"While we did not make this decision lightly..." Yes but you aren't doing it humanely, either.
I've been through the dot com crash and several hard economic downturns. It really puts your company's humanity on full display. It's the real test.
Preserving cash flow is important. But you also have to do things carefully, openly, and with genuine care for the people who've believed in your vision.
People will respect the hard decisions but not sloppy or careless execution.
The worst part is that Coinbase's interviews are difficult. If I'd spent months studying, rejecting other (good faith) offers, and then had this happen I'd not only be in a bad spot (without a job entering a recession) but I'd be furious at the inequality of input and output.
I've been interviewing for the past month and I made a rule that I won't be doing any algorithm interviews. I didn't have time to study; some friends questioned whether this was a good idea or not. I ended up submitting code samples when recruiters or managers would try to go through that kind of phone screening. Not only am I interviewing at better quality firms, but it's not nearly as stressful.
Anecdotally there is a high correlation between firms that tell me they're freezing hiring, etc and algorithm interviews.
A decade and a half of easy money leads to a lot of bullshit. I imagine many of those firms are your typical SV startup or wannabe SV startup that only exists due to easy money and doesn't yet have to make actual profit to survive. So they can tell themselves leetcode performance matters and get high on their own supply.
In my experience the higher quality non-FAANG firms who aren't wildly popular places to work and also need to turn a profit to survive tend to be more appreciative of qualified applicants and waste less time getting them started
Does a good way of finding these place exist? I would guess word of mouth and your network are best. As someone not super plugged into the VC world, and who is mostly interest in good sold work and interesting problems, and not the hype around “being a startup” I would be interested in knowing.
I went through the whole Coinbase interview process at the Staff level a few months back - I thought all their interviews were fair and represented what I would have been doing there as my job. There weren’t any LC questions and the algorithm questions were all based around doing crypto related things.
Same, mine was Staff level as well. I had to build a filesystem. I finished it, but I was left wondering if I was actually going to be working on an OS there.
How do you find the better-quality companies you apply to? Are you able to decline to answer algorithm questions when they're asked, and instead convince companies to accept code samples?
This sentiment seems common on Hacker News but I'm not sure its wise.
Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code.
It's definitely true that not all companies that use these algorithm interviews are worth working for. But, at least in my experience, companies that don't require them at all are pretty awful places to work. It demonstrates that management doesn't care who they hire.
I have advised, consulted for, or worked full time at 20+ companies, interviewed at too many to think about counting, and conducted technical interviews at 10+.
Without exception the companies that weighted academic algorithm skills over practical architecture skill and implementation experience had some of the most confident and brazen mistakes in security or scalability and some of the poorest work-life balance.
This is easy to say, but it is harder to convince others without showing us your data. Even a small table with anonymized company names and a few columns assessing their security foibles and work life balance would go a long way.
I understand most people will say "this is too much work". The problem is that it is all too easy for someone to say "in my experience, X is correlated with Y" ... but that isn't very believable if the observer didn't even write things down.
I don't like asking for everything to be quantified, but it does seem in this case you probably have the data in your head and just need a nudge to write it down.
Not that I can recall, though I admit I am very biased against academic CS theory dominant interviews in general for a number of reasons and it is possible this somewhat tints my memory.
> Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code.
The industry is at a point where there are plenty of clueless cookie cutter companies cargo culting Leetcode just because those interesting companies engage in it.
As far as interesting companies that don't require that, there's at least Stripe, famously, and surely more from this list:
> Programming/debugging phone screen + on site with your own laptop/setup and full access to internet, systems design discussion and talk with hiring manager about team alignment.
That seems to me to be a technical interview. I'm not sure what makes this different from a Facebook or Google.
> Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues.
I have quite high standards when I hire, which is why I don't use leetcode to assess. :)
I can get much better data more quickly without it. And, indeed, the best places I've ever worked with the smartest people I've ever known have not used these types of problems in the interview.
I've personally solved hundreds of them for the problem-solving challenge, but it's a horrible way to determine if someone is a good fit for a job. It's like interviewing a mechanic for your auto shop by seeing how well they can change a tire using only a screwdriver.
> I have quite high standards when I hire, which is why I don't use leetcode to assess. :)
How would you go about checking if somebody is qualified in an interview?
Using his past experience may help but too often it can be embellished or flat out lied about. That's why these algorithm interviews became popular in the first place, to my knowledge.
> How would you go about checking if somebody is qualified in an interview?
It depends on the job, but for coding I've had great luck asking them to bring some code they were proud of in to the interview. Language doesn't matter, subject doesn't matter.
And then in the interview I ask them to teach me how it works. It becomes apparent in no time if they don't know what they're doing (or stole it). And if they can tell me about it, I learn how well they understand their own system--do they only understand it well enough to code it, or do they understand it well enough to teach it? I also learn if they're a good communicator. And if they're a good culture fit. And if they're enthusiastic about coding. I can also ask probing questions about design decisions and shortcomings.
That covers the "how well do they code" part, but falls a little short on the problem-solving part. But I can come up with on-the-fly questions (often about the code they brought in) that exercise those muscles. "What would you do if this data weren't available?" "What if you needed more guaranteed uptime?" "What if you needed to process 1000x more data in the same timeframe?" These are more relevant questions.
I'm after someone who learns fast. I'll take someone who knows a little and learns fast over someone who knows a lot and learns slow 9/10 times.
(Once I had someone bring in a device driver written in C for a JavaScript gig. They were hired. Another time we hired a dev with zero experience in the platform, language, or framework. Worked out great.)
If they ace leetcode-style challenges, I know they're good at _that_, but I don't trust it as a proxy for the other things I want to know, above.
The parent commenter wasn't saying we shouldn't have "high standards"; just that filtering for maximal prowess at leet code grinding does not serve as a useful instance of such, in their book.
Further, this distinction seems basically quite obvious -- there's no other way to read their text, actually.
Alternatives like take homes, pair programming etc… don’t demonstrate that a company doesn’t care who they hire. I mean sure it could, but it could also demonstrate they don’t cargo cult interview practices.
Other industries don’t hire this way for anyone but fresh grads, and most don’t even do this for them.
It's the other way round. When NASDAQ sneezes, crypto catches a cold. I think because there's some tech investors who put a few percent into crypto, and when the market heads south you sell your frivolous rubbish (the crypto) first. And it takes very little actual-dollar volume to tank crypto
Same thing happened in March 2020, when investors panicked over COVID-19 and flew to US treasuries. Stocks went down, crypto went through the floor.
I wish it were the same as March 2020. You had a big drop and then almost an immediate reversal that lead to an explosive bull run to many new all-time-highs until April 2021.
Instead this time it's had the big drop and been very anemic for months since, with no clear end in sight. Could easily drop more. Starting to look more and more like the two year crypto winter back in 2014. Course if I was buying a coin a month that entire time it was $200 a coin I would have been retired by now. Or at least semi-retired.
I can confirm Coinbase interviews are difficult. I went in relatively confident and still failed.
Looking back, it would appear I got lucky since we all know new blood is the first to be dropped come a downturn. Well, maybe potentially not lucky since I recently jumped ship anyway, but it is not crypto or startup so risk level is lower.
To your point, I agree. As an applicant, I would be really aggravated if I passed on an offer, because I received and accepted offer from another place ( and that another placed rescinded offer afterwards ). Can I assume there will be some lawsuits over this ( in that case there seems to be an incurred loss )?
So let me get this straight: now, we're not allowed to ask people if they can perform an __essential function of the job__, without being labeled "inhumane" ?
You interview for sanitation work, I want to know that you can sling a heavy bag of hot garbage.
You interview for SWE, I want to know that you can throw a sling a heavy bag of hot garbage!!!
So let me get this straight: now, we're not allowed to ask people if they can perform an __essential function of the job__, without being labeled "inhumane"?
I think there's a simple solution to the problem of algorithm testing and Leetcode problems in hiring: every company should run their hiring technical test on their current staff, at random, on a regular basis. If the current staff can pass then the test is a valid one. If they can't then it isn't, and they should update it to be a more realistic task that the current staff can do.
There's a healthy way to raise the bar and there's lots of unhealthy ones.
A healthy way would be bringing your current talent pool up to a higher level through training, even if that's maths (if that's what your current problem is).
An unhealthy way is introducing a bunch of new talent that is tested on one niche domain of software engineering and pretending everyone needs to do that while also trying to improve fundamental skills that help them with their day to day job.
- you've got people working crazy hours and learned on the job. Are they supposed to spend extra time on this stuff when they're barely keeping up?
- the existing people have developed all sorts of niche skills of their own. I'm not trying the new folks on that stuff because... we don't need more of it right now.
The point is that most of the time you're not actually hiring for specific niche skills that the rest of the team don't have. You just need more capacity to do what the team is already doing. In those cases if your tech test is some Leetcode algorithms question that the team can't pass themselves then asking that of a new hire is silly. You'll be ruling out candidates who could do the job well, just because they can't pass a test you don't need them to pass.
All I suggested is using the team's existing skillset as the measure to hire new people for the team, rather than some sort of arbitrary test that doesn't reflect the work they do.
“we need someone who can help us write our yet another SaaS CRUD app using an MVC framework. But to get the job you have to reverse a binary tree while riding a unicycle on a tightrope juggling bowling balls. We also offer below average pay and make up the difference in statistically worthless ‘equity’ and only want 10x developers who are willing to work for 60 hours a week”
Using a test that you don't have the knowledge to assess is unlikely to raise the bar. It's much more likely to just mean you hire the wrong person.
If you really need to hire someone you can't assess internally then you should seek help with hiring them. This is one reason why networking and mentors are so helpful. Other people can help with this sort of problem.
Yeah, because we spend the whole day reversing a linked list in your real-life SWE job, right?
It's ridiculous that we have to study all those algorithms that we will never use it in your life, it's just too much.
I had an interview once that wanted me to do A-star "find fastest routing of internet packets between sites" and when I presented a brute force path finder and he complained about the big O, I told him that his problem as framed only featured tens of graphs and his business domain as framed (as a function of the company's domain) would never have more than 20 sites, and anyways a sneakernet (ship ssds) would be faster (which he conceded).
Me: “This is a domain I’m familiar with because I spent 9 years working in the bill payment industry. Here all of the corner cases you have to deal with. You’re much better off using these USPS certified CASS solutions instead of writing it internally for these reasons and went on to explain all of the drawbacks of writing software that didn’t give you a competitive advantage.”
The middle level developer interviewing me wasn’t impressed. The director was and I got the job and soon became the lead.
> now, we're not allowed to ask people if they can perform an __essential function of the job__, without being labeled "inhumane" ?
Please tell me of companies which ask about essential functions of the job? That's become infinitesmially rare.
Instead, interview are about memorizing algorithms and perfecting a theatrical delivery where you pretend to discover the fruits of years of research in 45 minutes.
In order words, things you will never ever do in the actual day to day job after getting hired.
I’ve been working professionally as a developer for 25 years. What is now called leetcode was part of my day job on and off from 1996-2012 as I wrote low level cross platform C code, a little assembly, maintained a proprietary Windows CE compiler tool chain (long ugly story).
But DS&A style interviews don’t come anywhere near testing the type of work that most developers will be doing day to day in 2022.
$200K and living in the Bay Area would not come near peaking my interest. I would have been better off staying at my enterprise CRUD job in a medium cost of living area with my big house in the burbs making in the mid $100s.
I’m making in the $200s now. But I found a job at $BigTech that was permanently remote.
Depends on your definition of "pays well", really. I think it's unlikely you're gonna find many companies paying Amazon or Google-tier salaries without these kinds of interviews, especially for junior or mid level.
> I'd be furious at the inequality of input and output
Stranger here. Just want to suggest that getting furious over things outside of your control, or the world not being as you would like it to be, is optional.
If you don't like being enraged, you can quit that pattern with some practice in learning to notice your emotions as they come and go, and then learning to interrupt the chain of events that leads to the state of being furious and brooding.
Of course. If someone wants to be angry, that's their choice.
Yet a lot of people get angry easily, and being an easily-triggered person works against a person's life. No one wants to constantly have to walk on eggshells around another person in order to be their friend, partner, child, etc.
Personally, I don't enjoy the emotion of being angry. If you do, more power to you.
With respect, it's not a matter of money or resources.
Getting angry is optional. With some practice (largely, mindfulness) people can learn to notice their emotions and not become strongly identified with whatever is happening in the moment, and choose to do something more productive than simply stewing or ruminating in the unfairness of life.
I practice stoicism in my day to day life, or try to stick to it best I can. That said, stoicism only helps me with actions I choose to take, it doesn't override the fact that internally I would be furious. I'd end up channeling that furor into something healthy. I also think it's healthy to convey to other people how you feel, especially if you are someone practicing moderation with reactions.
When I was an underboss in a firm that was going down, I just told people. Informally, in person. I wasn't supposed to, but they were putting two and two together themselves, and it would have been wrong to leave them with an inaccurate idea of how the firm was doing.
Don't hire me if you need me to lie to your staff.
This is literally my only request from management. If you know I'm going to lose my job don't wait until my last day to tell me. Give me some time to set up other options.
You should always have other options. You shouldn’t wait until you’re about to be laid off. I can honestly say there isn’t a single day since 2008 (I’ve been working a lot longer) that if the company I was working for laid me off that I wouldn’t be prepared to look for another job the same day.
That means an updated resume, career document of accomplishments and talking points, an active network and “fuck you money” in the bank. If you live in any major city in the US, and are a software developer with experience, you should be making in the upper quintile of income for your area. There is usually no excuse not to have savings.
A developer in SF is not in the upper quintile.. they can't even afford a starter house. Big cities add huge costs that start making sense with home ownership but will leave a renter worse off.
Yes because I’m sure two year old data is grossly out of date and the median income has gone up greatly enough so that a software engineer in SF is no longer in the top quintile.
That just doesn't make any sense. You can't even rent an apartment for less than $3,000 in SF, let along think about buying the average $2M house. What is the discrepancy? Maybe these folks all ended up buying their houses 30 years ago?
The number doesn't jive for me either. You would have to go through how the median income number is formulated. It may not be how you think. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this with broad statistics.
It’s so tough though - with large layoffs, you want to avoid revenge actions from people who are being let go. Immediate termination / cutoff of access is really the only way to do it. But I agree, it’s not humane. Don’t ever buy companies that talk about being a family. They want you to treat them like family but they will turn around and do what they deem necessary to self-preserve.
If you think your employees will take revenge action after being let go, you need to do a lot better job at hiring people.
I can't imagine many professionals would do something damaging to their employer on the way out. Facing legal troubles right when you are looking for a new job seems very shortsighted.
Also, if you treat the people you are letting go as humans, they will be less likely to retaliate. Ironically, trying to prevent retaliation by treating them like they will retaliate is more likely to cause them to do so.
Delusional. 99% of professionals can come across as nice and respectful in interviews, and have no criminal record. How could you possibly anticipate "a willingness to take revenge".
I’m assuming people you are laying off have worked with you long enough to get an idea of their character. If you are firing someone for cause, that is one thing; you are firing them because they aren’t what they originally seemed, so it makes sense to take precautions.
However, if you are laying someone off simply because the business if struggling, you presumably think they are trustworthy enough to employ. If you trusted them enough to give them the power before letting them go, you obviously trust them. If you are worried getting laid off will make them abuse that trust and use their access to cause damage, how could you trust them before you laid them off?
In Europe, we have layoff terms measured in months. Revenge action is nevertheless very rare.
If your personel has an exit period of a few months, they can take their time to process what happened, grieve, and find a new job, without losing the house or healthcare. There simply isn't that much of a reason for revenge.
True and false. There is a basic package that's good enough to get you trough life. This is one extra reason why being let go is less likely to cause stress for you and damage for your boss.
But bigger organisations give extra insurance. This covers e.g. avprivate or 2 person hospital room instead of multi person rooms. Or private care without waitung lists
Also, as healthcare is getting more expensive, the core package gets smaller. E.g. dental care was a victim in my country, preventative care is still covered but restorative probably not.
The best way for a company to handle layoffs in the case where immediate termination is needed for security reasons is for the company to pay 2-6 additional weeks of salary beyond the termination date -- that way the employee has time to find new work without having a sudden, unexpected gap in income.
This is how ie banking works. Nobody smart/experienced enough even pretends its about more than next paycheck.
Sounds soulless, and for some it is, but there is no place for drama when the day comes.
Being good hearted will eventually backfire - that one employee who feels its very unfair to him, with right access can do so much damage to already faltering company it can even bring it down.
So its a precaution, because 1 (or 5) percent of people are vengeful assholes, and you often find out only when right buttons are pressed.
Severance package is always generous, ie my bank gives in such case 1 salary for every year worked, on top of mandatory 3 ones mandated by Swiss laws.
This can create its own chaos. Having been through layoffs where the news got out early and others where management mostly kept a lid on it, the outcome wasn’t better when some people knew early.
Those who were connected to the right bosses knew more than others. There were a couple leaders who already had new jobs lined up when the news became public while others were stuck scrambling. There was a lot of anger and resentment compared to other layoffs I’d been through.
On the other hand, there were layoffs more of the form of directors making “objective” decisions without the bottom two layers of management knowing much of anything beyond that layoffs were probably going to happen. There was more shock. People had a bad time still but there wasn’t the same toxicity to it.
Why should one need to read an unrelated page posted by a 3rd party in order to infer what someone meant?
It is not-improbable that the GP intended a mafia reference for how the layoffs were handled. Your choosing to infer instead of learning produces incorrect results. i.e. It's best not to assume.
Take the hit. I worked for a series B startup employing around 100 people at the start of the pandemic. Because of the pandemic the business was entirely shut down for 6 months. And was barely operational for longer still. Not a single person was let go.
Now, this requires you to run your business responsibly from the start. If you’re already on the edge of your runway you either cut back or die. But if you have the cash in the bank you’re a better person for spending it on the employees than doubling down on your war chest.
What? If you're cutting, you're not doing it for excess fuck-you cash, it's clearly a runway planning scenario. Giving the example of a company that basically shut down while paying their employees to do nothing isn't helping make your point.
Your missing his point. He used this as an opportunity to increase loyalty, keep a trained functioning team together at decent wages which were able to outperform other companies who laided off, rehired months later at greater costs, no loyalty and starting from ground zero.
The pandemic had "paycheck protection program" or PPP and a second round of this called PPP2 also. This program payed out billions to employers to keep employees, rather than let them go on unemployment, which would have been less productive to the country and maybe even cost the government more in those $600 per week in unemployment, per person. I seriously doubt any startup could otherwise have kept their employees thanks to their 'war chest.' Normally startups don't have a war chest at all.
This startup had a 2 year runway after factoring in their office lease. Dropping the lease (since no one was coming in anyway) would have extended that. But you're right about PPP. They got PPP money a few months after the pandemic started.
How about an email from the executives who made the mistake of driving the company into the ground, who are humanely (or even humanly) resigning, so that you could be paid your salary that they'd promised you?
All the stock that the executives dumped could easily pay the salaries of all the people they screwed. And by resigning, they would open up some nice corner offices for all the people who they hired while fully knowing they were going to need to fire a lot of people soon.
>Coinbase insiders dump nearly $5 billion in COIN stock shortly after listing
>After an edict to remain "mission focused," Coinbase executives have succeeded in making themselves a fortune.
>Insider activity reports for Coinbase’s COIN stock indicate that multiple early investors and executives sold billions in equity shortly after COIN’s direct listing. While the filings initially indicated that multiple executives sold a high percentage of their stake in the company, a representative for Coinbase told Cointelegraph that the sellers maintain strong ownership positions.
>Data from Capital Market Laboratories and confirmed by filings on Coinbase’s Investor Relations website shows a total of 12,965,079 shares were sold by insiders, worth over $4.6 billion at COIN’s $344.38 per share Friday close.
>Notable transactions include Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas selling some 255,500 shares at a price of $388.73 (though her Form 4 states that she retains options), while CEO Brian Armstrong sold 749,999 shares in three transactions at various prices, netting a total of $291,827,966.
>According to his Form 4 disclosure, after the sale Armstrong retains 300,001 shares worth over $1 billion. In a filing prior to the direct listing however, he was reported to have 36,851,833 shares, indicating that he sold just over 2% of his stake in the company.
I'm always surprised by how high SBC is for executives these days at some of these firms. When I was starting out after college, was at successful start-up. Two differences (1) The CEO and Founders made money but nothing like today, maybe $50-75M and they just held the stock for years and (2) The secretaries from the early days actually made $2-3M when the firm went public. Not sure that happens today.
Exit interviews are an opportunity for the formerly employed to air and address their grievances too. I think it precludes a (generally) necessary transfer of information when an email is sent en lieu of a substantive discussion.
As someone who’s been on both sides of the proverbial desk, I’ve come away frustrated but enlightened in some way almost every time.
there's literally zero upside for the employee to say the truth - or anything at all - in an exit interview and basically unlimited downside. maybe you got lucky?
It's not just about the method of communication, it's also about being made whole. These people should be getting severance. Also in America your healthcare is almost inextricably tied to your employer.
Perhaps this is a moment where those that would get a severance at all with a job loss acknowledge that workers rights matter, for everyone. You think that a majority of the restaurant workers during the lockdowns got severances? Perhaps it's time we separate healthcare from our workplace. If it wasn't crypto, maybe I'd be more sympathetic. Bad bets made all around in this case.
According to the article, they likely are getting severance.
Those affected will gain access to the company’s “generous severance philosophy” and “a talent hub to allow them to opt-in to receive additional support services.” (The details surrounding the severance package are unclear, but some affected workers on Blind alleged they would receive two months worth of base pay; a representative from Coinbase did not provide further comment.)
I’ve read two months pay in a CNBC article, which for most of these folks is tens of thousands of dollars. They won’t be starving by any means while they search for a new job.
Isn't hiring excessively sloppy? In tech when times are good, everyone's desperately throwing warm bodies in chairs. I'm sure many have thought to themselves, "I'm glad I'm getting paid, but is my job really that necessary? Do we need a six-person Button Component Team?"
can’t find the tweet right now but saw one where a candidate showed an email where a recruiter or hiring manager literally promised a few weeks earlier to not rescind their offer before rescinding it
> Preserving cash flow is important. But you also have to do things carefully, openly, and with genuine care for the people who've believed in your vision.
So firing people who have actively worked on the vision is better than firing people who haven't started working yet? You seem to be taking things backwards.
This option is quite a lot better than the alternative.
Coinbase tried to recruit me last summer. I politely told the recruiter that I felt it was all bubble speculation mania. Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects.
I guess I was right? Not trying to brag or anything. Just a tip to everyone job hunting I guess. Watch what executives do (not what they say). Well, and human history of speculative bubbles.
I didn't think it was a coincidence Coinbase did a direct listing rather than an IPO, since an IPO has a waiting period for insiders to sell. I think insiders knew they had a limited window of cheap money froth.
> Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects.
As you note, since it was a direct listing and not an IPO, there isn't really an analog to many other companies.
My opinion about why they did a direct listing is because institutional investors didn't want to touch it, and that memetail traders (a portmanteau of meme and retail) are undiscerning at any valuation.
The company didn't sell any shares or make any money from the direct listing itself, so that means the only people that could make money or provide any shares for making a market at all would be existing shareholders that have a lot of shares. It's impossible to levy criticism both ways simultaneously, just to smugly pat yourself on the back, but there are other reasons to.
The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. A significant reason I avoided Coinbase's attempt at a 100 billion dollar direct listing is because there would be no stabilizing bid and retail doesn't have enough capital to simulate one.
> The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price.
Do you mean that you would have gotten the shares and would sell your shares at this point with a certain guarantee on the price, or something else?
In an IPO, the company sells a bunch of shares to banks, and this is a funding round for the company. The banks then immediately try to sell the shares at a slightly higher price to retail, and also collude and post a bunch of money on the buy side of the order books to give the illusion of demand. Psychologically this is commonly effective at getting retail to hop in front of these orders and purchase at higher prices and feel like they can sell at any time, leading them to be less discerning about what price they'll purchase at. And yes, they can sell directly into the stabilizing bid. It doesn't guarantee a price, thats too strong of a word for what this is. The bid can be removed at any time, the only thing exceptional is that the bid can be placed at all, as this would otherwise be sanctionable activity by the regulator or private litigants.
The participation of the banks is really spot on. And at peak mania you could see companies pop 100% on listing day despite having been bumped 100% the day prior to listing. The underwriting for the shares is a total farce, also shepherded by the same banks with insider holdings, and hence a conflict of interest to be honest with it.
There is dilution in a “final” equity round, and then the banks are immediately flipping them to people that believe they are helping the company but are just getting dumped on by the banks, as all help was done by the banks
I theoretically like direct listings more, but I don’t like retails tolerance of getting screwed in a different way because the valuations are unsupportable
I just like exposure and liquidity, so float the shares one way or the other! People should be pragmatic about what they are participating in
I told them something similar (didn't know about the CFO, I don't care enough to pay attention).
I'm also amused by the headhunter I heard from who apparently was trying to specialize in whatevercoin/NFT/etc. startups. I politely told him I would entertain any non-"web3" plays, and he started telling me how I was making the worst career choice of my life and turning away money, etc.
Wonder how he feels about his career right now.
I will admit to a little schadenfreude, but more generally it just saddens me. Idiot greed is eternal, I know, it is just a bit depressing to watch the destructive nonsense play out.
Pretty good, for all the money he collected placing developers in these crap bubble jobs. A little sad, that recruiting is going to be down for a couple years before he can start cajoling developers to take some other kind of new-fangled job that he doesn't understand.
I honestly don't get the point of Coinbase. Isn't it a centralized system to manage what is supposed to be decentralized and that kinda defeats the purpose? I may be dumb.
You are indeed not dumb. Coinbase is a bit of an oxymoron. If decentralized value exchange takes off, that will surely be the end of Coinbase. To a degree, Coinbase's demise is baked into crypto's success - which is kinda funny to think about. Coinbase has always seemed like a bit of a money grab, and crypto veterans sort've treat it this way.
Email is a decentralized protocol and the fact that you use a centralized provider such as gmail only somewhat defeats the purpose of email being a decentralized protocol instead of Google Messenger.
Email is _a bit_ similar, but the analogy doesn't work too well. While email might be a decentralized protocol, participation in the protocol requires quite a bit of technical effort. Whereas in crypto (e.g., Bitcoin) you can participate by just downloading a simple client and sending transactions via a nice little UI. In your example, Google actually provides a pretty huge value add by abstracting the complexities of participating in the email protocol away from the user. Crypto protocols (insofar as the assets provided by Coinbase) don't really get _that_ complex
It's even weirder than that, it's like if Google received your messages for you and bundled them up with everyone else's, then allowed you to read your share of the bundle but never actually delivered them to you as far as the protocol is concerned.
The email protocol isn't complicated though. Back before spam was a thing, lots of people could just open a port and manually talk SMTP (you could send messages as Santa, or whatever). The only service Gmail provides that's not trivial (and I mean, something that can be done in a whiteboard interview) is the spam protection.
With the accessibility of ML these days, I'm less convinced that spam protection is that hard, if you have a little bit of patience. The spam I get is repetitive and bad, and I get enough of it that I think I could get a workable model simply by using Gmail's spam tagging to train it.
Back in the day ('noughties through 2015 or so) there was POPFile, which did Bayesian classification of emails for spam filtering. John Graham-Cumming wrote it, and it worked reasonably well. I still think of him as the POPFile guy first, then remember he's the Cloudflare CTO.
A more advanced classifier certainly do better these days.
You have a point but not quite the same. Email is not a speculative instrument which makes Coinbase a very risky proposition for people who are using it for transactions. I can also change Email providers (can be painful sure but possible).
By that metric banks are decentralised too - my bank only speaks to another bank over a protocol but fundamentally just trusts the other side is good for it
I'm not very familiar with the subject but I don't believe the protocols used in banking are very decentralized. I'd be very surprised if you told me SWIFT was permissionless, for instance.
Crypto is indeed a decentralized system (well, the well-functioning ones at least).
However, it's also a closed system and you need to get crypto from somewhere. A centralized exchange is the most efficient facilitator of buying/selling crypto, and after that you can withdraw it and enjoy digital transfers without a centralized party.
(You can also get crypto buy mining or selling things for it, or even buy it for cash, but an exchange like Coinbase is much faster and more convenient.)
As we all know our beloved Terra offered 20%, and this is definitely on the lower side! Pls buy into it now while it is on discount and don't ask where the money is actually supposed to come from.
Coinbase is the lowest-friction, most legal, way to buy into crypto. They make it easy for nontechnical novices to get set up, and they comply with KYC laws etc. This has helped them build a large customer base and stay on regulators' good sides. Think of them as Crypto Robinhood, if that helps, though once you get into the weeds they have very different business models.
Note that Ted Gioia (in his interview with Rick Beato) said the same thing about Spotify: insiders had no lockup period, so they dumped the stock right away.
The next will be the same as this one, s*tcoins will lose most value, while Bitcoin and Ethereum will retain a reasonable amount of value. The problem is suckers think the altcoins are going to be their ticket to riches. Those that get in early do indeed gain, but those that are late to the scheme end up holding the bag.
Yah. I think distributed ledgers are here to stay, as are some tokens of stored value. But I don't think the insane bidding up of many tokens will ever happen again.
What exactly makes you think that? As far as I can tell, it's still unclear if distributed ledgers are really effective tools for much of anything. What real problems have they solved?
Non-repudiation is an important problem. Some things we can rely upon trusted third parties, but all kinds of things we rely on imperfect systems with notaries and trusted third parties can be more effectively solved with ledgers.
A whole lot of the interesting applications are non-monetary-- proving that a record was produced and made available before a certain time and has not been tampered with since.
As a world economy, we spend like $100B/year on notarizing things and related kinds of non-repudiation record keeping. If it was really cheap, we'd do much more. And a big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries.
> big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries
These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it. Ledger-based solutions tend to focus on a tiny technical step of a big process without considering whether that's a bottleneck or even a non-negligible part and whether improving it actually results in a better solution.
I used to sympathize and engage with the theoretical arguments; but at this point a more productive approach is: if the advantages are such and such, where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage? Maybe this competitive advantage doesn't exist at all?
> These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it.
The closest analog to crypto distributed ledgers is, well, ledgers. If you look around you, there probably isn't a single product that could have been produced without the adoption of double entry accounting. And yet that adoption process took around 300 years.
Crypto is on the exact same trajectory. When people look around them in 300 years, there probably won't be a single product that could have been created without distributed ledger technology. But obviously this isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes.
The IQ test is being able to see the trend even though crypto is currently at literally 0.00% adoption (on the basis of total financial transactions). Sooner or later, reality always goes to par with the math.
> And yet that adoption process took around 300 years.
People used ledgers right after they were created, by definition, and long enough to go through all these years without that practice disappearing and without speculation to prop them up. So they brought value from the very beginning. Speculation prevents this logic from applying to blockchains (the value is making money by extracting it from gullible users).
> the trend
Which trend? If anything it's stagnant with just more scams, I still don't know anyone who uses cryptocurrencies for anything other than speculation.
> I used to sympathize and engage with the theoretical arguments; but at this point a more productive approach is: if the advantages are such and such,
Distributed ledgers are being used for real business cases in banking. Realizing these full benefits will take a very slow process of societal adoption and legal/evidentiary recognition.
I said "not going away". These use cases are going to slowly grow and become ubiquitous, but it will be a very slow process. It isn't some overnight disruption where notaries vanish and banking is dis-intermediated in the next 5 years.
> where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage
E.g. JP Morgan and Liink are quietly connecting hundreds of banks and using it to more robustly and quickly move payment-related information between banks.
> Distributed ledgers are being used for real business cases in banking. Realizing these full benefits will take a very slow process of societal adoption and legal/evidentiary recognition.
Looking at JPMorgan's Liink, there is no proof that this is anything more than a cynical publicity stunt to try to capture some of the money sloshing around in the crypto hype. Most of its touted features are things that could have been done without blockchain and should have been done decades ago if they were willing to invest in modernizing things.
> cynical publicity stunt to try to capture some of the money sloshing around in the crypto hype
It's not being sold to end-user rubes. It's a way to try and suck banks into JPMorgan's technology ecosystem (promising to settle repurchase agreements faster and save lots of interest intraday).
It's not huge yet-- only about $1 billion per day flows through it.
> JP Morgan and Liink are quietly connecting hundreds of banks and using it to more robustly and quickly move payment-related information between banks.
At this point you're trusting JP Morgan and link to run the ledger. What if I disagree with a transaction and fork the ledger? How is this any different to JP Morgan running a SQL database and speaking a common protocol?
> (Of course, JP Morgan likely dominates both at this point, but they don't have to).
So what happens if someone comes along and stakes $X Billion and becomes the majority stakeholder? Do you _really_ think that JP Morgan will just sit and let that happen? That they won't fork? That Deutsche Bank will continue to stand by the ledger if a group of anonymous traders from China become the majority stake?
> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
> (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.)
Liink appears to have all three elements Schneier describes-- an immutable ledger distributed over many participants that any of the participants can read; the ETH consensus algorithm; and the third is a US-dollar backed stablecoin.
> In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features.
Yes, there's a limited number of participants with varying degrees of mutual trust. So this criticism is accurate, but I don't find the actual mechanism you get worthless.
In any case, note that what I said was not that blockchain was here to stay, but distributed ledgers. So even if one got rid of the specific consensus algorithm and the value token, you'd still have a distributed ledger.
As the other commenters have pointed out already, it seems to be a permissioned blockchain if anything, exactly what Schneier describes as already having existed for decades, nothing new, just marketing.
In particular it's not about having many trusted participants, it's about being public without any trust (from the blog post: "This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it").
Again, I never said "blockchain is here to stay"-- just distributed ledgers. And, yes, distributed ledgers have existed forever, but their use by market participants at arm's length is new, as are many new tools we can use to build useful distributed ledgers (including blockchains!).
Dude I knew someone who work on that, it's not actually used for anything, just exist so that Jamie can check off "blockchain" in the next shareholders meeting. Private blockchain makes 0 sense.
Nowhere did I suggest investing in crypto (indeed, I have a track record of the opposite, and I was mostly agreeing with someone who was suggesting the opposite), so your comment is unhelpful.
It'll happen again. It will just be a new set of coins/tokens, with new promises of new utility, and a new set of gullible people being takem advantage of. The sad part is schemes of the sort damage the image of actual future usefulness of blockchain technology. For now the crypto winter sets in, until the next thaw.
at this point there’s so much investment and attention dedicated to it that it will be willed into continued relevancy as much as anything happening organicly
The stock market goes up because the world economy goes up, allowing companies to make more profit. Someday that might stop, but it’s been going strong since the industrial revolution.
Cryptocurrencies don’t have that kind of track record. They also provide dubious value to society at best currently.
Maybe not. Crypto has never been through a general recession. A lot of net-loss stuff, from Uber to WeWork, was propped up by zero interest rates. That's over.
There will be other bubbles in future, but probably in other areas.
> So if tulipmania wasn’t actually a calamity, why was it made out to be one? We have tetchy Christian moralists to blame for that. With great wealth comes great social anxiety, or as historian Simon Schama writes in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, “The prodigious quality of their success went to their heads, but it also made them a bit queasy.” All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.
"merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations."
The problem for Coinbase, is that on the next boom cycle, a significant number of traditional stock exchanges will be slurping their milkshake.
Coinbase has only gotten as big as it is because they were effectively the most legit American exchange selling crypto. With Robinhood, Square, Paypal, and even legacy exchanges getting in the game, they won't have that advantage next time around.
Insiders sell stock whether executives or employees. Otherwise why work for a company and get compensated in stock if selling it was banned / frowned upon?
I think Brian Armstrong downsized his stake from ~300k shares to ~30k late last year. Has any company ever done well after such a sell-off from insiders?
investment is a pretty strong term for what a lot of us did to make money at btc.
I made quite a bit of money by throwing my ex-gaming 4870x2 radeon machine into a closet for a year.
my investment was a few bucks in energy, and an old computer that was going to become e-waste, and a few minutes time.
I got lucky that at the time this was a feasible strategy before ASIC domination -- but this 'investment' wasn't anything like the rest of my portfolio by any means.
Mining can be an investment, if you can stomach the volatility and have a plan to mitigate the risk. But buying a currency with the mere hope that it will go up is just speculation, pure and simple.
Let’s ask “Why are they doing this?” I will start by saying most indications are that the management is very rational.
Sometimes companies use downturns to get rid of people that they haven’t managed properly. It’s lazy, but cutting the bottom 10% in a layoff can be less short term work than performance reviews. They avoid the PR issues by saying “everyone is doing it.” This isn’t what Coinbase did.
If companies are cash flow negative and can’t get funding, they may reneg on offers too. This is what the banks did it 2008 and tech did in 2001. People see the burn and get it. The firms survive the reputations damage because they can say “we don’t want you to join if we are about to go under and we need to save cash.” This isn’t what Coinbase is doing.
Coinbase is still cash flow positive and has positive earnings. So why are they doing this? My sense is they see what’s coming. It’s either volume will shrink, leaving them unable to cover fixed costs, or some other seismic shift in crypto that will cost them a fortune. They are rational and have tremendous data on the crypto world. To me this is an incredibly bearish sign. But it’s also a very prudent sign on their part. (They feel the current risk is higher than future hiring challenges)
Please don’t take this as investment advice on COIN or crypto.
> So why are they doing this? My sense is they see what’s coming.
I think this vastly overestimates how efficiently corporations are actually run.
I've been in meetings with executives at several public companies. When the topic of adjusting HC or spending money comes up, usually those conversations happen in a ratio of 50% politics, 40% wild-ass opinion, and 10% data. And almost always, the "data" are completely cherry-picked, highly speculative nonsense that someone asked a BI team to produce to support their own political agenda. Now, I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy, but IMO there is pretty much zero correlation between their actions and having some kind of crystal ball on the market.
Seconding this. I work as a contractor at a Fortune 100, and have been there long enough, and am now highly enough ranked, that I see most of the decision pipeline from the C suite down to the intern I'm helping. The a-rationality of it is shocking. No one two steps above me really understands what our project does or how it makes money, only how it plays into the spreadsheets; and yet decisions come down from above that layer that have blistering consequences for us, with no apparent relation to our reality, but probably make a cell on a spreadsheet green instead of red.
Arguably, that's just how well things can work at this scale. A CEO of a company that large who can see all the way down to me would be a nano-manager who should be fired. But it's still incredibly frustrating to be implementing decisions that affect me (such as a hiring or spending freeze), knowing that it was decided blindly with respect to me.
As I near retirement, I'm starting to believe that any organization run substantially by spreadsheets alone is too large, meaning that profit is wasted on organizational overhead, and investors should be dismantling such companies into smaller ones.
Having had the same experience this is why I prefer to invest in small cap companies. The amount of overhead and waste in big companies is insane and overwhelming.
One would think that there's an enormous chance for optimization at companies at this scale, especially because everyone at the bottom know what is/isn't working but for various reasons, companies are very bad at doing this.
> I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy
I’d say that a company that makes an offer today and reneges it tomorrow is not a healthy company. It’s certainly not a company I’d work for. We aren’t talking about contracts underwritten 3 years ago.
I think it makes a difference if the founders of the corporation are still the CEO. At any rate crypto goes through very quick bull/bear cycles, with the most recent downturn being in 2018 & 2019. And they can easily see broad volume stats across the industry (it's all on-chain after all).
Ive been in these types of meetings at public companies. I think this is too pessimistic. The bigger issue is even with reasonable intentions and data, their ability to predict the future is limited.
I.e., general rule, don't assign to malice which can be explained by incompetency.
Jim Chanos, who famously shorted Enron and failed shorting Tesla, has been shorting Coinbase. He noted that Coinbase is making ~4% on AUM while Charles Schwab makes maybe ~0.5%. Surely this must come down.
Apparently, folks with offers received an email two weeks ago, when the hiring freeze was announced, saying no offers would be rescinded. Did management change their minds in just two weeks?
The only reason you cannot say Coinbase is isn't a scam is because it is impossible to prove that the people involved were lying in regards to the viability of crypto not being effectively a Ponzi scheme.
It is very difficult to believe Brian Armstrong was cynically cashing in on what he perceived as a Ponzi ten years ago when he founded Coinbase (he posted an ad for a co-founder here on HN).
Unless you personally know him well and have spoken with him at length about this, I don't think that opinion is based on anything substantial. A post on HN looking for a cofounder tells you only what the person wants you to believe they're thinking and feeling about what they're doing.
My opinion is based on it being completely insane to stake multiple years of your life on starting a cryptocurrency exchange in 2012 unless you had a sincere belief in the promise of blockchain technology. Crypto circa 2012 didn't look anything like what it is now.
Agree with the sibling that people make insane gambles all the time.
But beyond that, I don't think your premise holds true. People do often start companies because they believe in (or even have a passion for) the thing their company will be doing. But people often just start companies because they believe those companies can make them money. That doesn't mean that the thing the company does is going to be good and sustainable over the longer term. Just that there's some money to be made, even if it's on the backs of speculators and gamblers that don't provide much value to the ecosystem.
People make insane gambles all the time? Some of the most neurotic people find success.
Imagine you could peer into all the class A gamblers, there'll always be a subset who get lucky and convince themselves they "worked harder' or whatever.
Point is, without proper interrogation, it looks like a gamble and crypto looks like a scam. There's always tops of pyramid schemes.
Not really. Just you don't know what you don't know. You're not going to get a reliable feel for someone's motivations unless you actually know them and spend a bit of time talking to them about what they're doing. A "cofounder wanted" post on HN doesn't remotely cut it.
I think the Ponzi claims stem from the fact that so many people are in the market for speculative profit (and not to revolutionize finance or whatever), and the fact that earlier investors can only capitalize on their investments by proselytizing, recruiting, and ultimately selling their bags to new investors. Framed that way, it’s quite Ponzi-ish.
This is true of any value storage vehicle. You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. Art, baseball cards, stamps, stocks, gold etc. all work this way.
Unlike cryptos, gold and stocks have real material value behind them, not just community buy-in.
You can make the art/baseball cards/stamps argument, but then you’d be conceding that the value of cryptos — something pitched as a revolutionary technology with limitless profit potential — is, in reality, determined by the same irrational valuation process as niche collectible markets.
There’s a reason we don’t pay for groceries and mortgages with baseball cards and stamps.
I’d love to hear more about the distinction between “real material value” and “community buy-in” value. It’s not a distinction I’m familiar with from my more than 20-year career in finance.
Cryptos have value because their investors all agree that they do. That’s where it ends. If those investors stopped believing that, their value would drop to zero because there’s no underlying material value supporting it’s market value. They’re shared delusions, and arguably self-perpetuating high-control groups.
What I’m calling “real material value” are things like physical assets and profit generation capacity. Companies own things, and they use those things to generate profit, which in turn filters down to investors. This dynamic doesn’t exist in crypto.
Gold has real material value as a useful product, not simply a store of value.
I’ve only worked in finance for 6 years, and only on the technical side, so forgive me if my vocabulary doesn’t meet your standards.
If you’re actually disagreeing with the point that I’m making, and not just being pedantic, please let me know who you work for so I can be sure to avoid their services in the future.
What I’m actually trying - and apparently failing - to do is get you to reassess your misplaced confidence. You have a toy-like, airbrushed conception of value that is doing you an analytical disservice.
If you’re in finance and interested in value, find a great textbook and get to reading. It’s a fascinating topic.
I’ll leave you with Goethe: “Doubt grows with knowledge.”
This comment implies a great sense of knowledge, authority, and superiority on your part. But it doesn't demonstrate any of that. You couldn't even recommend specific reading. Just "a great textbook".
I’m not gatekeeping. Parent’s misconception wouldn’t survive contact with any decent first-year undergraduate finance text book. There’s plenty of great curricula freely available on OCW, EdX, etc. Take your pick. Just read something.
I usually just ignore this stuff. But people repeat this garbage over, and over, and over on HN to disdain others (have a look at examples in this thread) and it’s just plain wrong.
Anytime someone talks about how xx "isn't backed by anything, like gold" I know they haven't actually put in a modicum of intellectual work on the topic. Granted, figuring out that money of every stripe is nothing more than a belief coordination mechanism is kind of a mindfuck. Even so, you'd think smart people would at least begin down the road. But nope.
Everyone is well aware that the USD is just a worthless piece of paper. No one is suggesting that owning gold is the path to riches. We are just pointing out that investing is crypto is no different than investing in Enron or Bernie Madoffs funds.
The point I'm making, and that parent is making, isn't about gold as a path to riches. It's about where value comes from. Gold is a convenient illustration.
Whatever you’ve gotta tell yourself, buddy. I make reliable extra income every month relieving experts and believers like yourself of your crypto capital, so by all means, never change. The system needs suckers.
None of the things you mentioned are "value storage vehicles". Currencies may be a stores of value.
Gold is a hedge against hyper inflation and global crisis.
Art is an elaborate mechanism for money laundering.
Baseball, stamps, and pokemon cards are collectibles and eb and flow with the tides of pop culture
And I am too tired to explain stocks to you.
> You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person.
It might actual shock you to learn that the US money supply historically grows faster than inflation.
People can and do speculate on collectables. The difference is that there is underlying value in the collectable. There are people who would like to own a Babe Ruth signed baseball just because it is a unique piece of sports history and have no plan to sell the baseball when the price goes up.
Speculation on that asset can make the price go up far above the underlying value. But that comes at a high risk of the price falling down to the underlying value. For crypto this underlying value is basically zero.
If only I had a dime for every time someone on HN unironically threw around the term “underlying value” like it meant something they could build an argument off.
I also think the putative concept of “underlying value” - always defined in opposition to some other form of value the speaker is railing against - is a lazy rhetorical crutch that provides nothing of analytical value to a discussion.
Every time these crypto threads come along we have tens of people drawing this same distinction and hordes of software engineers nodding along in agreement like it’s actually a thing. It’s not a thing. At least, not the way it’s deployed here.
Usually I just ignore it but it’s beginning to pass into accepted wisdom through sheer repetition.
So to me it sounds like you do acknowledge the concept of underlying value. A house has utility, it is scarce, there is competition for it, ergo its value is a function of demand for the asset (aka a proxy for the utility of owning the asset). This can be extrapolated to other assets besides houses. Unclear if it can be to crypto, it’s sort of you believe or you don’t on that one. I think that’s what people mean when they say it has no underlying value.
TLDR scarcity + utility is where value comes from. Crypto really only has scarcity arguing for it. Much like collectibles actually.
There’s just “value”. People use the term “underlying value” as a proxy for “real value”, in opposition to “not real value”. You can verify that by looking at any example of its use in this thread.
I’m saying it’s a rhetorical crutch that doesn’t lead to meaningful discussion or insight.
If people acknowledged in these threads that “value” is way more complex and nebulous than these facile comparisons make it out to be, we’d have more interesting discussion.
I think it’s clear people are distinguishing value based purely on speculation in a scarce asset and value based on demand (and still maybe speculation) for some underlying good which has utility. Be that a house, a car, or stock of a SaaS business, a retail operation, whatever.
Yeah I see what darkteflon is saying but he is clearly wrong. And condescending about it to boot. There is a meaningful and discussion worthy difference between “value” (price, really), driven by speculation and hope versus price driven by demand for scarce goods which have utility.
Wealth isn’t denominated in currency - price is an exchange rate to another system of faith.
Value is the length people will go to acquire an asset. Utility is only one dimension. And true utility is arguably far less important than perceived utility. Being convinced something like gold has intrinsic utility that justifies its current exchange rate is sufficient to carry the current price regardless of whether that belief is based in reality.
I’m just saying with crypto all we have is its price to go on, plus fuzzy allusions from people like you about how value is beyond the understanding of the unwashed masses.
For an otherwise useless digital token which can only be held or exchanged, its price would seem to be pretty relevant when discussing its value as it literally only has exchange value and no utility.
A huge percentage of economic activity has a strong correlation with real world utility. Food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, childcare, medical care, banking services are all dependent on real utility being delivered in a short timeframe. If a top rated restaurant hired a new chef that was terrible and then failed it's health inspection and gave all of its customers food poisoning they would quickly lose perceived value.
I would agree that perceived value is more important than real value, but it is risky to place bets on there being a big difference between the two for a long time.
This is borderline arguing in bad faith. You’ll need to demonstrate a good faith argument to continue this conversation.
All value is psychological. Money is a behavioral coordination system. Believing gold has an intrinsic value that justifies trading at $1.8k an oz is sufficient for gold to trade at that value - regardless of gold’s real utility to any holder of gold. It’s the belief that drives the value.
Every single thing you hold that you believe has value either:
1) has direct value to you or
2) can be traded for something that has direct value to you
History is full of people who mistakenly believed their wealth was far more “real” than it was.
You are right that psychological value is all that matters, you just need to take your logic one step further.
When the Dole company buys a banana plantation, it is because they believe that consumers will want to buy bananas in the future. That future may or may not become "real". This is where your logic ends. You have proven that perceived value is all that matters and have stopped.
You need to understand that a year later millions of bananas will be ready to harvest. And grocery stores will be placing or not placing orders to have those bananas delivered. So that perceived value is now hitting reality. The crypto people have done a pretty good job kicking the can down the road and avoiding reality hitting their perceived value, but it is hard to keep that up forever.
What, seriously, what are you talking about with the bad faith? We’re responding to your comment which said baseball cards and stocks worked the same way.
It’s bad faith to point out how wrong what you said was? Sorry about that, guess we can’t talk anymore.
Coinbase doesn't do the Blockchain part, except as much as needed to enable a blockchain
-adjacent thing for people who don't want the blockchain part.
I'm not sure it's clairvoyance so much as risk management. They see a possible future in which they are unable to survive at current spend, and based on conservative management principles they've decided to make the tough decisions that keep corporate failure out of the set of reasonably foreseeable outcomes.
Realistically, if they could
actually predict the crypto market, they wouldn't need to worry about money period.
Word on the grapevine is that there’s a new bill coming up that would classify any crypto that had a presale or ICO as a security. This would include practically 99% of all popular coins, but would still classify BTC as a commodity (since it didn’t have an ICO/presale)
If this is true, Coinbase - and crypto - are in for a rough time
2 weeks ago they sent out emails saying "we will not be rescinding the offers of any employees who have already signed or have received an offer from us".
They then proceeded to rescind offers from people who received this assurance.
2 weeks is long enough that people signed leases, resigned from jobs, moved cities. And yet it's also short enough that Coinbase leadership was certainly already preparing to make this decision.
These are hallmarks of people being uncomfortable having difficult conversations. Either because they can’t, or they’ve been punished for trying by someone higher up.
I mean in all honesty it these prospective employees can hold out and get good counsel they may end up with 5+ years of salary in settlement negotiations.
It really depends, but 5 years salary for wrongful termination isn't far fetched. The fact that they sent an email saying this wouldn't happen and then it did does indicate breach of contract. They could be held responsible for compensatory damages to make up lost wages and punitive damages.
I spoke with Coinbase at a time where I was trying to get away from a job where I worked 70-100 hour weeks. I would always tell recruiters I was seeking better WLB as I didn’t want a company that would have a problem with that attitude. I was told by multiple people that late nights should be expected and Coinbase was not a 40 hour per week company. Further - there are 4 weeks a year where the company shuts down and everyone is “encouraged” to take their vacation during those times. Personally I like to select the weeks that I am off work. The comp was good but I ended up at Google making the same money with great WLB. My equity has been hit far less hard by recent market turmoil as well. Can’t even imagine getting a 6 figure equity package and having it devalue 70% and then grinding long hours.
FWIW the 1 week every 4 months is on top of your vacation, not "encouraged vacation", but rather a company wide recharge week
I agree those who started in the 6 months after IPO got the short end of a stick. The current packages are based on 90 day moving average IIRC. At least the grants being yearly helps in this case
Probably an unpopular opinion here but I think they handled it in a classy way. Severance and assistance with your job search? That’s very nice of them.
Other companies like Meta rescinded too, I’m not sure if they offered severance. Maybe just a generic email?
I didn't hear about Meta rescinding so I googled a bit. A few sources came up and it looks like it was a pretty specific scenario(s) about contractors, visa etc...but regular straight up offers are still good.
Meta did not rescind at scale. I recall seeing one Canadian new grad who was under the impression she'd be able to work at the Toronto office but which was rescinded for whatever reason. They followed up and were able to re-make the offer, though.
I mean, they may intend it as kindness, but it's also cheaper and easier to put that option up front than to deal with lawyers from each person who had a signed offer rescinded.
Absolutely. You could just literally stop showing up one day, it is the company’s problem at that point. 2 weeks notice is expected, and giving less is considered a bit of a betrayal, but it’s perfectly legal. As much as like the idea of having the security of a contact, being forced to work honestly seems kind of strange to me.
no-one's forced to work by a contract of employment
you can quit on the spot and ignore the notice period, and they can try suing you for lost business as a result, which is quite difficult to prove to any sort of standard
whereas it's generally very easy to go after an employer if they don't pay your notice if they sack you on the spot
LinkedIn should set up a code of practice that bans this. Rescind offers? Then you can't advertise on LinkedIn for the next 5 years, and we won't host your job posts either. That would change the calculations at these companies and make the jobs marketplace better, at little cost to LinkedIn.
Is LinkedIn a successful way to advertise jobs? I know it seems like they're all on there, but the last two times I hired, the LI crowd was by far the lowest quality. I got 700 applicants in a couple days (and 1000+ in a week) for a data science posting at a startup in 2019, almost all were entry-level applicants for a senior-level role. I don't blame the applicants, but it was basically impossible to wade through so many as a two-person team (me and the VP of Eng I was reporting to). I think LinkedIn is partially to blame in making it too easy to shoot off another application with near-zero marginal cost. We had much better luck with applicants direct to our jobs page.
I'm sure a company like Coinbase with their HR/recruiting resources has a rather different experience, though.
LinkedIn (a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation) has the worst "activity feed" algorithm I have ever seen. It is a dopamine-poking, engagement-optimizing mess. So I have very little confidence they would do anything for ethical reasons over money.
You won't be able to see individual updates/posts either, but just toggle off ublock when you do want to see someone's specific post. This has been huge for me to avoid all the virtue-signalling/pandering-to-the-Current-Thing crap that permeates the feed.
Would you be ok if they let recruiters have similar tools on linkedin, to filter out candidates who rescinded offers before? I am not trying to elicit some sympathy for coinbase here, I absolutely don't care about them or companies in general, but I don't think you've thought this proposal through.
Let's imagine the issue i mentioned above doesn't exist. Linkedin figured out a perfect way to figure out and filter out companies that rescinded offers. If that became a problem for companies, then a company would just hire someone and then lay them off immediately. Same result, but larger administrative/accounting overhead, so no severences for rescinded people, most likely. How would Linkedin track that? What's the time period cutoff for which laying someone off/firing them is considered "just a loophole around rescinding an offer"? A week? A month? How will you be able tell the difference between an instance of someone being fired within a short period of time after starting as a loophole around rescinding an offer vs. someone genuinely being fired within a month for whatever legitimate reason?
Imo i dont see how the current situation with coinbase/meta is a reason for such a major outrage. I could have understood it, if they were habitually known for rescinding offers as a part of their regular practice. But they don't, they all did it exactly once, at the same time, due to a very legitimate reason of a strong economic downturn affecting their survival/livelihood very badly. Imagine your spouse was having serious health problems, and you just found out you will need to take care of them for a year, right after you just accepted an offer from a company a few days ago. I think it is more than reasonable for that person to rescind their offer and tell the company they have something that's more important and that matters to their survival.
And that's not even mentioning that coinbase is paying severance worth 2 months of work (as well as provides job search assistance services, whatever that means) to those whose offers they rescinded. So those people essentially are paid for 2 months of job searching. Still sucks to deal with job search, don't get me wrong. But that severance package wasn't expected and feels pretty fair.
Would I be OK if LinkedIn gave similar tools to recruiters? No, because an applicant has a lot less power than a company. But I can see that recruiters would want that. So why wouldn't we want that on our side?
The "hire for a day, then fire" issue is interesting. Companies would tread more carefully there, though. Once you've hired someone, then you have a legal relationship with them. In the US, employment is at-will, but protections for firing due to race, gender, etc. still apply. So there's a lawsuit threat that would make this a dangerous game for companies to play.
Other threads claim that Meta did not actually rescind - those were more visa issues. Why is this such a big outrage? Because it's a breach in the norms of how job markets work. Re your analogy - Coinbase would certainly prefer not to have all these people in a downturn. But it certainly has options that the person with a spouse with health problems doesn't have. For example, executives could reduce their compensation temporarily to deal with this. The entering cohort of employees would make Coinbase less profitable, but won't by itself cause it to fail.
Do I really think that the CEO of Coinbase would take a 10% pay cut rather than rescind several offers? No. But the point is that Coinbase has options that mean it can do the ethical thing.
As awful as it is, letting people go is something that happens when doing business.
If you have to choose between resciding offers and leading your company to its death by running out of funds, the only sensible decision is the first one.
I also don't get why LinkedIn should be the HR police of 2022, this is nonsense.
I'd think so, I get dozens of recruiters reaching out every week. My current position I started a few months ago from a recruiter show reached out to me through LinkedIn as well.
A recruiter reaching out directly (warm leads) is very different from a LinkedIn job posting applicants apply to themselves (cold lead), and much harder to prevent. Of the recruiters I hear from, almost none of them point me to a LinkedIn job posting.
I cannot imagine how upsetting and stressful this would be, especially to individuals depending on work visas to lawfully remain in the country. Severance is some small solace, but wow. Shameful.
There are so many proper applications of blockchain that could improve humanity and provide value to customers and instead these shitheads create NFTs.
"But the US dollar is fiat" they will say, "what's the difference?!"
Gee, I dunno, the fact that the US Government backs it? All central banks use it? It's the reserve currency of the world? Any currency that isn't backed by a government or was widely used before there was a government (gold, for example) is a goddamn scam and I'm sick of it.
The US Dollar is tightly coupled with assets, and tangible goods and services that provide a substantial portion of its stability. Bitcoin, however, is based on burning through terawatts of electrical power in order to "prove work" and actually produce nothing but waste heat.
The irony is there's use cases for that waste heat.
- Utilities could use the extra boost of heat in winter
- producing potable water
The coin produced from these processes could then be used as tradable units. "Heat Coin" or "Fresh Water Coin" would ease the transaction of these resources.
Hence, we get to the root of the problem of any "Coin": it is inherently worthless without any real asset or unit of production to back it's value.
I think of crypto as a class of stock, instead of currency. Speculative valuation based on investor confidence.
Yes, it’s not backed by a real asset, so crypto is truly a sister to Monopoly money, but I don’t see an issue with investing as long as you recognize what crypto is and what it isn’t.
Arguably retail investors aren't actually investors either, but savers, speculating on whatever assets they buy having value when they need their dollar value.
> There are so many proper applications of blockchain that could improve humanity and provide value to customers and instead these shitheads create NFTs.
I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t wait until “web3” moves past the whole fintech thing and people start realizing the true value of Web3 technologies: the fact that you no longer need a third party to mediate interactions between individual users on the internet.
You’re thinking of blockchains, but I’m thinking more broadly of p2p systems. But even blockchains have the potential to satisfy the ideal that I have in mind. For example, I’ve often thought web2 SSO (sign in with Google/Facebook/etc) to be ripe for disruption by some open standard for wallet based authentication. I think I’ve even seen a few projects that come close to this.
At any rate, this is the part I find interesting. The money games are a huge distraction IMHO.
I have quite a few disorganized thoughts on the subject… maybe I should write an essay…
More broadly that sounds more like web1, not web3.
For sign in there are distributed ways. SQRL by Steve Gibson is one, that is just first and second party. No third party needed, distributed or not.
But really, any public key system, like gpg web of trust would do it.
You could even do mTLS, with self-signed certs. Or build an identity tree with signed certs.
Like all things Blockchain there's always the open question to any solution of "but why not just do it without the Blockchain, and it'll be better faster stronger?".
Indeed i see many stories of solutions where they ended up just removing the Blockchain in the end, with no loss of functionality.
If you write up your thoughts then please look at non-blockchain alternatives.
Like why is a gpg key not identity, or not good enough, but a Blockchain solution would be?
Companies that are rescinding offers are just terribly managed companies. If you're in that bad of shape, then you should have done a hiring freeze months ago and there shouldn't have been any offers left to rescind (sure, there are odd ones where maybe they accepted 3 months early).
In addition to bad management, the contrast of the CEO buying a $133 million compound in Bel Air while throwing employees out on the street is just too stark.
Not many companies expect or plan for their valuation to drop 75% in 6 months, that's gonna lead to tough choices. In the case of coinbase I'm guessing they're also seeing trade volume (and therefore future revenue) plummet and don't project it to increase anytime soon. Not sure this is evidence of a horribly managed company so much as a company dealing with a crisis and doing costly things to their reputation to manage it.
It's less nice and more that they're paying people to sign away their right to sue.
Imagine you've left your job, you probably don't want to go back there. You have to start a new job search. You're likely out more than one month's salary. Plus the intangibles of a job search while unemployed vs. employed.
Imagine you declined COBRA, or even with COBRA, you might end up with a period of being responsible for your own health insurance payments, too.
You have a gap in your employment record where you otherwise wouldn't have had one. That affects credit decisions.
> COBRA is actually a terrible deal if you had a nice plan. You could pay a third to get a decent marketplace plan in most places
Unless you qualify for marketplace subsidies, marketplace plans aren't a better deal like for like, than the best deals on employer group plans. If you had a good employer plan, a minimal marketplace plan will be far cheaper, but switching insurers can have a nonfinancial transitional cost associated with networks changes that you may not want to deal with when transitioning to job hunting, and while for the average consumer a cheaper plan will usually also be lower cost, you may not be the average consumer; a cheaper plan that covers less may, as well as being a transitional headache, increase your total insurance + out of pocket cost.
The last time I looked at marketplace plans (in my state ymv). I couldn’t find a single one that had good enough coverage for this to be worth it. The person I was looking for hits their out of pocket max every year though, so it just depends on your usage. The best I could find was like 1k a month + a 12k out of pocket max, so 24k a year total. But ymmv
1 month is no where near enough. Folks probably left money on the table at the previous job to join Coinbase and now are going to be at a significant disadvantage negotiating for their next position.
One month severance is perfectly reasonable. They're under no obligation to make sure people are in a better position than they were before, and if someone walked away from options, etc at a previous company that's their business. One month is enough time to find a job if you aren't choosy.
You have to draw the line somewhere. When the economy goes south, guess what? People will be out of work. I don't know why white collar workers seem to think they need to be isolated from all bad events.
The only way 1 month severance is acceptable is if it becomes acceptable to give zero days notice to your old job, so you can ensure that you actually do start the new job
there actually is legal precedent that they are under obligation to not cause losses through lying. Promissory estoppel is the term and basically it means that if you incurred expenses or lost gains as a result of a false promise (like a rescinded job offer) the party making that false promise may have to make you whole.
So things like lost bonuses or options or moving expenses are very much something that Coinbase need worry about
A Coinbase recruiter sent me an email a few months ago with this emoji https://emojipedia.org/emoji/%F0%9F%93%88/ in the subject line; I politely told him that the emoji was rotated 90 degrees...
I kind of agree, but to get an offer letter you surely must have had at least one telephone call or video conference, if not several hours of in–person interviews.
It seems that they are paying a severance package of two months of base pay to try to compensate for that. [1]
[1]: "The details surrounding the severance package are unclear, but some affected workers on Blind alleged they would receive two months worth of base pay; a representative from Coinbase did not provide further comment."
This is meaningful and deserves more prominent placement. If you’re going to rug pull someone paying out $10k+ certainly takes some of the sting out.
I would love to have an offer rescinded with pay. If the company’s prospects are really that dim I wouldn’t want to join anyway. Getting a cash bonus to go somewhere else is even better.
Yea, apparently there are some compensating factors. Still, an email to tell you that they’re rescinding the offer is the easy way out; it avoids an awkward telephone call. It is easy to see why they went that route. I agree that it’s not the worst thing in the world though.
You can't get unfiltered answers to any follow up questions, taking that away from the applicant isn't great but yeah a lot of this is basically confusing proper behavior within business transactions with standard expectations of decency/behavior between friends or colleagues.
These companies, and your manager, and that recruiter is not your friend. Stories like these just pull back the veil and show that the mutually accepted delusion between employee/employer disappears when the bad times come.
> It is no different than been fired I don't understand the noise it is making
Exactly. Not sure what the fuss is all about other than these companies not caring about you.
I've seen worse and Fast straight up shut down [0] after assuming that the VCs will just bankroll them despite Fast making little to no money for years with an extremely inflated valuation in the multi-billions.
I think lots of people have also forgotten the change of policy that Tesla, Meta, Apple, and Google said about the 'Working from Home' option in the job description. Before it was 'we're 100% remote', then it was 'you can go remote but you'll get a paycut if you do', then it was 'back to the office by spring 2022' and now some employees who are back at the office are also having their benefits cut.
With any company, 'nothing' is guaranteed. Once again these companies DO NOT care about YOU.
'you can go remote but you'll get a paycut if you do'
No, it was 'you get a paycut if you move out of where you were working, into a lower-wage region.' Most (but not all) remote jobs in remote-only, or remote-first firms will cut your pay if you do that.
When the pandemic started, and the office closed, a few people certainly did just that (with, or without notifying their employer), but the firm never made any promises that this sort of thing will work out.
> then it was 'back to the office by spring 2022'
In some orgs/teams, yes. In others, no. In Meta/Google, this is not a corporate-wide mandate, this is up to your director to make a decision on. Mine has no problem with remote, and we've hired two 100% remote people in the past 6 months.
I don’t think Meta or Google are doing that for the most part. Yes there is a small pay cut if you move away but if they said you could be fully remote then they have honored that. And I don’t think Tesla or Apple ever advertised that roles could be fully remote forever.
That being said, you are absolutely right. Companies only care about employees to the extent they have to for retention. You always need a plan B, nothing is ever guaranteed.
Still a lot better than having you show up and then get laid off a week later. Typically happens in larger companies where your boss’s boss doesn’t know that his boss’s boss is about to lop off your department because her boss’s boss has to cut expenses.
I wonder how many excitedly gave their current boss a middle finger after getting that 7 figure offer from coinbase.
I know for a fact you can go back to the same team (and same level) in many FAANG companies without even interviewing. If you left on good terms that is.
Since this is essentially a coward's layoff, you might as well do a real layoff. It's hard to believe that they needed to cut back enough to not bring on a ~month's worth of hires, but not so much they they should do real layoffs.
When I interviewed at Coinbase 6 years ago, the interviewers felt egotistical and borderline incompetent. After I’d interviewed, they decided to change the open req to a different role.
By “egotistical”, I mean that the interviewer clearly believed he knew more than he actually did. It was that “I’m hot shit” vibe. I have worked across several roles in this industry over the last 20 years, and there was clearly inexperience on the other end of the phone.
That told me everything I needed to know about the company, and I was happy to move on from that experience.
A lot of these rescind offers are popping up on my social feeds. The majority appear to be foreign nationals who require work sponsorship to stay in the US.
The detail that they also reassured the people with offers that their offers would not be rescinded two weeks ago is wild. Did they expect this not to leak? Why weren’t they transparent about this total about face in the initial announcement?
The only thing I can think to do is gently blacklist this company (personally and amongst friends). This kinda behavior needs to have some kind of consequences, I think.
One of my friends recently interviewed with them. He told me about the experience he had and it seems like the worst experience I've ever come across. The interviewers he had were working on their job during the sessions, and one guy wasn't even allowing a quick Google search for some python 3.5 syntax reference.
The questions asked also seemed to be outrageous and silly for a 45 minute session. Felt like their process suits Machines rather than actual engineers lol.
Additionally, the entire process according to him was badly mismanaged by the recruiter so it feels like one of the worst companies to work at.
>Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr. JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy. On that moment Joe Kennedy had the intuition that we were at the end of the bull market and subsequently he decided to short the market and became .. multi-millionaire !
I think this is the third time I've seen this in my professional career. First during the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Then during the 2008 recession. Now again we are starting to see news everyday about another company going through layoffs. Soon there will be a tsunamai of hiring freezes and layoffs as every company gets in on this. If the past is anything to go by, things will be bad for a number of years, but then will greatly improve on the other side.
Coinbase is a dumpster fire. I moved states and they suddenly disabled my account. Which is fine, but they have now been holding my staked Ethereum hostage with no ability to withdraw.The support team has no capacity, ability nor the company has installed much incentive to help (besides hitting their resolution time metrics) even if they were willing.
I only air this out publicly since, it seems by design that they want to delay or prevent withdrawal of your funds. And there is no other recourse.
Explicitly caution everyone to move your holdings to a hardware wallet, and never stake anything on Coinbase. Not your keys, not your coins.
To be fair they are quite up front when you stake Ethereum that you cannot withdraw it before the network itself supports it... Hope they re-activate your account though!
dumpster fire sounds right. their support team is also basically non-existent, so if you ever have questions about your account, expect multiple days of waiting
Oh there's plenty of companies that have lost more than 100% of their value. If you go from a positive value to a negative value (e.g. you have outstanding liabilities that cannot be discharged), that's a >100% reduction in value.
One good example would be old mining companies that went bankrupt. Their value cratered to zero, AND now the corporate overlords that ended up acquiring them are spending neverending millions of dollars spent to clean up Superfund sites decade after decade. There are some liabilities that simply cannot be discharged.
It's pretty similar to other big 2021 IPOs. Rivian, Robinhood, UIPath, etc. The ones doing well are only down 50-60%.
Now, these companies have pretty good access to capital, and retail getting ripped off is no problem. The interesting part of this glacier is the pre-IPO ecosystem that is bleeding money and trying to avoid similar markdowns.
It's almost as if a business built on providing services for a half-baked libertarian meme / postmodern decentralised ponzi scheme has poor long term stability prospects.
It's not great, but how bad it is depends heavily on how they're compensating the people they did this to. Like, if everyone affected gets an immediate lump sum payment equivalent to say 4-6 months salary, it would be really not so terrible. The mere 1 month of salary they offered, though, is obviously completely unacceptable
Corporations manipulate human agency at scale for their benefit. Film at 11.
Please father, may I have another? I’m afraid I did not learn my lesson last time, says public through apathy to adjust agency.
Plenty of impotent rage and frustration. Hardly any exceptional deviation from routine of it. Such grit.
Last I checked, nothing is stopping teachers, nurses, programmers, from quitting and signing up their community to take advantage of their services.
Give a minority of bean counters authority to count your beans, don’t be surprised when your allotment comes up short.
Corporatism is effectively quota based communism everyone is afraid of; “your skills earn you this much per annum! No more! Remember the fundamentals!”
Secular propaganda repeated over and over to make it stick. Advertising and marketing spawned from WW2 propaganda research. They’re intentionally targeting biology religion stumbled upon.
Even if the Montana non-at-will provisions kicked in immediately, would it matter?
Non-at-will usually just means that that the company can only discharge people for categories of reasons enumerated in the law. In at-will states the company can terminate for any reason except for reasons that are specifically forbidden by law.
The acceptable reasons to discharge people in a non-at-will jurisdiction is likely to include reducing costs when the business is facing a downturn.
This is a very bullish sign (mid-long term). They see the writing on the wall and are doing a swift full throttle u turn.
Nobody likes doing this kind of stuff, its really bad for PR, really bad for the stock (short term) and messes with morale.. So for them to do with when they have billions in cash is very kewl.
Update on Hiring Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31600505 - June 2022 (466 comments)