>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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!)
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.
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).
“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.
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.
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?!
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.
> 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?
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.
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, 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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
> 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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
Following seems to be squarely the responsibilities of C-Suite (including 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.
>> 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.
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.
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
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.
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".
- 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Clearly that is the case here. CEO really comes off as if he’s living in a fantasy world here.
Which isn’t surprising given he started a crypto company.
If 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.
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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.
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> 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".
Not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user here. The CEO responding to petitions like this on Twitter in a childish and heated manner is reducing my confidence in Coinbase as a company. The same might be true for other users who are watching.
You are the CEO of a public company, and will have to see many such petitions over the course of your career if things go well. Lashing out on Twitter is a shortcut to achieving much worse outcomes that will not end well.
I suggest apologizing publicly to your employees for your heated Tweets, and cite that you will definitely not use Dot Collector in the future. If it's such a non-event, why not take the win and admit that it was a bad idea? It is well-known as controversial anyway from all I have heard about it.
The biggest threat to my confidence about Coinbase is the structural parts of it, the fact that they are a growing centralized for-profit company responsible for a large amount of assets.
On this trivial (to me, maybe not to Coinbase) Twitter matter: I can see how both sides would go public like this. If you are an internal employee and you think there are C-level personnel changes that should be made, the odds are definitely not in your favor to propose such a thing internally. The risk is high that there will be retribution (whether direct or indirect). Going public is a way to drive attention to the issues, and incentivize that execs act in a legal manner in their responses.
I can also see why Brian would want to address this. Employees are airing their dirty laundry publicly. Shareholders and users can see this. If all you saw was this petition, it would certainly raise a lot of questions. It needs to be addressed in the arena in which it was surfaced by leadership. Where I think Brian is going wrong is he is being 100% defensive and 0% open-minded/empathetic. What about Coinbase's environment led to employees feeling the need to go public like this? This should be a time for some introspection, to hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.
it's nice to see you haven't changed in the sense that you're responding here directly and address the issue without mincing words. The content is less nice though, very misguided even. I don't have inside knowledge and can't speak for the employees but I can tell you that other shareholders also aren't happy with the way things are going and what's been said in the petition largely resonates with me.
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that. Most long term investors don't care about the current share price either, but we're worried about the future value of the company. The out of control hiring was completely incomprehensible after you and other execs for months repeated the mantra that Coinbase is well prepared for the bear market. Spending has been out of control lately as the Q1 figures showed, especially on administration and employee stock options, wherever that money went. The company is quickly turning into another Silicon Valley bureaucratic monster, eating up funds with little real world gain in terms of productivity. (Foreign) acquisitions don't seem to be going great. And neither do you communicate any of the "challenges" to the shareholders, you seem to be treating us the same way as the employees. One day you announce the plan to hire thousands of new employees, a few weeks later that gets completely scrapped and a hiring stop put in place. This isn't good leadership and doesn't look like there is sufficient foresight.
Lastly in terms of investments, one of the great opportunities Coinbase has at the moment is investing aggressively in startups in the space, given the cash reserves. Having a chief people officer who doesn't understand crypto hire more and more people who don't know what they're doing at Coinbase isn't needed at this point, it would be better to invest in talent that does understand the space and actively builds solutions.
And while of course the leadership should lead and the employees should follow, not the other way around, it doesn't hurt to listen to them once in a while. Publicly dismissing their concerns in an arrogant and aggressive manner is not helpful!
It absolutely is and there is a lot more of this blame game to come as people’s illusions are crushed. BTW it’s not a downcycle or a season, it’s a crash and cryptocurrencies will not recover because:
Nobody is using them as currencies - the experiment has failed, instead they are vehicles for speculation
The supply of greater fools in the world population has been exhausted, and after they lose all their money they will never return
That’s not to say coinbase and Armstrong don’t deserve criticism but let’s be clear about why it is happening now - his actions haven’t changed, the context has, and a lot of people have lost money they’re never getting back invested in coinbase itself and cryptocurrencies so they are angry (esp employees who probably invest in crypto, in coinbase and depend on the company).
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.
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?!
Or, you could hope that people will stop having emotions and acting irrationally based on those emotions. I seriously doubt that will pan out well.
So much this. I’ve worked at a couple companies that at some point had a lot of leaks. In every case it was because employees had become disgruntled because there was no way to affect change inside the system.
Brian armstrong: We need to lay-off 18% of our workforce to stay healthy as a company.
Brian armstrong: Doesn't slash his $60M compensation to help retain some staff who've contributed to building the company.
Also, Brian armstrong: I take accountability.
Clearly not.
It seems to me that it's not the company's health he's worried about.
My first thought after reading that - maybe your employees actually believe that their execs are the ones running the show?
Here’s a link on your CPO:
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Coinbase-product-team-culture...
""" I’m deeply troubled by this, but not for the reasons you might imagine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690452
2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. I was a little offended not to be included :)
3/ Second, let’s separate the problems that you perceive to stem from a few execs, and those that you believe are core to the company's mission. If you don’t like the mission, your decision is easy: you should leave. If a few unpopular execs, my decision is hard.
4/ Third, making suggestions on how to improve the company is a great idea (in fact, we expect everyone to be a part of that). But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private.
5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired. """
The rest was really good!
>5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
That's just terrible advice - whistleblower retaliation is illegal, and you're suggesting he retaliate publicly? I'd argue that your post could best be condensed to, "Speak with your legal team before you publicly respond to something like this."
Coinbase seems like a dumpster fire. Heed the warnings of the recent announcements that your assets can be considered the company's in bankruptcy proceedings - and move your assets into hardware wallets.
This guy is dumb, really dumb, on multiple levels.
No it's not. It's often the only recourse because of the certainty of retaliation because of the power imbalance.
A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending:
Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This is a very amateurish response, and honestly I'm expecting better from some exec of a publicly traded company. You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice, share how Coinbase is always (supposed to be) looking for new ways to improve, and how there are more appropriate channels for this kind of feedback.
Instead you let your ego get in the way, shared some childish tweets (that you'll probably regret soon), and alienated the majority of your employees.
Well, he did say he felt offended that he wasn't included in the list.
>You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice
Brian is doing that here. Except he is appealing to the employees that aligns with him and his choice of people for exec leadership. You seem to assume that a vast majority of the employee base agrees with the petitioner, and Brian seems to assume that a vast majority agrees with his PoV.
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The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
[1] https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1534986892906639360
Retaliation?
I dare him to do it, no I double dare him to do it.
But I bet all the tea in china he wont do it.
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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.
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he says whilst criticizing his employees on Twitter
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I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
Sounds like hell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
https://youtu.be/avJnpDKHxPY?t=13m24s
- 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).
Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.
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.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
Where is the middle ground?
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.
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.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
Not sure what you are trying to mean.
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.
I don't understand -- what should I look for, how should I act (and why)?
(I've never been in such an environment)
Interesting to read about their system!
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.
There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
And of course that Black Mirror episode. Constantly evince a super positive energy or else.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
Perhaps coinbase doesn’t target employees like you. Maybe they like happy clappy medicinally-well-adjusted type employees?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-asking-staff-rate-e...
[1] https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...
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.
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.
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...
Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity and Wiles.
Normally, I try not to value any principle over the others, but today, I'd have to say Cheer is my favorite.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...
The app is based on his philosophy https://www.principles.com/
But, like major thumbs down on their vibe. They need more positive vibes.
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Sounds like standard corporate usistan.
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.
In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams).
This has been to my heart for years https://www.radicalsimpli.city/
Looking at HN, enjoying the single founder SaaS threads, this is the future for a lot of business models.
So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders will be left with 60%. After the 2nd hire 1st hire would give up 5%, and founders 10% to get 15% ...
My idea was that this would disincentivise hiring new people, so that new people would be hired only when absolutely necessary .
I'm still planning on experimenting with this at some point in my life.
It's an interesting concept, but it feels like there would be significant pitfalls any way I think if it.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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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.
- The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
- Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
- A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
- Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
> ..fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable
Feedback like 'apathy' and 'condescending attitude' are very legit for employees and even to the interview candidates. Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
It comes down to someone's judgement call. It's usually not possible to quantify if "certain products" should be prioritized over "other important issues" or vice versa. Particularly so for someone who does not have the full picture.
> Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Is it objective or just an opinion? If objective, how is it measured?
> Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
Because "Someone anonymous said some of you were generally apathetic and sometimes condescending". "Well, can you give specific examples? No? Then it's fluff and not actionable".
The petition is immature and maybe 'condescending attitude' towards petitioner is deserved.
It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g. vs. Open Sea), and how to minimize risk, and maximize success (e.g. adoption).
Investing too much in new initiatives, while not building the right platforms, and tech infra for it, will lead to even higher tech debt and more chaos - so they seem like logically reasonable complaints. Whether they are true or not I have no idea but the points do not seem vague at all.
They'd be better off either trying to form a bargaining unit and attempt to get management to rollback on the performance management changes.
It’s poorly worded and broadly vague in most places.
If the criticism is valid but you’d never know it for lack of details. It just reads as disgruntled workers trying to stir things up.
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
I think that is what is happening here, they mention at the bottom - replace the current execs with people who are knowledgable about crypto world.
They want the company to succeed.
On the other hand, if you're some random dude in the IT department with very little influence or stock ownership, and with little reason to believe the host of engineering and product is going to stand up behind you, then yeah I'd say the time spent organizing an effort like this is much better spent "shopping elsewhere".
- Yesterday was onboarding my friend to Coinbase wallet and the landing page for that product was 404'ing. This is the first result on Google! Proof - https://imgur.com/yMt1N49
- They activated the dapp browser in the app, with a new wallet that's different than my existing coinbase wallet. Why?? Why do I now have 2 wallets.
- Coinbase direct deposit does not work with Gusto, or at least it didn't 3 months ago. Tried and got silent error.
- Rescinding offers. Terrible, how could they not forsee a massive backlash? Does the foreign national new grad who was counting on that offer/visa really affect the bottom line so much? Maybe $20M for a superbowl ad where the app crashed wasn't worth it?
- Coinbase wallet: popular projects like Chain Runners do not even display.
I mean the list goes on. Meanwhile the CEO is going on Good Time Show talking about "how we built this" and I'm thinking hello? Your own house is on fire right now. All this said, Brian Armstrong is a legendary entrepreneur and I know that he can reset. Airbnb went through a similar phase before the CEO made changes and got them back to their core.
While it is sad that offers are rescinded, the company is struggling. Sometimes, hard choices need to be made.
https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/bitcoin-investor-tool...
Execs often hold too much power in tech companies, and I’ve worked enough to see how condescending they can be to people even just 1-2 levels below them.
If the choice is between many the of employees that are actually building the company and a few bad execs, it seems easy to me.
I remember reading about him as the guy who got over $600 million [1] in compensation for 15 months of work (factoring Coinbase’s high share price at the time of its direct listing)…mind-blowing
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/google-ex...