Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work.
Sure, nothing can go wrong there... Even if they didn't have non-managerial work to do, 15+ direct reports is just too many. They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
I think as layoffs emails go, it's a pretty good one (as the current top comment points out[0]), but boy, I would not want to be working at a company like what Coinbase is turning into. Non-technical teams shipping code to prod? No thanks. "AI-native pods"? No thanks. I do like the idea of one-person teams; I was at my most productive when I was in that kind of role (though I'm not sure my experience generalizes). I get that companies are still struggling to figure out how to adapt to LLMs, but... damn.
Pretty solid severance package for the folks being laid off, though.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there. Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.
Don’t know if it will work with this weird arbitrary cap, because 15 is fine for some things and way too many for others.
Mandates do be like that.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
* Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement
* Having the respect of the team, to settle disputes
* Solving problems when needed
* Hiring and retaining an excellent team
* Picking the right things to work on
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Email is a thing.
What needs? If you squeeze people hard enough there are no needs anymore, only responsibilities and urgent+important backlogs that have no bottom.
Welcome to 2026.
Of course, as a manager my normal workload was reduced to account for the managerial tasks, because that's what most industries outside of tech do.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
Time will tell.
Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.
For sure this part screams LLM
Is there a flood of talent leaving after this one? Major breaches? Only time will tell.
Buckle up, and don’t forget your pudding!”
Except for that tone-deaf part at the end, where right after he talks to the people who "will be leaving" (that is, the people getting kicked out), he says that Coinbase will be stronger and healthier for this. Which makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that the people "leaving" are part of the unhealth.
The CEO probably does not even think that, and just wants to reduce costs. But from what was written, the implications are decidecly suboptimal.
Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
I don't expect ethical conduct from crypto companies and will not be sad if they are sued into oblivion.
This sounds suboptimal to me - probably the kind of employee I would avoid for as long as possible.
I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
{1} scottlamb: "I suspect their lofty stated goal of X is a lie, to disguise their true goal of Y, which is something common which companies find much easier and more-desirable."
{2} CityOfThrowaway: "You are wrong, because it's obvious that X is achievable... if you define 'native' in a certain way."
{3} Terr_: "Uh, what? That doesn't make sense. The feasibility of X isn't part of Scottlamb's argument. Even if we assume X is possible, it isn't evidence they actually intend X over Y.
Either it's badly named or people are trying to be included (?).
I'm not sure exactly which children they're planning to replace all their staff with, nor how they plan to get around the child labour laws.
Huh? If it came out this year then everybody had a chance to learn it this year?
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
See also "digital native", a popular term which is absolutely about growing up after the technology in question was ubiquitous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
I got laid off 3 years ago and got a mere 2 weeks + 1 month of COBRA. It was a tech company, but not a big one.
> COBRA is the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. It gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. [0]
Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?
I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder
They hear this from the sellside, from activists, from the guys managing their private market allocations etc.
- big institutional allocators
- activists
- the sellside
- guys managing their private market allocations
Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
But also the type of investor who is into crypto in the first place will probably love this
Crypto bros :handshake: AI bros
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
And something else I don't get about these AI related layoff announcements: if AI was a productivity boost wouldn't you hire more engineers and technical staff to capture the value? Or else you're basically saying "we're a tech company that has no idea what to do with more super-engineers".
They aren't saying that they don't know what to do with the AI productivity boost, but rather they think it worth taking a huge productivity hit right now so they can invest in the future. Whether their vision of the future is realistic...
It would be slop, but the market would love it
They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.
No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.
In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.
AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review.
AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improvement overall.
We do not see the weeks to days improvement though. The bottleneck before was testing and reviewing, and they are even bigger bottlenecks now.
What kind of work do you do, and what kind of workflow were you using before and after AI to benefit so much?
> We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
I've been searching for months for evidence of this kinda thing. Do you have receipts you can share? Or is it more of the same "just trust me bro"?
I have an example in my line of work. Full service rewrite in a new language. Would have taken forever without AI. AI makes it easier, faster. The service has better throughput, uses less machines. Having a complete full test harness that allows us to ensure we are meeting all the functionality of the previous service is key. AND we are keeping the old service on standby because we know we don't know what might be wrong with the new one.
What's your example?
Most devs aren’t working on cutting edge, low level, mission critical systems. AI is great for that. Every company I personally know have been fast shipping features that are being used daily by millions of people for the past 7 months.
We have the same thing on my team, and we also understand the limitations of AI generated code. If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. I wouldn’t say the same thing in 2025 January, but it’s much different times now. Things are already working.
If you're truly "managing fleets of agents" there's no way you're able to sift through the good and the bad in the output. If your AI-generated code is evolvable (which is hard to tell right now) then you're not writing it with "fleets of agents". If you are writing it with fleets of agents, I would bet it's not evolvable; you just haven't reached the breaking point yet.
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )
Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"
The problem is that executives could take the 15-20% productivity boost and be content, but they read stuff like this, get greedy, and they don't understand the risk they're taking.
This is how I feel. It’s building things for me that work. I don’t care how it works under the hood in many cases.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
It's because crypto goes in a cycle and now it's down. You should expect layoffs from them again in 2029/30.
I mean, I want to work... and I absolutely despise the push to keep dev wages down, even at higher levels. But the reality is, at least from my own experience, that most software orgs and projects are actually over-staffed and would operate better with fewer, more experienced staff. Rather than filling hundreds of butts in seats.
However, I understand rationale, as the money was not in-flowing enough.
---- edit ----
When reading about AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents, I shout out. Hire me. I will tell you why this won't work
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:
> Facilitating for ICs.
> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.
I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
Like the guy who "just gets math" is often NOT a good teacher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto...
F these leaders.
And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
Well today is your lucky day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_player-coaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach#Player-coaches_in...
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.
Experienced high IQ player in a team sport could also be considered player-coach. Players like Lebron James or Nikola Jokic come to mind.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
Exactly. People are too naive these days
The Marxist view of everything valuable being a product of a person's labor is tired and debunked.
Bill Russell is (was) the guy you’re looking for and he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
sounds stupid to me
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.
I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.
Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.
(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?
(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.
This is going to end poorly for them. The only good managers I've had over around 20 years in the industry were 100% people managers and had no IC type of role expectations.
I've personally walked away from multiple manager role interview loops when I ask about the split only to find that they expected managers to also take on partial roles with IC engineering work. I know I can't be effective in either when having to juggle two entirely different hats, and in my anecdotal experience I've never seen anyone else do it well either.
It almost makes we wish there were legal requirements for giving proof backing up the reason. It doesn’t need to be an actually good or noble one, but just in the sense of actually being accurate information being put into the world. I imagine this could be sold as a part of financial transparency laws.
Because as of now, it really seems like companies are using AI as a cover to fire people.
Laughs in labour protections.
In many countries (the vast majority of developed countries, and plenty of developing ones), you can't lay off employees for any reason, and reasons can be scrutinised and sued over.
E.g. in France, I can be fired for performance after I've been written up and given an opportunity to improve, or fired immediately if I steal money or harass someone at work. But my employer cannot invent themselves a reason. If the reason they want to let me go is because they're going through economic headwinds, or no longer need my position, they have to document that, give me the opportunity to find another job in the company if possible, and if they're lying (e.g. immediately replacement with someone younger and cheaper), I can sue with almost guaranteed success.
Crypto was a big hype of last decade.
Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase.
Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.
Or maybe they have to start designing shoes first, IDK.
What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?
The extreme being people that produce only one report a month and that more than justifies their income + bonus.
I would forget half the processes I use if I didn't document them all religiously. The benefit now is that I can save myself significant time by having an LLM help me write the docs.
/s
As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
> You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.
Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.
This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.
4 months basic severance pay + 1 month for 2 years emploument is nice? so total 5 months severance after 2 years of working for them or only 6 months after 4 years
let me guess you are from US if you think this is nice, as European I would say this is fairly standard, nothing to brag about, 3 months should be bare minimum by law
That doesn’t make one model universally better. There are clear tradeoffs on both sides. But it is part of the equation worth considering in response to your point. It does not attract business though and you can see that in parts of the EU.
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/user-tricked-grok-bankrbot-to-...
+ 2021 | 3,730 employees + 2022 | 4,706 employees + 2023 | 3,416 employees + 2024 | 3,772 employees + 2025 | 4,951 employees + 2026 | 4,250*
*Estimated following May 2026 layoffs.
So the reduction gets them closer, but still higher than where they were in 2024. Given the fact that the crypto business doesn't seem to be growing much over the last few years it can be argued that they over hired in 2025 and going back to 2024 numbers just makes sense. And as others have said in the comments, they haven't turned a profit so likely this makes business sense and the AI shine is trying to make the news less ugly for investors.
Also, it is clear at this point that thought tech leaders decide, probably over group chats mere mortals are not allowed in, on messages to deliver for a few days, urbi et orbi: introspection is overrated; the leaders-followers dichotomy; now, the disdain for "people managers," as if they were imposed by the Galactic Empire instead of being people whom their organization hired for years.
And, like, what sort of message is, to be sent when announcing lay-offs: "from now on, teams will have not 14 but 15 ICs (whatever numbers), the new IC will be the manager, who will continue to be a manager but also will do some IC work"?.
It is high-school all over again.
As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.
Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.
So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.
More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.
Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
if you vibe code financial systems this cannot mean anything good for your business
And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.
Given Coinbase is a financial platform this doesn't make me feel great. Hopefully they're contributing in areas that don't affect security or money.
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
What could go wrong?
If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.
Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.
If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.
If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.
If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.
It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.
Terrifying.
Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?
Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).
This resonates but I can't put my finger on why for the founders of AirBnB. Do you have examples? Obviously true for Elon.
It seems like the previous generation of founders were always paranoid that their companies could/would fail in an instant, which led to the management styles of Andy Grove, Gates, Jobs etc (and I'd argue Larry and Sergey as well). That mindset meant they knew they couldn't afford to be surrounded by yes man and their egos were secure enough when challenged by their underlings.
Despite the intensity of all three, you hear stories of how Gates only respected people who could credibly argue back against him, Jobs empowered his team, etc. The current generation of founders seem to believe their own mythical BS to such an extent that anyone who disagrees with them is culled from the organization, resulting in a natural selection effect of only the yes-men survive.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI can't do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.
Today, not a single mention in that email.
I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).
Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
I was shocked at how easy it was to train and develop a model that can replace senior leadership in a company.
The CEO was the easiest. I simply loaded the model with as much corporate jargon, double talk and the ability to talk down to people. The model nearly wrote itself.
Then simply ingesting the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times and SEC 10-K reports and annual reports, I was able to compile the perfect CFO. It was able to spit out regulatory reports, answer questions on investor calls.
Strangely, the component of the model I had write in house was the ability to give up part of their bonus to keep key people employed. Seems in all of those financial reports, there were no examples of anyome that the model could leverage.
How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?
You know, hire, stop hiring, then start firing
The reads like typical MBA-efficiency-idiocy taken to the extreme. Clearly this guy is so deeply isolated from the actual work that he cannot even begin to comprehend just how utterly stupid this idea is. It's one thing to push for 100x engineering "output" with "AI", but something completely different to expect a single person to be 3-4 persons in one. Pure schizophrenia - but at least companies like Coinbase which adopt the AI-first illusion will burn themselves faster and leave the room for something new and genuinely innovative.
Why would non-programmers need to ship production code in a financial context?
The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt...
This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.
It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.
But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
Print it all out and bring it to the meeting please.
I think all of us are a bit sad now that AI has essentially removed what it means to be a coder.
There will never again be the time like we had, the golden age of being a nerd. We nerds had it all, and then we destroyed it by making something too smart!
As a Texan, it's kind of like cowboys. Coders were wrangling the computer, but now we have been replaced by industry and mechanics.
Having read the twitter post, it was raw and honest, and I want to share some ideas about life that I feel are relevant.
The first one is that when you work, you should always do something you believe in, because nobody can take that away from you.
If you worked for the money, or because someone told you you could be a part of a cool team, your whole world falls apart when you get let go.
But if you work because you truly believe your work is worthwhile, you will always be glad you did it.
I feel that people on here continually complain about capitalism and how bad corporations are. I challenge all you all to check yourself and ask what are you doing to be a part of the system. If you go accept employment at a 9-5, you are part of the system and making it stronger.
I have always refused to have a job. At age 32, I have only ever worked at one company as an employee, and that only for a short time, and the person was a genuine friend of mine.
I ask each person here to quit working at a company. I think all of us should choose to only ever work at a nonprofit.
Fundamentally Capitalism can't be defeated if we complain and then try to negotiate the biggest salary or benefits.
It's logically stupid for us to be saying they are evil, when we do the exact same thing with a salary.
Instead, each of us should work at a nonprofit, and we should NEVER accept a salary but instead ask them to give to us when they have something left over.
Ultimately, friends, I chose to tell my boss one day (the guy I ended up being an employee at his small company for for a bit), that I didn't want a salary, just donate if you want.
Ever since then, I have been happy.
I hated life when I worked for money. But now, I love it. I have gotten to code on many fun projects, but for the first time I felt alive.
It was terrifying with a wife, a kid and a mortgage to say that. But I am a true believer that the universe, or God has a plan for everyone, and that if you stop worrying and doing what you are told, and just go out and love people, it will all work out.
What I found is that the pay you get working for free is better than the pay you could ever get with money.
You can finally live with yourself when you just love everybody, every day.
If you pay me, and I did great work, you will never know if I love you. But if I did it for free, for all of eternity, you will know that you know that I care about you. And that, to me, is worth more than all the money in the world.
That's why I never accept a salary when I work. I just let people give as they feel fit.
Yes, it is hard, and it doesn't always feel fun. But it is 1000X worth it.
Thank you for reading, God bless you and have a great day!
There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.
The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.
I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.
Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.
Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.
Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.
The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.
If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.
No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.
I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.
And due to this it deserves even more mockery.