products.
You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.
To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.
Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.
Seems the problem is that these massive companies hit a threshold in size and then everything is about self-perpetuation by creating large moats, even ones that don't make sense, hence you have teams and entire departments engaged in boondoggles that are wastes of time and resources.
Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.
I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.
There was a post here recently where a Netflix employee was proudly showing off their log processing system. Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.
In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.
I think the impressive thing is how much data that is for each user-minute. What could they possibly be storing in 33KB for each second of Netflix you stream?
220m users. Let’s imagine 50m are streaming concurrently. That’s 100TB an hour in logs lol. They could be storing an entire petabyte of logs a day. My friend did some data center stuff for the large hadron collider and wasn’t hitting these data ingestion states, and these are just to record me binging the office.
I think it's impressive that they somehow found 33KB/second worth of data to log for each stream. I can't even imagine the amount of useless shit that must be logged to get to that number.
For every minute that someone streams Netflix, 2 MB of data is logged. So if 1,000 people are using Netflix simultaneously, they're generating 2 GB of logs per minute.
Just a note, that ABNB did a huge layoff at the start of the pandemic which allowed them to come out the other side a much stronger company. Actually highlights your point.
Both. When money is free flowing it's easy to avoid hard decisions (in business money hides many mistakes). Companies may continue to fund projects that should be cut or hire instead of optimizing a process. Prioritization alignment meetings end with everything is a priority.
In ABNBs case, business going to almost zero overnight was a forcing function to a level not often seen. After being forced to lean up and prioritize, they were well positioned for the market to improve.
There is a lot of tokenism in hiring. A Fortune 500 might be marketing a new "push to AI" or whatever and want to seem legit by hiring loads of people, quickly realising that it doesn't work like that but at least it looks good on paper.
FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.
I’m fascinated by the idea that, once a company reaches a certain size – let’s say 100 – then it is, by definition, average. Any claims to be above average may be summarily dismissed.
This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick.
If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small.
It is for this reason that I find Apple fascinating. They have their issues but if there is a company that seems to have somehow escaped this jinx, they are it. (I know, I know, YMMV. Please don’t turn this in to an Apple thread.)
Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.
I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date.
They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.
There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).
I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.
Yeah I completely get why it happened it's just sad that it did.
Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.
TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas".
Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.
In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.
Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.
I think Zoom doesn't get more shine for the same reason Alibaba, Baidu, or ByteDance don't. They are large companies doing complex engineering, but they are Chinese and not western.
> My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed
I could have stated that more clearly. 60k people started working from home full time and we switched completely away from our existing solution to Zoom as the primary service provider for teleconferencing.
What’s interesting is in my opinion Netflix engineers made the best UI and best reliability with distributed edge-node storage and all those hard problems.
Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?
> Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity
This could well be true, but it seems far from obvious to me. Do you have any evidence? Clearly netflix stock is doing poorly in recent months, but this seems much more of a consequence of content issues rather than engineering talent.
Netflix has a strange technical management philosophy: they have zero interest in any technology other than their existing streaming infrastructure and traditional media production tools. I've had conversations with members of their tech management, and their ability to investigate new technology directions (such as a Netflix Game Service, or a Netflix Online University) are absolutely zero. One of their identified sources of success is a narrow focus, and they push that commitment.
Tell me more about how they didn't manage to create a compelling streaming product that failed to gain any market share.
Oh wait. That isn't what happened.
Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.
The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.
The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.
If you are talking exclusively about delivery systems. Bitrate.
At it's peak Netflix accounted for ~35%+ of traffic on the Internet (around 2014-2015 era) alone. Times have obviously changed since then. Not because it had more users than YouTube or more playtime but because it was delivering long-form content in high resolution. Which at the time was a considerable technical challenge, from bandwidth and distribution itself but also to encoding infrastructure.
More broadly Netflix also had a profound impact on the CDN landscape. They made use of all existing CDNs (Akamai, Cloudfront, old stuff I forget) while also building out their own POPs, they paved the way for modern CDNs in many ways. The style of which would eventually be cloned by many players but most importantly Fastly. Fastly would then go on to provide this service to new players like Bytedance to rapidly deploy massive delivery capability with very little ramp-up.
They did some less-cool things ofc, they bowed to the HDCP mob and did dumb things like build a Silverlight based client etc.
By and large however Netflix has had a positive impact on the industry.
YouTube on the other hand (after acquisition) was largely built with Google tech on Google infra.
The only major project to come out of it isn't delivery related is Vitess - a sharding system for MySQL.
Its largest impacts on the industry are unfortunately much less savory. Mostly pioneering inventions like pre-roll ads and targeting based on content in which the video is embedded, heinous recommendation algorithms that send people into procrastination spirals etc.
Well that isn't entirely fair, we can thank Youtube for pushing for better encoding standards and tangentially through Chrome making HTML5 video not suck (arguably though, Safari/Webkit was also influential there).
And yet our family spends almost no time with netflix and instead lives on Disney+, HBOMax, YouTube and Paramount+. And paramount+ sucks as a software product. It is by far the buggiest of the bunch but yet it has the content. Netflix doesn't have much compelling content anymore
They way I had it described to me was that the optimal number of direct reports to one person is 7 (hence why military squads tend to be about 8 people). All companies go through growing pains as they reach ~7^n people and have to put in another layer of management. So about 7, 50, 340, 2400…
In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000.
I have never worked somewhere with larger teams so I may well be wrong, however there is definitely a step in small businesses with two founders at about the 20 people point.
Inquiry like this should be left to the people who experience it, and of course all they have is their personal experience and then opportunities to share their personal experience.
Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?
The worst company-level experience I saw in my career was seeing over-hiring only with a massive downsizing later on. It was during that time, that first employee I was directly involved in hiring was part of the layoff. A company that goes acquisition crazy and trying to boost staff rapidly seemed at first like a good thing. In my case, I saw sales staff grow a lot. However, executive leadership, with whatever responsibilities they have, will always have different agendas. Hiring sprees can probably build credentials for managers, whether or not it is a good investment in the first place.
Hiring sprees and acquisitions towards some business goal that doesn't match the current product goal can also cloud judgement on what can actually be delivered. If your product is optimized for a certain set of things, but it is being sold for other use-cases because "meh, we need to compete", you create a multi-year issue when that business plan fails (in an R&D perspective, since that's only what I am interested in.) I bet this is exactly going to happen to Coinbase. Just jumping on that NFT craze instead of developing out their core business more is probably an example that can be relatable (but I am speculating here.)
>Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically
True but not fatal. Being equal to the first employees isn't a requirement: as long as the employee creates more value than they cost, it's worthwhile. Facebook is a simple premise that could be (and was) created with a skeleton team but it's still worth hiring the person to work on Linux's networking stack if that enables them to make it more efficient.
Back when i was testing so setup a startup I proposed a crazy idea to my cofounder: Let's setup an equity programme where every time a new person is hired, a chunk of equity would be taken directly from the existing employees(including founders!!), and would go to the new hire.
So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders will be left with 60%. After the 2nd hire 1st hire would give up 5%, and founders 10% to get 15% ...
My idea was that this would disincentivise hiring new people, so that new people
would be hired only when absolutely necessary .
I'm still planning on experimenting with this at some point in my life.
I could see that working while hiring is exclusively by the founders, but what would be the plan after there are departments with mostly autonomous hiring functions? Would the allocation continue to come from all employees, the manager of that department, or everyone upstream?
It's an interesting concept, but it feels like there would be significant pitfalls any way I think if it.
Not only that... there's the issue with stock options already bought: once the employee bought the stock then it wouldnt be possible to take them from her. And when do you "freeze" the stock amount of an employee? When they leave?
There are lots of details that I thought about, and surely many others I didn't. That's why I'm still ruminating the idea in my head, until I feel it is complete enough to apply it.
No, when I was hired as a 1st engineer at a startup, I was given 2.5% of the shares.
When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected. So, I in a way I, as an IC with 2.5% of shares could push to hire more people to do more of the work I did without any negative direct impact to me (I know the impact comes as the company spends more money, has to raise more and then dilute the value of the stocks in theory, but that's something employees rarely see).
What I want is being able to sit down with say, the team of 10 people in the startup and ask them: Hey, do we REALLY need to hire this 11th person? we all are going to have to give X% of our share of the pie to him. And particularly, when starting the project, the first 5 or 6 should have a sizeable chunk of the pie, and not 2.5% ... ideally, a 1st employee would get to 2.5% once there are about a 100 people in the company (i.e. after hiring the other 97 people)
> When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected.
Where did the new hires' shares come from, if not dilution?
They might have come from an option pool, but that just adds a layer of indirection. When the option pool runs low, typically it is replenished with new shares, diluting existing ones.
So I think the dynamic you're describing already exists in most startups.
Doesn’t this already happen at most startups. Each round dilutes the founders share and dilutes the shares of existing employees. The VC might have targets like, acquire 10m users or generate $40m in revenue, and that might not be possible with a team of 5.
That's only if you raise another round and don't have enough equity for the founders to just gives some of theirs. OP is talking about something more automatic for every new hire.
As others have said, there are some gotchas with the idea but you could probably do something similar that doesn't involve stock like with a profit-sharing fund or a fixed amount to spend on your socials or something!
Here’s another thought:
Decreasing communication costs decreases the optimal organization size.
In the days of horse-delivered mail, you wanted all your employees in one big building, and you wanted to cover all the functions inside your own org so you don’t have to send many slow, expensive letters.
Fast forward to email and zoom and automated SaaS businesses - there is very little friction in engaging a third party to do the things you don’t specialize in. You don’t need any employees beyond your core team anymore.
The worst thing in having too many people working on the product is increased code size / code change velocity.
Compile time per person and code understanding time per person grows linearly with the number of people (which grows exponentially as revenue grows), which means that the total time people are spending with understanding the code base & total compilation time for the code server grows quadraticly with number of engineers (+ exponentially with revenue).
Total code size should be kept under square root of number of engineers in an organization probably to keep product velocity OK, and engineers should spend significant time minimizing the number of changes in the code base after they have the first proof of concept.
i think it is awesome to see coinbase crumbling so quickly. you came out thinking you could do whatever you want, ignore customer service, lie, cheat, steal, and made it clear that the customer and service doesnt matter. now you cant afford to pay your employees and doors are closing. coinbase would rather try to screw you once rather than keep a customer for life. FYI: you dont get money when you dont have customers, you stupid fucking idiots. and stealing doesn't count. i love it! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
Companies should only hire entrepreneurs and engineers who has proven track record as builders as execs. Hiring people from business schools and non engineers as execs is the stupidest thing you can do for long term sucess of the company.
I think this theory is proven in practice. If you look at the major tech companies, they are all run by people who programmed at some point. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, ... .
However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions)
I think it's very hard for non-builders to really understand the underlying processes that result in success.
Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and an obsessive personality to product according to Walter Isaacson. I think those two things compensated for his lack of technical skills. Steve Wozniak is highly underrated compared to Steve Jobs and was a crucial factor to Jobs' early success.
His degree was in Electrical Engineering and Computer science. He was offered jobs at Intel and Bell Labs, some of the highest technical companies at the time in 1986. He worked at Fitel, a fintech startup for 2 years programming financial networks. Then he went into management.
I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again.
It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
This seems like it could be handled by hiring ONE engineering leader for the engineering org - which is one spoke of the multi-spoke wheel that runs a modern day tech company.
The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
But that was my whole point, that in practice, successful companies seem to be run by the engineer, and not by some business type and a good CTO of some sort. I even forgot Mark Zuckerberg in my original post.
So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful.
My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels.
Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.
Sheryl Sandberg - Facebook COO - Harvard MBA //
David Wehner - Meta CFO - Former investment banker //
Zachary Kirkhorn - Tesla CFO - Engineer, but also Harvard MBA //
Brian Olavsky - Amazon CFO - Carnegie Mellon MBA //
Ruth Porat - Alphabet CFO - Wharton MBA
I think the fact that these companies are successful inspite of this shows how good their initial product market fit and founders(CEOs) were. Even after having non builders in key leadership position these companies survived and continue to thrive. Just think about it. Business school admissions are not given on the basis on how well you can run a company long term.
I think companies like coinbase can't afford to have non builders in leadership because they don't have a strong product market fit compared to Facebook, Tesla cars, AWS etc.
Almost every public company has a CFO and/or COO that has an MBA. It's not an 'in spite of;' financials get complicated as do business operations and those two things are what an MBA is for, other than networking.
Also, I know a lot of entrepreneurial people that do not do very well when the company gets beyond a certain size. They can't operate within a system of greater restriction and don't want to follow best practices for employees. Managers are often not good builders and builders aren't always good managers.
Addendums to fix the initial assessment? It's overrated that engineers and entrepreneurs can self manage. Look at any team of engineers without a good EM or PM
Looks like lots of commenters here don't realise this, believe anything and hastefully jump in without questioning this as it could be made by a random user. Always be skeptical around the source of this.
> It seems completely anonymous.
That's the case here since the Ethereum address has absolutely 0 iterations, making it more harder to trace.
It's short interest has increased by almost 200% since April, now at about 20% of the float. So now that there's a lot of money riding on people hating Coinbase, I expect we'll continue seeing more articles like this.
Sounds like those employees that took exit packages to leave after their "apolitical" pivot 2 years ago, got a good deal. There was a lot of congratulatory posting here then, about how the company was going to come out of that a lot better, and with less of the fat. Now it doesn't look like that really happened.
We can't possibly know that solely based on (what other comments have rightly pointed out) a vague, anon petition lacking nuance or details. This could just as well be a very small, vocal minority. We have no way of knowing without more information.
One of the stated goals of the no-politics at work stuff was to allow Coinbase staff to "Support each other, and create team cohesion". It doesn't look like that has happened!
Chief People Officer in the list. To any young, fresh eyed college person taking up their first job - don't believe HR is your friend (as I did, when I started my career). They are not.
It might seem silly to point out the obvious, but a lot of people still genuinely believe HR is their friend, especially those starting their careers.
Honestly don't know what on earth this is trying to achieve. Running a software company is hard. Management is going to make choices and there are hard decisions. Not everyone you work with is going to be nice.
>The failure of the Coinbase NFT platform
Market forces.
>The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
Name them. General "I disagree with your priorities" is pathetic. Name the decisions and explain why they were foreseeably wrong.
>Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Welcome to any fast growing team. You get slower before you get faster.
>A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Rescinding offers harms all our companies. It will cause employees to not give notice when they the leave the job. Chief People Officer deserves to be blacklisted.
Oh for heaven's sake, just quit. Vote with your feet and walk them out the door to another job. The market is good (for now), best do it before that changes. When the people who do the actual work leave and they can't hire anyone due to their poor reputation because of the previously rescinded offers, they'll reap their own rewards.
What if they believe in the product, platform or the company?
I think that is what is happening here, they mention at the bottom that replace them with people who are knowledgable about crypto world. They want the company to succeed.
Right? A lot depends on how much power these individuals have. If the folks running the petition hold a lot of sway in engineering then the petition could have a real impact; even if it's just forcing the leadership to pay more attention to folks working at the ground level.
On the other hand, if you're some random dude in the IT department with very little influence or stock ownership, and with little reason to believe the host of engineering and product is going to stand up behind you, then yeah I'd say the time spent organizing an effort like this is much better spent "shopping elsewhere".
This is refreshing. When I first saw the title my immediate reaction was this is probably another US workforce political drama. But actually they list very valid points. Although the stock price has a lot to do with the crypto market in general. It's not the execs' fault it was so hyped when they IPO'd.
- Yesterday was onboarding my friend to Coinbase wallet and the landing page for that product was 404'ing. This is the first result on Google! Proof - https://imgur.com/yMt1N49
- They activated the dapp browser in the app, with a new wallet that's different than my existing coinbase wallet. Why?? Why do I now have 2 wallets.
- Coinbase direct deposit does not work with Gusto, or at least it didn't 3 months ago. Tried and got silent error.
- Rescinding offers. Terrible, how could they not forsee a massive backlash? Does the foreign national new grad who was counting on that offer/visa really affect the bottom line so much? Maybe $20M for a superbowl ad where the app crashed wasn't worth it?
- Coinbase wallet: popular projects like Chain Runners do not even display.
I mean the list goes on. Meanwhile the CEO is going on Good Time Show talking about "how we built this" and I'm thinking hello? Your own house is on fire right now. All this said, Brian Armstrong is a legendary entrepreneur and I know that he can reset. Airbnb went through a similar phase before the CEO made changes and got them back to their core.
The four year cycle of Bitcoin caused by halvings is not a secret, certainly not to Coinbase. Hiring in that fourth year that is always a bear market was folly. They've been in the game too long and have more data than anyone to know that "this time is different" was dumb.
Not really, you just degraded your employees who had a complaint and told them their jobs aren’t safe without assessing their concerns, you just dismissed the concerns offfhand. Kinda shitty, IMO, but I don’t have a dog in this race so my opinion is not really important. Good luck navigating the future.
This petition was created by one person (may or may not be a current employee) and posted to Blind. There were zero replies before they deleted it.
The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
I don’t care about the initial trigger much, mostly that the CEO’s first response to a possible employee problem was that it was dumb and to threaten his employees over it. Not a great look regardless of whether it was one employee, zero, or several hundred. Leaders should have much more compassion than this.
I guess I'm just frustrated at these "tech writers" for re-posting unverified information from Blind and then needing to walk it back later. It's unprofessional and risky.
Too bad Mr. Armstrong didn't choose to keep his mouth shut for a bit longer, to verify if the claims were from actual employees. Alternatively, he could have made a single tweet:
"I am aware of the open letter published today that was claimed to be from Coinbase empoyees. We will do our best to verify this and also respond to those employees internally to try and solve any issues they have with the direction of our company. I appreciate all feedback from Coinbase employees, positive or negative."
>Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This comment is really, really tone-deaf. People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction and/or making decisions that negatively impact the company's mission.
Exactly. I remember when ponytail became the CEO at Sun. Most of Sun employees loved Sun to a level that hasn't been experienced anywhere else, while hating the new CEO.
Interesting. When I learned about Ponytail (Jonathan Schwartz, possibly spelled incorrectly), I perceived him as the guy who would rescue Sun. I still remember his presentation of Looking Glass - it felt so modern. Little did I know...
Being tone deaf and treating employees like cattle is almost his whole thing[1][2]. I’m surprised he’s getting pushback now. The reception[3][4][5] to his previous actions would’ve had you thinking running a company like a soulless money farm was some brave and innovative strategy.
It's wierd tho because it's not ENTIRELY tone-deaf. When i was reading it i would agree wholehearitly with some, and wince at others.
If he would have left it at these two points and immeditaly called a company all hands:
>First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
> Our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private. Posting this publicly is also deeply unethical because it harms your fellow co-workers, along with shareholders and customers.
> But wait, you bluster, the custodial agreement clearly says that I am the owner, that it’s my property, that I retain title to it. Yup, but that’s not how the law actually works. Just because they wrote that doesn’t mean it’s true.
> In fact, the exchanges are lulling the consumers with language claiming that the consumer "owns" the coins, when in fact the legal treatment is quite likely to be different in bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it is likely to be treated as a debtor-creditor relationship, not a custodial (bailment) relationship.
> Not only are the customers likely mere creditors, but they are also likely general unsecured creditors, which means they will have to wait at the back of the line for repayment with everyone else. They will share on a pro rata basis whatever assets are leftover (if any) after the secured creditors and the priority creditors (including the expenses of running the bankruptcy) get paid, and any payment might not be for quite a while. That’s not a happy to place to be. Recoveries could be pennies on the dollar.
Your citation refers to the status of customers with respect to other creditors.
It says diddly squat about shareholders, who are below creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. Because, in a corporate bankruptcy, shareholders generally lose their investment.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests. In bankruptcy, customers will be screwed over to benefit the other creditors, not to benefit the shareholders as I mistakenly said.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests.
No, this is still wrong. Shareholders are not prioritized over creditors, at any time. Shareholders are the least important stakeholders in a corporation, because by virtue of their limited investment, they have the least at risk.
> People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction
Clearly that is the case here. CEO really comes off as if he’s living in a fantasy world here.
Which isn’t surprising given he started a crypto company.
Probably gonna get blacklisted by someone for this, but it’s astonishing to me that people can (with a straight face) say this at one moment then at another claim there’s no reason software engineers should ever unionize since they get paid well.
That argument really falls flat when you realize that this guy is the co-founder and CEO, i.e. he was already there and in charge when these people decided to join him.
If you don't like a company's leadership, obviously don't go work there. If you do, then decide you don't like them, obviously you quit. A 5-year old could understand that. Though it's beyond the anarchist collective on HN, apparently.
When you have poured your life energy out creating technology for a business you believe in and find to be a force for good, it is hard when business people come in and systematically uproot all the good. Yes, one must leave, but one leaves behind a lot of good work.
Yikes. Insulting your employees is not a good look.
> We praise in public and criticize in private
But you’re criticizing employees in public right now? As the CEO and founder I think you need to be receptive to criticism and take it on the chin. This tweet reads as if it was written in a frustrated, spontaneous episode. That’s also not a really inspiring look for outsiders or investors.
Best of luck, I’m moving over to Kraken. Treating and talking about employees like this isn’t okay.
>If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution).
Yet all his thread does is criticize this petition without trying to understand and work with the person who wrote it. I understand that a CEO would be very unhappy at something like this and I can't fault him for feeling that way, but he'd do well to listen to his own point in this instance - "be a part of the solution".
The petitioners publicly called for the ousting of senior executives, while airing confidential dirty laundry. The idea that this deserves to be met with a receptive and empathetic response is absurd. If you want collaboration, approach collaboratively. You might not get what you want, but at the end of the day, a company needs to be led by somebody, and I would much rather be led by a designated leader than by public pressure campaigns brought by whatever employees are most willing to escalate their grievances to the public square.
There is a middle ground between saying nothing and raising it to the general public. The public square is a terrible place to litigate what are effectively unsourced, one-sided allegations.
It's not a political stunt. The people who haven't left clearly want to remain their for various reasons asides from the issues they expressed. It's an attempt from those employees to actually improve the company and address the issues they have.
It's a publicly traded company. The shareholders have a right to know if the company is being mismanaged, so they can take action to improve management of the company they own.
Do you have backchannel information to suggest that the collaborative approach wasn't tried first? In my experience, going public never is the first step people take.
I have no inside info about this, but it wouldn't change my opinion if there had been an internal ask first. It's a fact of life that sometimes you will lose the argument, and fail to convince others of your ideas, even when you care deeply. I have been there, and it sucks. At that point, you can chose to stay and live with it, or decide it's a dealbreaker for you and move on.
The third option -- to escalate the argument to the public square and enlist the public as allies -- is available, but think what would happen if everybody did this. In a company of thousands of people there will always be passionate disagreement. If companies tolerated this kind of public escalation, it would erode the trust that is necessary for any organization to operate. It would be its own kind of toxic culture.
Brian has an exceptionally long history of holding himself to a dramatically lower standard than he holds his employees. It is hard to imagine a reason that he would change.
I get where you're coming from - this response seemed overly harsh. But I do think there's an important difference - this petition is anonymous and criticizes three people by name. Armstrong's response criticizes nobody by name (he couldn't!)
If he knew their name(s), he would have just fired them. Posting anonymously is the only real option they have if they love the company but think leadership has gone astray.
Yeah, but the employees aren’t exactly in a position of power here. He already indirectly said “it’s good I can’t name you, because you’d be fired now”.
A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending:
Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This is a very amateurish response, and honestly I'm expecting better from some exec of a publicly traded company. You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice, share how Coinbase is always (supposed to be) looking for new ways to improve, and how there are more appropriate channels for this kind of feedback.
Instead you let your ego get in the way, shared some childish tweets (that you'll probably regret soon), and alienated the majority of your employees.
>Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending
Well, he did say he felt offended that he wasn't included in the list.
>You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice
Brian is doing that here. Except he is appealing to the employees that aligns with him and his choice of people for exec leadership. You seem to assume that a vast majority of the employee base agrees with the petitioner, and Brian seems to assume that a vast majority agrees with his PoV.
There are a lot of people that agree with the petitioner, but employees aren’t given an open forum to talk about internal problems. If you talk about things that are wrong too much with your manager, you get marked down for not being positive. There’s no “free speech” internally and it is a pretty oppressive environment in that it doesn’t feel safe to express yourself to anyone.
Was Coinbase the company that paid-off employees to leave when it implemented the "no politics at work" policy? I had my suspicions that this would result in chilling /suppression of dissent as "politics".
This response reminds me of a company in the cannabis software space where recently the engineers put together a letter essentially saying they were not happy with the work environment, that the company was focused on the wrong things and that the CTO was not doing a good job. It was signed by 10 out of 12 engineers I think. They got no response. 2 weeks later they had layoffs and got rid of every engineer that signed the letter. I think they have 2 engineers left. This happened a few weeks ago. This is the second time the engineers have expressed something like this, the last time, every Sr. engineer just quit in a ~6 month period (7 total I think).
Well that's a sinking ship, people seem to think replacing software developers is like hiring for a fry cook where you can get going in a day but in reality it's months to get up to speed and it a rotating door of devs makes for some really bad code.
Sure, but not in an illegal way, I think its warranted. Its one thing to post the recall letter internally but to publicly bash your employer and call for the firing of others and expect to keep your job is insanity. They could have easily rewritten the letter to be less inflammatory, identified the problems, proposed solutions that did not target individual leaders and posted it on an internal board. We are at a strange time in industry where people don't think they will be fired for publicly torching their employer (see the recent Washington Post debacle). With that said, Brian's response was equally bad.
Now, I am no lawyer, but i am pretty sure that this would fall under "discussion of workplace conditions" - a type of speech in California protected by the labour code and not allowed to be retaliated against.
I'm not sure it's that clear cut, since they're singling out and attacking fellow employees in the process. Seems like the kind of complex labor case that would be heavily litigated.
If your execs prevent your employees from interacting with the board of directors, their only option is to go public to get the board and investors' attention. Brian only wants this to stay internal because he can control the narrative, how people communicate about it, and what the board and investors are made aware of.
Honestly surprised he even responded to it, and every single tweet is a red flag there. Not a good look, and he didn't even address the rescinded offers which I think is dragging coinbase's rep down the most.
> 2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
My first thought after reading that - maybe your employees actually believe that their execs are the ones running the show?
it's nice to see you haven't changed in the sense that you're responding here directly and address the issue without mincing words. The content is less nice though, very misguided even. I don't have inside knowledge and can't speak for the employees but I can tell you that other shareholders also aren't happy with the way things are going and what's been said in the petition largely resonates with me.
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that. Most long term investors don't care about the current share price either, but we're worried about the future value of the company. The out of control hiring was completely incomprehensible after you and other execs for months repeated the mantra that Coinbase is well prepared for the bear market. Spending has been out of control lately as the Q1 figures showed, especially on administration and employee stock options, wherever that money went. The company is quickly turning into another Silicon Valley bureaucratic monster, eating up funds with little real world gain in terms of productivity. (Foreign) acquisitions don't seem to be going great. And neither do you communicate any of the "challenges" to the shareholders, you seem to be treating us the same way as the employees. One day you announce the plan to hire thousands of new employees, a few weeks later that gets completely scrapped and a hiring stop put in place. This isn't good leadership and doesn't look like there is sufficient foresight.
Lastly in terms of investments, one of the great opportunities Coinbase has at the moment is investing aggressively in startups in the space, given the cash reserves. Having a chief people officer who doesn't understand crypto hire more and more people who don't know what they're doing at Coinbase isn't needed at this point, it would be better to invest in talent that does understand the space and actively builds solutions.
And while of course the leadership should lead and the employees should follow, not the other way around, it doesn't hurt to listen to them once in a while. Publicly dismissing their concerns in an arrogant and aggressive manner is not helpful!
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that
It absolutely is and there is a lot more of this blame game to come as people’s illusions are crushed. BTW it’s not a downcycle or a season, it’s a crash and cryptocurrencies will not recover because:
Nobody is using them as currencies - the experiment has failed, instead they are vehicles for speculation
The supply of greater fools in the world population has been exhausted, and after they lose all their money they will never return
That’s not to say coinbase and Armstrong don’t deserve criticism but let’s be clear about why it is happening now - his actions haven’t changed, the context has, and a lot of people have lost money they’re never getting back invested in coinbase itself and cryptocurrencies so they are angry (esp employees who probably invest in crypto, in coinbase and depend on the company).
When crypto was rising there was a lot of back-patting about how the cryptocurrency industry was slurping up talent from other sectors.
Granted, maybe the crypto aficionados celebrating the hiring spree are different from the ones now demanding labor austerity, but it strikes me as quite the heel-turn.
This will probably never be read, but I'll say it anyway.
Not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user here. The CEO responding to petitions like this on Twitter in a childish and heated manner is reducing my confidence in Coinbase as a company. The same might be true for other users who are watching.
You are the CEO of a public company, and will have to see many such petitions over the course of your career if things go well. Lashing out on Twitter is a shortcut to achieving much worse outcomes that will not end well.
I suggest apologizing publicly to your employees for your heated Tweets, and cite that you will definitely not use Dot Collector in the future. If it's such a non-event, why not take the win and admit that it was a bad idea? It is well-known as controversial anyway from all I have heard about it.
Also not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user. I don't know that Brian's set of tweets does anything to my confidence in Coinbase as a company. These tweets are trivial.
The biggest threat to my confidence about Coinbase is the structural parts of it, the fact that they are a growing centralized for-profit company responsible for a large amount of assets.
On this trivial (to me, maybe not to Coinbase) Twitter matter: I can see how both sides would go public like this. If you are an internal employee and you think there are C-level personnel changes that should be made, the odds are definitely not in your favor to propose such a thing internally. The risk is high that there will be retribution (whether direct or indirect). Going public is a way to drive attention to the issues, and incentivize that execs act in a legal manner in their responses.
I can also see why Brian would want to address this. Employees are airing their dirty laundry publicly. Shareholders and users can see this. If all you saw was this petition, it would certainly raise a lot of questions. It needs to be addressed in the arena in which it was surfaced by leadership. Where I think Brian is going wrong is he is being 100% defensive and 0% open-minded/empathetic. What about Coinbase's environment led to employees feeling the need to go public like this? This should be a time for some introspection, to hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.
Imagining how other founders such as Jack Dorsey or Reed Hastings would have reacted to these with tact. If the company has a transparent culture, they isn't much harm or fear for non MNPI to be discussed publicly.
Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. I was a little offended not to be included :)
3/ Second, let’s separate the problems that you perceive to stem from a few execs, and those that you believe are core to the company's mission. If you don’t like the mission, your decision is easy: you should leave. If a few unpopular execs, my decision is hard.
4/ Third, making suggestions on how to improve the company is a great idea (in fact, we expect everyone to be a part of that). But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private.
5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
"""
>Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
>5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
That's just terrible advice - whistleblower retaliation is illegal, and you're suggesting he retaliate publicly? I'd argue that your post could best be condensed to, "Speak with your legal team before you publicly respond to something like this."
You can't just leak anything you want and claim you're a whistleblower. Whistleblower protection is for leaking illegal actions, not for posting a petition that you don't like some executives.
“If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution). If you can't do that and you're going to leak/rant externally then quit. Thanks!”
The amount of blatant hypocrisy in this tweet is mindblowing. If I knew I wasn’t smart enough to run a company I’d at the very least get someone to proofread my tweets before exposing my lack of logical consistency and awareness.
This whole leak/rant is something that should have been addressed internally. Shot in the foot.
As others said this tweet feels childish for a CEO of a public company. Also, responding to it on Twitter this way can't be in the best interest of shareholders because you are making it way more heated and thus accelerating the spread of the bad look of your company.
Employees took a massive risk to organize (which you confirmed by threatening to fire them in this tweet) to try to help the company. I believe this should be rewarded, and you should apologize for creating an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this.
Or, you could hope that people will stop having emotions and acting irrationally based on those emotions. I seriously doubt that will pan out well.
> an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this
So much this. I’ve worked at a couple companies that at some point had a lot of leaks. In every case it was because employees had become disgruntled because there was no way to affect change inside the system.
Not a great look for the cofounder to be berating small groups of employees externally - the irony of the power dynamics at play seems to be lost.
Coinbase seems like a dumpster fire. Heed the warnings of the recent announcements that your assets can be considered the company's in bankruptcy proceedings - and move your assets into hardware wallets.
That email about bankruptcy seemed to be a call to action to move funds off platform. Not sure why it was framed that way or sent to account holders — was it supposed to be a shakedown (“support us, or else…”)? Either way, Ledger just got a new customer.
I disagree with most of the comments here; this tweet chain was mostly fine. It seems like the biggest problem was not the petition, but the leak. Unnecessarily tarnishing the company reputation publicly would piss off any CEO.
If this same response were posted after an internal petition, it would have the wrong tone. Externally, I'm not going to condemn it so much.
The initial petition alleged problems at exec level. Brian's response confirmed it. And he wonders why the employees wouldn't bring this up internally..
Aside from the fact that his response is likely illegal according to California labor code, threatening to fire employee for discussing workplace conditions, it blows my mind how ignorant and illiterate he is when it comes to understanding power dynamics, and even the basic history of labor.
How do you go from being a startup founder to a public company CEO without deeply reflecting about workplaces, employee happiness, dysfunction, power dynamics and history of all of that?!
Responses like this from C-levels in crypto make me glad I moved from the space after 4 years. Everyone is so egotistical. Blaming it on mental patterns of the employees without accepting it could be some really shitty management from your colleagues instead is toxic. Have a good hard look at the people named in this petition.
Brian, I feel your urge to solve this huge issue. Though I think only Elon gets to do this (with a tweet storm) while getting away with it The mere mortals should probably solve it in meetings. Hope you can weather through this and wish you the best
Whoever wrote this (do we have any way of even knowing how many employees?) must be completely desperate and does not see any other way to enact change - to the point that the group thinks Coinbase is going under either way so 'might as well try'.
If that is not the case, this is an extremely foolish move. Erodes confidence in the company, peers, everyone.
At its peak, Coinbase stock had appreciated less since its seed round than simply holding Bitcoin
Thanks to brilliant management, like handing out a billion dollars to some google exec who knew nothing about crypto and shipped a product no one uses, Coinbase is now indexed to the average price of the shitcoins it consistently lists.
How many people have actually joined the petition? If it's <10 employees petitioning that execs leave over incompetence (e.g. not something criminal), I don't find it news worthy.
Look if you’re going to ban politics from the office to be “focused professionals” you really HAVE TO nail the professionalism bit. Rescinding offers etc is beer league HR and Planning. What a clown show.
I have been watching this unfold ever since I bought my very first crypto on Coinbase many years ago. I can not believe that Brian Armstrong does not ever do a moral accounting and deep dive inside himself. If he was not such a narcissist, he could have the best CEX, going away. But, he continues to shoot himself in both feet at every turn. I feel sorry for such a self-UNaware person who thinks he is better than everybody because he's a billionaire. Believe me, I know what I am talking about. No, I am not a billionaire. I am a retired teacher and mental healthcare psych technician. I can only hope that he will see that if he changed his ways and attitudes toward ALL people, he would be much richer and happier, as would we all. I hope he gets help, or the board replaces him. Or both. Brian, you are out of touch with reality, ensnared in a gigantic trap of epic denial.
Its more likely that he’s going to lose everything and end up in a bad place, IMO.
Coinbase hasn’t cornered the market. They’re one player in an industry where other players aren’t that far behind. They had first mover advantage which it seems like they’ve squandered on dumbass political fights.
Brian should’ve done what other CEOs do: hire a Head of DIB, fund them just enough, and focus on product.
Instead he’s suffered from that ailment that everyone will suffer from when they’re on a success high: they believe they’re somehow just better due to X (doesn’t matter what it is) and all their decisions will then be around defending that core belief.
Or in other words, he is a huge idiot. He’s going to wreck everything and the end result isn’t going to be pretty.
At the size of COIN, a company does not equal the CEO + a few execs, but it's a machine in its own.
Ignoring feedback is not the most wise.
The feedback is not "the company did this list of bad things" but rather "the employees are unhappy, unmotivated, to the point that they complain in public"
Honestly it makes me feel a bit bad for him. He got lucky and everyone thinks he’s smart but he’s just coping by trying his best to copy others and lacks the ability to think clearly.
From copying Ray Dalio’s Corp practices blindly to copying Elon’s “unfiltered” tweet style, this guy is revealing his weaknesses. Doubt a vacation would cure that.
Good to know that you don’t really need much intelligence to be a founder/CEO of a unicorn company, just luck and a ton of unearned confidence.
Sure the initial petition is somewhat dumb but the fact that the CEO is so proud of his response is comical levels of dumb. Cringed hard at the revelation of how dumb this guy is. Sometimes the best response is no response.
The most generous way I can view this is that this guy is trying to copy Elon Musk in a contrived manner. Just shows a lack of original thinking.
I love you guys to death and if anyone can explain this to me I would love you even more:
"On April 02, 2022, you attempted a transfer of $615.00 USD. Unfortunately, the transfer failed and we still have not received payment."
Okay because number one there was never anything taken out of my bank and my Bank never reversed anything-The whole scan is BS. Especially considering I had a dispute with a merchant at the time and now have over 1200 cash that they got back from the merchant but yet they want me to pay them $615 even though it never happened in order to get my $1,200 what the hell is going on here and my entire account is Frozen can anyone explain this because they won't talk to me ...help and WTF? Oh and PS when I look at the logins on the coinbase site there was not one login at all from me or anyone else for that matter on the date they state that I supposedly did this what kind of crap show is going on here
FWIW, Surojit the CPO has a long colorful history of being a horrible person to work with. Just in the last couple of months, I think Blind had atleast a few threads on him. Here are a couple I could find:
Known him since grad school. He's a little bully (literally and figuratively). He acts all tough, until you call him out, and then he'll change the subject.
Can anyone claim with a straight face that Coinbase is well managed? You shouldn't be getting to the point where you're rescinding accepted job offers. Any reasonable leadership would have frozen hiring earlier instead of sending out job offers that would have to be rescinded.
Though I would imagine the responsibility for this extends to the CEO, not the various execs.
i think it is awesome to see coinbase crumbling so quickly. you came out thinking you could do whatever you want, ignore customer service, lie, cheat, steal, and made it clear that the customer and service doesnt matter. now you cant afford to pay your employees and doors are closing. coinbase would rather try to screw you once rather than keep a customer for life. FYI: you dont get money when you dont have customers, you stupid fucking idiots. and stealing doesn't count. i love it! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
In which more tech employees learn how we need to unionize our workplaces so we have real power to prevent the execs from destroying a company for their own gain
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