> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
And to continue with the analogy, he neither replaces the coach, nor the actual team players.
He just sits on the bench, paid for his - additional - role. Exactly the contrary of the Coinbase manager-IC, which is supposed to replace 2 jobs in 1.
Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.
Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.
I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.
The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees.
By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.
I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA."
4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years
let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
you should always add salary during notice period if you are not expected to work anymore, it's essentially severance pay as well, though technically it's salary for no work
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.
Sure, I agree, not sure why you are downvoted for stating the facts, both have benefits, Europe in general is less flexible but employees are more protected with more benefits.
All I wanted to say was I don't find 4 months something particularly "nice" as European, though I am sure there are even some Europeans who would find it nice since they work for crappy companies in countries with less protection, so they are in lose lose situation, no US benefits (salary/taxes), no Europe benefits (severance pay/notice period).
If you're making 2x or more what a European developer makes, you're responsible for your own emergency fund. You ignore that at your own risk. I'll take that trade.
well, everyone has different experiences, but just to make it clear, I was calculating ordinary salary during notice period into severance pay since in many companies it's essentially severance pay:
1. you get fired with 2 months notice period and they will tell you, you don't need to bother to come anymore = 2 months of severance, you can sit at home, look for job for 2 months with full salary
2. on top of this you will get also extra 2 months severance pay
so in total de facto 4 months of severance pay , but I understand shitty companies will expect you to work even during notice period (especially if they are firing you) and somehow expect you will be delivering same results, smarter companies know the reality when they are firing someone and just tell him not bother coming anymore, this was my case in last 1-2 jobs I've had more than 10 years ago when I was still employee (plus they wanted to give me 1 month severance pay, but I argued about years I worked there and certain operation practices which could be published, so got 2 months, unlike my less assertive colleagues), I'm nowadays contractor/freelance for companies outside Europe so no law protection for me
my wife is always employed as employee and got fired this winter under conditions I mentioned in point 1&2 and got 2+2 months after 1 year of work, two jobs ago she was fired without severance but didnt need to work during notice period
plus I've found funny mention of the 6 months COBRA as some benefit, you are covered by insurance in Europe regardless of your job status whether employed or unemployed you are always covered by universal healthcare
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
There's a law for that. If Coinbase did not require an external bank account to create the coinbase account, by law, they cannot require one to close the account.
At least, that is what I have been led to believe. You could sue.
I have to admit I'm always baffled by these "you could sue over this trivial matter" replies. Do you think lawsuits cost no time or money? Obviously I'm not going to do that.
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.
I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.
Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.
The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.
If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.
No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.
I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
I do understand the theory, none of what you mentioned is new to me or contradict my points. I do not believe things will be done right. It’s not only mission critical services that require maintenance and need to handle incidents. Internal services are as important to a company as their public facing ones, and once you get the ball rolling I do not believe we won’t see the same approach used for customer facing services. I also do not expect non technical people to understand differences between MCP servers, rest apis, direct db access, and other resources. If they do they are definitely technical… so it will be up to whatever they let the agent do. Which is the whole problem here, you need to be technical to understand and push back when agents are doing things wrong
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them.
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.
> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
"Neo feudal lords" might read like hyperbole to those unaware of Brian Armstrong's "Network State" fanaticism. He may not be one yet, but he's certainly striving toward that goal.
There’s also Yanis Varoufakis’ recent book, Technofeudalism.
> Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol. I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Reminds me of how kings used to (I think, I'm bad at history) actually fight the battles themselves. Now the head of state, the head of government and the other top people don't fight themselves. Even the admirals only plan and command, AFAIK.
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
Haslem played 72 minutes the entire 82 game season. That's like the Engineering manager who ships a PR once a year.
And to continue with the analogy, he neither replaces the coach, nor the actual team players. He just sits on the bench, paid for his - additional - role. Exactly the contrary of the Coinbase manager-IC, which is supposed to replace 2 jobs in 1.
Thanks for the examples. I didn't realize this still happened. I don't follow basketball much - more hockey for me with some baseball. It sounds like those examples jive though - they're players in the twilight of their career who still bring a lot of value being in the locker room but maybe aren't ready to fully retire or move to coaching full time.
Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.
I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.
I think the CEO was more talking in the line of Bill Russell or Maximus from Gladiator, not final-year Haslem
"They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up."
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
Employees should be cattle not pets.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
what's the point of having 5 people doing 1 person's job though?
sounds stupid to me
delusions of having AI do those roles and the one person in charge over prompting will know the difference between quality and slop... guess which one I'm betting on?
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
Isn't this what he says in the post? The first reason listed is market cycle not ai.
Yeah, but imagine if he had said that AI was the reason, and how wrong he would have been if he had said that.
Yes, I'm not buying this story about layoffs due to AI. It's a convenient excuse, which these companies seem to be getting away with too.
And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
The layoffs being "due to AI" is usually about freeing up the budget to build a couple datacenters and buy GPUs. And they have to layoff 14% of their workforce because they are buying those GPUs at many times the normal price thanks to the zeitgeist.
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.
This assumes they had a deficit of engineers pre-AI. What if they had as much as they needed?
Oh yeah, AI is just an excuse to sell it to the public. But it's not about that at all. It's about bad leadership.
They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.
It would be slop, but the market would love it
Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
Time will tell.
This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.
Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
Yep, it's 25+ years of corporate communications.
> this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.
The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T
Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?
I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder
I worked for Coinbase. Brian won't even speak more to this to the company. He led by twitter post. I was there for 4 years (thanks to a great manager) but Brian was one of the worst leaders I've ever experienced.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
This is (unironically) what big institutional allocators love to hear. They've been sold the idea that almost every medium-very big tech corp is vastly overstaffed and can become a monster cash cow and stop SBC dilution by cutting headcount + becoming A.I first.
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
Are any of these fields hiring?
- big institutional allocators
- activists
- the sellside
- guys managing their private market allocations
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?
What is the alternative
Start your own company. If you’re already doing everything yourself then you don’t need to do it for someone else.
Organized labor
Beatings will continue until morale improves
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
Its been 6 years, how are you still blaming covid overhiring?
They already had substantial layoffs in 2023 for that https://www.coinbase.com/blog/a-message-from-ceo-and-co-foun...
It's because crypto goes in a cycle and now it's down. You should expect layoffs from them again in 2029/30.
That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies with a significant number of tech workers... I think every tech manager/leader needs to read The Mythical Man Month and pass a test on the content without benefit of AI. I know Twitter/X was lambasted when Musk took ownership and made deep cuts, but my own opinion is it was probably for the best and would be healthier as a company after.
I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
when we will see "we do not need CEO anymore. AI can do it better. we are sorry to let go CEO, we do not need him".
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.
So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.
They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.
More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
I think you'll have to work it out with your peers and collaborate... we here at $BigCo believe in individual ownership of the process.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
Yikes. That's bad leadership at that top all around. But we already knew that when they announced layoffs. No good leader lays people off.
> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.
AI-unfucker is likely to be a growth industry.
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing.
Today, not a single mention in that email.
I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).
Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
All in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
That reminds me, I'll need to stock up on rum so I can cheer the more spectacular detonations.
At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off.
What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.
"US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA."
4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years
let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law
I'm not from the US, but from eastern europe. I have not been in collectives where what you're saying was true. At most I've seen 2-3 months of pay for someone to sign their own resignation.
you should always add salary during notice period if you are not expected to work anymore, it's essentially severance pay as well, though technically it's salary for no work
As a European you're on a third as much though in the first place.
As an American, I’d point out that there are structural reasons the U.S. often outpaces Europe in certain areas of innovation and business, tech and otherwise. Labor regulations in many European countries make it harder to reallocate talent quickly, which can slow down company formation and scaling.
That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point.
Sure, I agree, not sure why you are downvoted for stating the facts, both have benefits, Europe in general is less flexible but employees are more protected with more benefits.
All I wanted to say was I don't find 4 months something particularly "nice" as European, though I am sure there are even some Europeans who would find it nice since they work for crappy companies in countries with less protection, so they are in lose lose situation, no US benefits (salary/taxes), no Europe benefits (severance pay/notice period).
When I got laid off I got 0. The company I currently work for generally gives 0 severance as well. 5 months is extremely generous
But hey! Guns and bigger salary, or something. And less socialism.
Yes?
If you're making 2x or more what a European developer makes, you're responsible for your own emergency fund. You ignore that at your own risk. I'll take that trade.
> as European I would say this is fairly standard
I must live in a different Europe then. I'd say this would be EXTREMELY generous for Europe.
When I was laid off, I got only 2 weeks of pay (notice period).
well, everyone has different experiences, but just to make it clear, I was calculating ordinary salary during notice period into severance pay since in many companies it's essentially severance pay:
1. you get fired with 2 months notice period and they will tell you, you don't need to bother to come anymore = 2 months of severance, you can sit at home, look for job for 2 months with full salary
2. on top of this you will get also extra 2 months severance pay
so in total de facto 4 months of severance pay , but I understand shitty companies will expect you to work even during notice period (especially if they are firing you) and somehow expect you will be delivering same results, smarter companies know the reality when they are firing someone and just tell him not bother coming anymore, this was my case in last 1-2 jobs I've had more than 10 years ago when I was still employee (plus they wanted to give me 1 month severance pay, but I argued about years I worked there and certain operation practices which could be published, so got 2 months, unlike my less assertive colleagues), I'm nowadays contractor/freelance for companies outside Europe so no law protection for me
my wife is always employed as employee and got fired this winter under conditions I mentioned in point 1&2 and got 2+2 months after 1 year of work, two jobs ago she was fired without severance but didnt need to work during notice period
plus I've found funny mention of the 6 months COBRA as some benefit, you are covered by insurance in Europe regardless of your job status whether employed or unemployed you are always covered by universal healthcare
AI and crypto --- what could go wrong?
This: User just tricked Grok and Bankrbot to send tokens with Morse code
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...
Fun read. Why would grok have access to a wallet? That sounds so absurd
People still unironically use Web3 as a term, that's hilarious.
> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
This REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop
To me that sounds like financial issues dressed in PR slop.
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
Apart from "AI" making us productive talk.
Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?
Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
Your sentiment should be redirected to the leadership team and execs, not the engineers themselves.
Nah, they are adults. Labor should make way more decisions, but they knew what they were doing and for who.
Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
That statement does not inspire confidence considering how ripe crypto is for hackers/scammers, if anything it makes me want to close my Coinbase account.
Very early in the first Bitcoin boom cycle I had a friend who was into it, so I opened a Coinbase account because I thought it'd be funny to pay him the $15 I owed him for lunch or whatever in Bitcoin. I bought the $15 on a credit card, sent it to his wallet, we had our laughs about it, and I moved on. Years later, after it became clear that the only purpose of cryptocurrencies is scams & crime, I went to close my Coinbase account just for some basic digital hygiene. Except I found out that now, they only let you log in if you have an external bank account associated with your Coinbase account. And you can't delete your account without logging in. And there's no way in hell I'm associating my real bank account with a scam & crime agency. So I'm stuck with a Coinbase account I can't close or even log in to. Lol.
If you joined when Coinbase was still giving 0.1BTC signup bonuses, it might be worth trying to retrieve the account
There's a law for that. If Coinbase did not require an external bank account to create the coinbase account, by law, they cannot require one to close the account. At least, that is what I have been led to believe. You could sue.
I have to admit I'm always baffled by these "you could sue over this trivial matter" replies. Do you think lawsuits cost no time or money? Obviously I'm not going to do that.
Closing mine today
Given how crypto is the priority target for NK hackers it doesn't fare well for Coinbase to engage in such reckless behavior.
Reckless behavior? In my crypto currency? It's impossible!
Not like it ever stopped the crypto industry before, if we're being honest
Exactly. That is completely irresponsible of them.
It takes one massive breach and theft from the exchange as a result of this and they are cooked.
Exchanges never recover after billions of dollars get stolen from the exchange.
Depends on what they're shipping. We're doing this with UI work, as long as your backend is secure I don't see what the issue is personally.
Generally engineers are not well placed to be building UIs.
Frontend has plenty of security considerations.
You are a npm import away from having big problems.
You're definitely doing something wrong if that's the case at your company.
How did you solve supply chain security?
Like letting non-technical teams ship production code
But the claude/cursor/kiro/codex said my code was production ready, enterprise grade, and PCI/alphabet soup compliant.
That is your problem right there. Instead of PCI compliance you needed that sweet, sweet IBM MCA compliance.
Rookie mistake by your AI; otherwise it did a flawless job, and the glaze it's been giving you is 100% accurate. You are the bestest.
If one more AI calls me "insightful" or says that my question "really cuts through the noise" or "gets to the heart of the matter"...
You're totally right!
Many comments are mocking the "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" line as an obvious disaster waiting to happen.
I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Will they also do the maintenance, future migrations, and handle prod alerts at 2am? I’m all to empower non technical people but shipping prod code isn’t the way to do it. What will happen is a very large amount of unmaintained services with no coherence, that will accumulate over time. I cannot imagine the monsters we will after a few years of that being normalized
No, because you're misunderstanding how this works.
Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.
Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.
The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.
If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.
No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.
I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
I do understand the theory, none of what you mentioned is new to me or contradict my points. I do not believe things will be done right. It’s not only mission critical services that require maintenance and need to handle incidents. Internal services are as important to a company as their public facing ones, and once you get the ball rolling I do not believe we won’t see the same approach used for customer facing services. I also do not expect non technical people to understand differences between MCP servers, rest apis, direct db access, and other resources. If they do they are definitely technical… so it will be up to whatever they let the agent do. Which is the whole problem here, you need to be technical to understand and push back when agents are doing things wrong
> I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
And due to this it deserves even more mockery.
Many people say this and they also say (see top comment) it being for financial company. But this being for financial company is an extra layer of risk that I am not willing to take personally.
> Leaders will own much more
Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.
I d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.
This goes for everyone.
Some of the biggest AI adopting companies are still shipping garbage (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and I’m desperately curious what infinite AI resources are actually doing for them.
More reports for accounting? What?
What is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
And increase in their workload. Win-win!
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.
It is weird to read this considering they should have enough money to employ enough software engineers.
Why would non-programmers need to ship production code in a financial context?
Because it’s faster and cheaper, which are two very important metrics?
I’ve never wondered if BoA is moving fast
"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
Coinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
What could go wrong?
Crypto in bear market, volume is down. Less money to skim. Layoff.
The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
Lots of layoffs this year. The economy is in bad shape.
Everyone I know is barely holding on, markets doing well though but tbh it feels like a mad scramble last resort sort of thing
yeah, check reddit. now even front page is people talking how hard it is. everywhere.