Execs often hold too much power in tech companies, and I’ve worked enough to see how condescending they can be to people even just 1-2 levels below them.
If the choice is between many the of employees that are actually building the company and a few bad execs, it seems easy to me.
As a shareholder I support them and 100% agree with what they're saying.
edit: That said I don't see any proof that this was written by Coinbase employees. Will treat it as unconfirmed although that doesn't change anything about the criticism being correct.
CME Group has a market cap of about $70Bn. I would say that COIN looks like a good acqusition target in the 5-10Bn range. I could see that as a good exit strategy for a company like coinbase.
Unfortunately COIN is currently worth 15, and was worth around 70Bn last year.
Wouldn't the shareholders usually do something like this? I mean Coinbase's stonks have been going downhill for a long time now (mainly starting from Nov 2021), losing 4/5ths of its value from then. That's usually more than enough to dismiss / replace senior management.
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down - unless I misread it - which is a lot less invasive or "ratty" than most employee review systems I know.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
I think "Black Mirror S03E01 - Nosedive" gives a good perspective on how such a system can go wrong, but on a country level. I think that the same would apply in a company though: it would exacerbate the misalignment of incentives instead of improving the situation.
> I dunno, it only asks for a thumbs up or thumbs down
Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
>Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this person a good teammate, yes/no?" and the person gets many no's...perhaps it's something to look into?
> So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever).
If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I should intervene. In this case, I will contact them directly trying to understand them and solve the problem in an amicable way, without involving any external party. This helps in a vast majority of cases. Only in extremely rare cases, once in a few years, the problem becomes so grave that another person needs to be involved. In any case, giving anyone a thumbs down doesn't solve anything.
That's fine by me. I have never applied to coinbase nor intend to. I do agree I am a somewhat negative nick as well since I tend to comment on stuff I disagree with on HN. Thanks for the heads up though. I shall see if I can improve upon it.
For what it's worth, this is progress. The previous default is a 24/7 inquisition trying to find and destroy any co-worker not on the cutting edge of woke - whether outside of work or at work.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
I lived it. It sucked. Only the dumb ones got cancelled. The smart ones kept their heads down or got new jobs. The team was defined by mediocrity. Mediocrity in hiring, in execution, in quality. But oh were they ever so woke.
What kind of company was this? I do contracting and have worked a lot of places, big and small, but have never seen anything remotely like this.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?
This is a venture backed enterprise software company.
Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.
Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.
I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.
Damore was cancelled and a woke NLRB lawyer making things up to ensure his cancellation stuck doesn't mean anything beyond the NLRB being just one more corrupted organization on top of so many others. Obviously, if you think Damore is actually a terrible person then you're a part of the problem, and not going to perceive anything as woke regardless of how many other people find it crazy.
Damore was canned by Google for exactly one reason: he had become a liability to the company. If he became a manager with a report who was a woman, or even worked on a team with women, any negative feedback would be suspect. He had literally written a treatise stating that women were not as predisposed to working in tech as men. Any woman could challenge him as biased. And Google would have to deal with the fallout of that, which would be a huge time sink and PR disaster for them.
Bridgewater's approach sounds interesting, albeit not for everyone.
Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.
One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.
AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.
That's a cherry-picked example by a person promoting himself and his own system. Not really a useful data point, more an example of an aspirational goal.
360 feedback usually happens a few times a year while Dot Collector feedback seems like it's for every meeting [0][1]. This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" where everyone is rating everyone for every social interaction (e.g. saying "hi" or paying a cashier).
Like others already said, this is just another variant of the commonly used 360 degrees feedback system.
I don't think that system is bad in itself, I've been in companies where it worked very well. I've also seen a company where it was being used by some to rat on colleagues, but in that company there were lots of things wrong already and the reviews just made it worse.
So I guess there were many underlying problems in Coinbase already.
> how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
To paraphrase the economics joke: Coinbase doesn't have any value(s). It has ten prices, none of which are correct, and it doesn't know the difference.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
I disagree, emotional work is work, and « positive energy » sums it up quite well.
Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work, because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance.
One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.
I was a successful retail and enterprise salesperson earlier in my career. I also suffer from lifelong depression.
I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.
That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."
I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.
Strong disagree, I did sales (I would like to think successfully) for a long time as someone who struggled with depression and anxiety, there's far more to it than just having a fake smile plastered on; people like those who can empathize with them, understand their needs, etc. and sometimes a no-bs straightforward approach talking pros and cons directly instead of a fake used-car salesmanesque over the top approach is far more effective.
The most successful salesperson I know has a pretty flat affect but knows her product super well and is excellent at needs analysis. There’s definitely a lot more to sales than glad handing people with a smile.
I did non-commission sales for a while as well, and made no effort to appear more happy than I was. People appreciated my candor and knowledge, rather than being won over by my charm. I sold a lot of stuff, and there was even a time that a customer found out I wasn't in that day and decided to come back another day instead of dealing with anyone else, even knowing there were no commissions.
My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.
I don't know anything about coinbase, but you're taking the least-generous possible interpretation of this. A really simple re-statement is that your bearing has consequences for other people, and if you're having a shit day and feeling miserable, you can either conduct yourself in a manner that poisons everyone around you, or you can try to keep yourself together. "Positive energy" is, I'm guessing, one way to get at this idea, though it's not how I would frame it myself.
As an aside: I assume that you know this from your own life, and appreciate when people behave in a manner that cares for the emotional commons of wherever you are. Is your objection to it here the fact that it's a giant stupid company ostensibly trying to curate your feelings, and that's annoying and (probably) hypocritical? Or do you really object to the premise?
Sounds like hell. I can't believe companies use such systems to manage their own employees. It tells a lot how bad managers do their work, which is basically know every employee and care for them.
A lot of what larger companies do is find ways to take mediocre or bad staff and make them more useful by giving them structure and tools that help them do their jobs even if they're bad at them.
This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.
There are a lot of replies to this comparing Dot Collector to TV shows. Can we not judge these things on their own (de)merits with more nuance than just saying it reminds us of some popular media? This happens in a lot of tech discussions - usually using 1984 - to argue that a surface-level resemblance means something is bad. I agree that I don't want to work in a place like this but if this is an acceptable line of reasoning then it extrapolates to good-boy-points used for children being dystopian. Using stories whose morals we agree with as a gotcha enables the use of stories whose morals aren't agreeable or sensible - perhaps democracy reminds me of the senate from the Star Wars prequels so we should revert to feudalism?
There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?
Because you don't know how this information is going to be used and whether it's going to be used against you? Because it's weirdly reductionist: no longer happy or unhappy with or about anything, just a number in a vacuum?
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
I see you've never worked in a toxic organization (or at least not noticed).
My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.
I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.
The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.
I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.
My most recent gig was pretty toxic, which is why the framing of the OP (and some of the reactions) is so surprising -- most managers at our place wouldn't have noticed when the employers were spiraling into a funk, and certainly wouldn't have sat down with them individually and asked them how they were doing, as per OP. So to me, that sounds like someone giving a shit and trying to do something about it. If it's an evil manager situation, you can grind people into dust without the theatre of trying to help them. All that said, your example makes sense. I guess it depends on the particular pathology of the place and how it manifests.
I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was.
Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?
And if you manager had been regularly checking in with how you are feeling then this would have been... worse? I suspect that, given a manager with as poor people skills as yours has, your manager initiating the contact and asking you instead of you going to your manager may have instead made all the difference.
It doesn’t really matter. In a toxic work environment - any dissenters are immediately pushed out. This is because toxic work environments have no intention of changing and need everyone to be a yes man. If you are not a yes man - you are managed out or fired.
It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…
a company I worked at tried this. it didn't work out for these reasons:
A) it's a strange request
B) it's an imposition
C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly?
D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.
> your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you.
I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.
Ditto. We do this at my company today, but it's done as part of a culture of trust and openness. (Which culture – I might add – is one of the biggest reasons I'm still there.) And it doesn't displace 1:1s where my manager can talk in person about how I'm doing either. Why wouldn't my manager want to know if I'm happy at work? This seems like one of the most basic things your manager would want to know, and often enough to use a tool to automatically share this regularly.
It is absurd to reduce "happiness" to a single, one-dimensional value, as the sliders illustrate.
Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
The same as with any data you'd collect about anything -- it's part of a larger ecosystem, and no reasonable person expects one number to be the ultimate fount of all wisdom.
I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.
Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.
Because at the same time the Vice President was telling us to lie to our customers, which we were all extremely and openly unhappy about, and our direct manager and up already knew that quite well, so he didn't actually have to ask how numerically happy we were, since he already knew, because we'd made it quite clear and unambiguous to him and the VP already.
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".
This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:
>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)
It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who...
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.)
"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]
That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade".
He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it...
I can see how this went sideways at a toxic company, but as both a manager and an individual contributor, sharing this metadata with your team _can_ be a healthy outlet, as long as:
- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow
- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances
- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)
During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.
If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.
(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).
I've been in situations like this before. The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on.
They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Just imagine if all companies were run like your high school social hierarchy, except that this also determined whether you kept your job or not.
> humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Great insight! It's like an ouija board. It feels like you're making independent decisions and a gestalt outcome "appears", but it's much more social than we perceive.
>with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings,
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
> Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is.
Depending on who is it that people do and don’t want to work with, we might call it “discrimination against a protected class”, which is at least bad enough that it’s illegal in many countries.
It comes from life experience. I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs.
That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when you have the clout to do so, because there's no manager to protect them from the bullshit anymore. It's basically inviting these sorts of shenanigans rather than forcing saboteurs to do a lot of extra work to get people fired.
>I once made the mistake of contradicting a powerful person at my company at a party, and it embarrassed him. Shortly thereafter, people who had been friendly with me became noticeably cooler. My peer reviews took a nosedive and I was let go in the next round of layoffs.
Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actually were the asshole here? Wouldn't you be saying the same thing? Maybe this incident made people realize that "you" weren't a good person to work with?
If you were on the other side, isn't that a good outcome?
You don't "suddenly" notice that someone is an asshole. You just know it, and avoid them as much as you can.
If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.
When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.
If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.
Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.
I mean, by the same logic, you could also say it's also a cynical interpretation of the high school clique...
Another way to look at [high school cliques] is that people who other people want to be around get high [social] ratings. Is that bad?
From experience: yes, it is. The fact that this criticism can be reframed in a way that hides the problem, that something we've all experienced becomes invisible, shows that it is a problem. There is a kind of problem with group social dynamics that can't be easily ironed out; the real experience of existing high school cliques is proof of this. Unsurprisingly, this same problem that comes up in high schools appears in workplaces also.
Externalities, Nash equilibria, and fairness are good keywords to start understanding why the “natural state of affairs” can suck for the majority of people.
> The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on.
Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social acumen can easily see.
Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones. The quarterback’s popularity doesn’t rest on whether or not he’s pretty.
Whether or not the social dynamics of big established companies and high risk startups vary due to this is interesting to consider.
So, because it’s a base human urge, we shouldn’t ever try to improve on it or do better?
Sounds very defeatist to me. Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
> Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones.
I think it’s telling that your example here is high school. IMO the focus is always on who has the most power. In high school, yes, the pretty girls have power, because of the way the boys treat them. I can’t say I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in adult workspaces.
> So, because it’s a base human urge, we shouldn’t ever try to improve on it or do better?
Sounds very defeatist to me.
Improve and do better for whom? Those of us with adequate social acumen can deal with human nature just fine.
It is observably true though that low status persons often fantasize about somehow overturn the social order such that when it all shakes out they come out on top. It’s so common that it’s a well-known and frankly overworked trope.
The world has seen plenty of revolutions and other social disruptions and every single time those with a good grasp of human nature come out on top. You can fight reality if you wish, but you can never beat it.
> Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
And it’s telling how reliably chumps fall for that story. The process is observably no more than a fig leaf covering office politics except perhaps at the levels where nobody with influence gives a fig.
We had something like that at one of my jobs. The most senior engineers there were myself and the founder, and everyone else was either fresh out of college or fresh out of high school. The founder had to spend a lot of time on business stuff so most of the things that required a senior engineer were done by me.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
This is a fantastic example in how incentive design can go awry! Would love to hear any other stories like this one (from you or anyone) to learn from.
Had a similar thing at Deloitte that they called "Scatterplot". There were questions like, "if the money were yours, would you give it to this person to work on projects?" They take your rankings from multiple people over time, plot them, then generate a trend line. The thinking is that, in an org like Deloitte, you'll end up working with so many people that any interpersonal friction will winnow out as noise. This is said to be "scientific".
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
That makes sense, though, for the business. Consulting companies sell a brand image. If Justin Bieber's backup singer got more famous than Bieber, it would mess up the brand dynamics.
No, that analogy does not make sense. They weren't competent at their own marketing, so their own efforts weren't successful or a respected part of the industry zeitgeist. It'd be more like getting upset that one of the sound engineers that worked on the Rebecca Black's "Friday" was getting famous amongst sound engineers for talks on sound engineering. I didn't ask them to make me a part of their marketing. I just wanted to continue doing the talks I was already doing (mostly just local enthusiast groups), completely devoid of any of their involvement. Hell, we had even discussed these talks during my interview and they had said they wanted to encourage me to do more. They wanted me to get approval for all talks of any kind and once I got in they would not give approval for any.
Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.
Ok, but how are the results used? For improving work behavior or for employment decisions? Are they disclosed to the employee or the manager or everyone?
I have a hard time not imagining the shoe Community (season 5 episode 8) where the college starts using an app that rates every interaction between people.
You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together.
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
Isn't Bridgewater a very high performing organization? How has the company not completely collapsed at this point? Or is there a ticking time bomb coming that will end up destroying Dalio's supposed "reputation for excellence"?
Calling any hedge fund "high performing" is pretty meaningless, as once they've figured out their core trade their main job is to 1) keep the core trade secret, 2) try to find some other bet, 3) try to trade bigger/faster/stronger, in that order.
They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs.
This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above.
A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
The modern tendency is to codify and systematize all management decisions.
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
If your classics included the Greek ones, that probably led to the aristocrats getting shipped to their demise in WWI. There might have been something akin to single combat bwtween champions in India, but that was something probably too much to expect in Belgium.
(: I guess you realized that they should have joined the nascent airforce— it was the last truish example of single combat between champions, one, ironically, enabled by technology—- the continental aristocrats did :) (eg Baron von R) (maybe they had a better-faith classical education, considering their generally more accurate transmission of the classic pronunciations)
This is not what the Dot Collector was intended for. It was intended for live discussions debating market conditions. Bridgewater would use it so participants could rate and then aggregate.
For instance there are 10 people in a meeting and Person 1 is talking about the Bank of Japan effect on the EUR/USD. The other 9 would rate that person on this specific topic in terms of "credibility, experience, etc...". The results would then be displayed after all people talked and were given so the team could come to a consensus on correct action.
Brilliant if used correctly. Does not sound like it's being used as intended.
It's not as simple as this rating system, there's a lot more principles and frameworks that they used in their culture at Bridgewater outside of just this dot collector piece. You can find deeper material on this in Ray Dalio's Principles book.
But yeah that alone sounds like hell.
Also, Bridgewater associates were being paid ridiculous amounts (I think, haven't run specific nubmers on this) by someone widely regarded as a visionary, so they were much more incentivized to stay and deal with this stuff. I suspect that there wasn't a comparable job opportunity for them at the time, whereas with Coinbase in a market downturn...
While I'm sure that there's a lot of truth in this (and love the petition, as it focuses on shareholders, not the employees), the margins Coinbase was having for trading cryptocurrencies was unsustainable, and the company was overvalued.
Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captured over IP protocol, with Bitcoin I expect the base layer to capture most of the value, and not the companies on top of it.
Correct. If anything, Coinbase's value should be tied to the volatility of the crypto market. Doing a quick search of various crypto volatility indexes, this appears to check out, roughly.
I don't understand how there can be such a push for a vote of no-confidence in three C-level people with no mention of the CEO that ostensibly chose, managed, and retained them.
> I don't understand how there can be such a push for a vote of no-confidence in three C-level people with no mention of the CEO that ostensibly chose, managed, and retained them.
The CEO and his C-suite all have agency.
If one member of the C-suite misbehaves professionally, you are suggesting that the one who hired/managed him/her should be punished alongside the errant person by virtue of association, rather than by establishing concrete evidence that they both acted in concert?
I am assuming/suggesting that if NOT one, not even two, but three core members of the C-suite fail to do their jobs correctly--jobs that are described as fundamental to the company: defining product direction and allocating corporate resources--then it would seem strange not to cast at least some blame on the person who leads them, whether for having chose them in the first place, for having managed or directed them incorrectly, or for having continued to retain them to this point... if this isn't the CEO's fault, then what even is the CEO doing? Is his job just to make controversial statements on Twitter?
Well, the whole post was written by one or more faceless individuals [1], so rather than allow my emotions lead me to make premature judgement in the face of incomplete information, I decided it was best to suspend judgement [2] by treating the claims made as what they truly are: allegations.
Premature judgement is what is causing a lot of commenters to elevate these anonymous claims to the level of facts, rather than wait until an interested party (like an external investigator commissioned by the board of directors, or a regulator like SEC) is able to substantiate any or all of the claims.
I don't work for Coinbase, so I am in no position to speak on whether the CEO is at fault or not. Any attempt to do so as an outsider with limited information would be pure speculation.
It's simple. The CEO is the founder and built the company from the ground up and has the most skin in the game. Execs keeps jumping between the companies for better resume and compensation and don't generally care about long term results.
If the CEO manages the three people and has the most skin in the game, this petition is actually a message to the CEO saying: you're doing a bad job / don't know what you're doing.
Notably, the CEO was not mentioned in this petition. Putting on my tinfoil hat, could this be a ploy by Armstrong to continue purging the political activists within the company?
Interesting that they mention the Chief Product Officer, Surojit Chatterjee.
I remember reading about him as the guy who got over $600 million [1] in compensation for 15 months of work (factoring Coinbase’s high share price at the time of its direct listing)…mind-blowing
If it's any consolation, that compensation was in Coinbase shares and options at the IPO valuation of ~$320/share, meaning it's been slashed to under a fifth of that at the current $64, possibly less if the options are under water now.
Either way, if I ended up with $100 million ($600 million * stock crash) I’d probably retire. It’s mind boggling to me when people with such wealth want even more. Take the guy who stole tech from Google and went to Uber. Google gave him enough to live out his days doing whatever he pleaded for the most part. Yet obviously he felt like he wanted more - whether that was money, recognition, etc. and lost it all. It’s crazy to me.
Levandowski supposedly left Google for Uber because Kalanick promised him more resources to commercialize self-driving vehicles and make them a reality, but that’s probably a “principled villain” depiction of his crimes (as seen in Super Pumped).
Money is a highly visible, easily comparable, unambiguous “point system.” It’s not to feed their family or anything like that, it’s to prove that they can earn more points and that’s it.
This is a pretty vague and poorly thought out petition. It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault; fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable; and much of the phrasing like "the wisdom of the crypto industry" (lolwut) reeks of amateur hour. If the goal is to convince the board or shareholders to vote them out, this is not the way to do it.
The one valid criticism is that they had a wildly ambitious hiring plan that they had to scale back in a hurry, resulting in severe fallout. However, any such plan had to be approved by the CEO, it's not clear to me why the Chief Operating, Product and People Officers specifically should be ones falling on their swords here.
Yeah lots of vc backed startups were overvalued so exceptional risk was needed to be taken to match such expectations. It’s easy to blame people at the top but they’re not the ones evaluating the company and they can’t control: the fed, the war on Ukraine, oil prices
While it looks like coinbase had a toxic work culture I have no sympathy for those “mercenaries” joining companies on exceptionally great times then complain when things get back to reality
Following seems to be squarely the responsibilities of C-Suite (including CEO).
- The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
- Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
- A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
- Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
> ..fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable
Feedback like 'apathy' and 'condescending attitude' are very legit for employees and even to the interview candidates. Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
> The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
It comes down to someone's judgement call. It's usually not possible to quantify if "certain products" should be prioritized over "other important issues" or vice versa. Particularly so for someone who does not have the full picture.
> Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Is it objective or just an opinion? If objective, how is it measured?
> Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
Because
"Someone anonymous said some of you were generally apathetic and sometimes condescending".
"Well, can you give specific examples? No? Then it's fluff and not actionable".
The petition is immature and maybe 'condescending attitude' towards petitioner is deserved.
coinbase's nft marketplace has <0.01% of the marketshare. they launched without using their key advantage- custodial relationship with the customer. coinbase nft should have been a custodial marketplace. this is definitely on someone in product, though it's unclear whether it's on surojit.
>> It leads with the collapse of NFTs, which has little if anything to do with Coinbase or its execs; it complains about infra/tech debt but says nothing about why that's bad, much less the execs' fault;
It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g. vs. Open Sea), and how to minimize risk, and maximize success (e.g. adoption).
Investing too much in new initiatives, while not building the right platforms, and tech infra for it, will lead to even higher tech debt and more chaos - so they seem like logically reasonable complaints. Whether they are true or not I have no idea but the points do not seem vague at all.
What I'm saying that even if Coinbase had become the market leader instead of OpenSea, the entire NFT market is rapidly collapsing. Of course you could argue that this outcome was obvious and Coinbase shouldn't even have tried.
I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products. Sometimes one person can be much more productive than a whole team. This is obviously unscientific, just a feeling I’m getting lately.
I also found working in smaller companies more effective (worked in 20 people, 500 people and 30.000 people companies).
DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams).
Do you believe we're favorably headed that direction already? Or would it require a lot more conferences highlighting this, getting mindshare buy-in, etc?
People don't want to have meaningless jobs [1] and want jobs that make sense to them. But the other force is VC driven startups where the mantra is "Scale, scale, scale" by hiring hundreds of people - with the goal to make people rich. I do assume for more and more people money is no longer a substitue for sense though, several of my coachees want new jobs with less pay but more sense. I do believe this becoming a mega trend for the next decades (AI, 3d-printing, ... will accelerate this trend). We're at the very very beginning.
> I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products.
You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.
To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.
Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.
Seems the problem is that these massive companies hit a threshold in size and then everything is about self-perpetuation by creating large moats, even ones that don't make sense, hence you have teams and entire departments engaged in boondoggles that are wastes of time and resources.
Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.
I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.
There was a post here recently where a Netflix employee was proudly showing off their log processing system. Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.
In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.
I think the impressive thing is how much data that is for each user-minute. What could they possibly be storing in 33KB for each second of Netflix you stream?
220m users. Let’s imagine 50m are streaming concurrently. That’s 100TB an hour in logs lol. They could be storing an entire petabyte of logs a day. My friend did some data center stuff for the large hadron collider and wasn’t hitting these data ingestion states, and these are just to record me binging the office.
I think it's impressive that they somehow found 33KB/second worth of data to log for each stream. I can't even imagine the amount of useless shit that must be logged to get to that number.
For every minute that someone streams Netflix, 2 MB of data is logged. So if 1,000 people are using Netflix simultaneously, they're generating 2 GB of logs per minute.
Just a note, that ABNB did a huge layoff at the start of the pandemic which allowed them to come out the other side a much stronger company. Actually highlights your point.
Both. When money is free flowing it's easy to avoid hard decisions (in business money hides many mistakes). Companies may continue to fund projects that should be cut or hire instead of optimizing a process. Prioritization alignment meetings end with everything is a priority.
In ABNBs case, business going to almost zero overnight was a forcing function to a level not often seen. After being forced to lean up and prioritize, they were well positioned for the market to improve.
There is a lot of tokenism in hiring. A Fortune 500 might be marketing a new "push to AI" or whatever and want to seem legit by hiring loads of people, quickly realising that it doesn't work like that but at least it looks good on paper.
FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.
I’m fascinated by the idea that, once a company reaches a certain size – let’s say 100 – then it is, by definition, average. Any claims to be above average may be summarily dismissed.
This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick.
If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small.
It is for this reason that I find Apple fascinating. They have their issues but if there is a company that seems to have somehow escaped this jinx, they are it. (I know, I know, YMMV. Please don’t turn this in to an Apple thread.)
Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.
I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date.
They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.
There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).
I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.
Yeah I completely get why it happened it's just sad that it did.
Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.
TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas".
Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.
In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.
Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.
I think Zoom doesn't get more shine for the same reason Alibaba, Baidu, or ByteDance don't. They are large companies doing complex engineering, but they are Chinese and not western.
> My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed
I could have stated that more clearly. 60k people started working from home full time and we switched completely away from our existing solution to Zoom as the primary service provider for teleconferencing.
What’s interesting is in my opinion Netflix engineers made the best UI and best reliability with distributed edge-node storage and all those hard problems.
Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?
> Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity
This could well be true, but it seems far from obvious to me. Do you have any evidence? Clearly netflix stock is doing poorly in recent months, but this seems much more of a consequence of content issues rather than engineering talent.
Netflix has a strange technical management philosophy: they have zero interest in any technology other than their existing streaming infrastructure and traditional media production tools. I've had conversations with members of their tech management, and their ability to investigate new technology directions (such as a Netflix Game Service, or a Netflix Online University) are absolutely zero. One of their identified sources of success is a narrow focus, and they push that commitment.
Tell me more about how they didn't manage to create a compelling streaming product that failed to gain any market share.
Oh wait. That isn't what happened.
Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.
The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.
The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.
If you are talking exclusively about delivery systems. Bitrate.
At it's peak Netflix accounted for ~35%+ of traffic on the Internet (around 2014-2015 era) alone. Times have obviously changed since then. Not because it had more users than YouTube or more playtime but because it was delivering long-form content in high resolution. Which at the time was a considerable technical challenge, from bandwidth and distribution itself but also to encoding infrastructure.
More broadly Netflix also had a profound impact on the CDN landscape. They made use of all existing CDNs (Akamai, Cloudfront, old stuff I forget) while also building out their own POPs, they paved the way for modern CDNs in many ways. The style of which would eventually be cloned by many players but most importantly Fastly. Fastly would then go on to provide this service to new players like Bytedance to rapidly deploy massive delivery capability with very little ramp-up.
They did some less-cool things ofc, they bowed to the HDCP mob and did dumb things like build a Silverlight based client etc.
By and large however Netflix has had a positive impact on the industry.
YouTube on the other hand (after acquisition) was largely built with Google tech on Google infra.
The only major project to come out of it isn't delivery related is Vitess - a sharding system for MySQL.
Its largest impacts on the industry are unfortunately much less savory. Mostly pioneering inventions like pre-roll ads and targeting based on content in which the video is embedded, heinous recommendation algorithms that send people into procrastination spirals etc.
Well that isn't entirely fair, we can thank Youtube for pushing for better encoding standards and tangentially through Chrome making HTML5 video not suck (arguably though, Safari/Webkit was also influential there).
And yet our family spends almost no time with netflix and instead lives on Disney+, HBOMax, YouTube and Paramount+. And paramount+ sucks as a software product. It is by far the buggiest of the bunch but yet it has the content. Netflix doesn't have much compelling content anymore
They way I had it described to me was that the optimal number of direct reports to one person is 7 (hence why military squads tend to be about 8 people). All companies go through growing pains as they reach ~7^n people and have to put in another layer of management. So about 7, 50, 340, 2400…
In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000.
I have never worked somewhere with larger teams so I may well be wrong, however there is definitely a step in small businesses with two founders at about the 20 people point.
Inquiry like this should be left to the people who experience it, and of course all they have is their personal experience and then opportunities to share their personal experience.
Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?
The worst company-level experience I saw in my career was seeing over-hiring only with a massive downsizing later on. It was during that time, that first employee I was directly involved in hiring was part of the layoff. A company that goes acquisition crazy and trying to boost staff rapidly seemed at first like a good thing. In my case, I saw sales staff grow a lot. However, executive leadership, with whatever responsibilities they have, will always have different agendas. Hiring sprees can probably build credentials for managers, whether or not it is a good investment in the first place.
Hiring sprees and acquisitions towards some business goal that doesn't match the current product goal can also cloud judgement on what can actually be delivered. If your product is optimized for a certain set of things, but it is being sold for other use-cases because "meh, we need to compete", you create a multi-year issue when that business plan fails (in an R&D perspective, since that's only what I am interested in.) I bet this is exactly going to happen to Coinbase. Just jumping on that NFT craze instead of developing out their core business more is probably an example that can be relatable (but I am speculating here.)
>Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically
True but not fatal. Being equal to the first employees isn't a requirement: as long as the employee creates more value than they cost, it's worthwhile. Facebook is a simple premise that could be (and was) created with a skeleton team but it's still worth hiring the person to work on Linux's networking stack if that enables them to make it more efficient.
Back when i was testing so setup a startup I proposed a crazy idea to my cofounder: Let's setup an equity programme where every time a new person is hired, a chunk of equity would be taken directly from the existing employees(including founders!!), and would go to the new hire.
So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders will be left with 60%. After the 2nd hire 1st hire would give up 5%, and founders 10% to get 15% ...
My idea was that this would disincentivise hiring new people, so that new people
would be hired only when absolutely necessary .
I'm still planning on experimenting with this at some point in my life.
I could see that working while hiring is exclusively by the founders, but what would be the plan after there are departments with mostly autonomous hiring functions? Would the allocation continue to come from all employees, the manager of that department, or everyone upstream?
It's an interesting concept, but it feels like there would be significant pitfalls any way I think if it.
Not only that... there's the issue with stock options already bought: once the employee bought the stock then it wouldnt be possible to take them from her. And when do you "freeze" the stock amount of an employee? When they leave?
There are lots of details that I thought about, and surely many others I didn't. That's why I'm still ruminating the idea in my head, until I feel it is complete enough to apply it.
No, when I was hired as a 1st engineer at a startup, I was given 2.5% of the shares.
When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected. So, I in a way I, as an IC with 2.5% of shares could push to hire more people to do more of the work I did without any negative direct impact to me (I know the impact comes as the company spends more money, has to raise more and then dilute the value of the stocks in theory, but that's something employees rarely see).
What I want is being able to sit down with say, the team of 10 people in the startup and ask them: Hey, do we REALLY need to hire this 11th person? we all are going to have to give X% of our share of the pie to him. And particularly, when starting the project, the first 5 or 6 should have a sizeable chunk of the pie, and not 2.5% ... ideally, a 1st employee would get to 2.5% once there are about a 100 people in the company (i.e. after hiring the other 97 people)
> When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected.
Where did the new hires' shares come from, if not dilution?
They might have come from an option pool, but that just adds a layer of indirection. When the option pool runs low, typically it is replenished with new shares, diluting existing ones.
So I think the dynamic you're describing already exists in most startups.
Doesn’t this already happen at most startups. Each round dilutes the founders share and dilutes the shares of existing employees. The VC might have targets like, acquire 10m users or generate $40m in revenue, and that might not be possible with a team of 5.
That's only if you raise another round and don't have enough equity for the founders to just gives some of theirs. OP is talking about something more automatic for every new hire.
As others have said, there are some gotchas with the idea but you could probably do something similar that doesn't involve stock like with a profit-sharing fund or a fixed amount to spend on your socials or something!
Here’s another thought:
Decreasing communication costs decreases the optimal organization size.
In the days of horse-delivered mail, you wanted all your employees in one big building, and you wanted to cover all the functions inside your own org so you don’t have to send many slow, expensive letters.
Fast forward to email and zoom and automated SaaS businesses - there is very little friction in engaging a third party to do the things you don’t specialize in. You don’t need any employees beyond your core team anymore.
The worst thing in having too many people working on the product is increased code size / code change velocity.
Compile time per person and code understanding time per person grows linearly with the number of people (which grows exponentially as revenue grows), which means that the total time people are spending with understanding the code base & total compilation time for the code server grows quadraticly with number of engineers (+ exponentially with revenue).
Total code size should be kept under square root of number of engineers in an organization probably to keep product velocity OK, and engineers should spend significant time minimizing the number of changes in the code base after they have the first proof of concept.
Companies should only hire entrepreneurs and engineers who has proven track record as builders as execs. Hiring people from business schools and non engineers as execs is the stupidest thing you can do for long term sucess of the company.
I think this theory is proven in practice. If you look at the major tech companies, they are all run by people who programmed at some point. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, ... .
However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions)
I think it's very hard for non-builders to really understand the underlying processes that result in success.
Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and an obsessive personality to product according to Walter Isaacson. I think those two things compensated for his lack of technical skills. Steve Wozniak is highly underrated compared to Steve Jobs and was a crucial factor to Jobs' early success.
His degree was in Electrical Engineering and Computer science. He was offered jobs at Intel and Bell Labs, some of the highest technical companies at the time in 1986. He worked at Fitel, a fintech startup for 2 years programming financial networks. Then he went into management.
I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again.
It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
This seems like it could be handled by hiring ONE engineering leader for the engineering org - which is one spoke of the multi-spoke wheel that runs a modern day tech company.
The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
But that was my whole point, that in practice, successful companies seem to be run by the engineer, and not by some business type and a good CTO of some sort. I even forgot Mark Zuckerberg in my original post.
So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful.
My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels.
Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.
Sheryl Sandberg - Facebook COO - Harvard MBA //
David Wehner - Meta CFO - Former investment banker //
Zachary Kirkhorn - Tesla CFO - Engineer, but also Harvard MBA //
Brian Olavsky - Amazon CFO - Carnegie Mellon MBA //
Ruth Porat - Alphabet CFO - Wharton MBA
I think the fact that these companies are successful inspite of this shows how good their initial product market fit and founders(CEOs) were. Even after having non builders in key leadership position these companies survived and continue to thrive. Just think about it. Business school admissions are not given on the basis on how well you can run a company long term.
I think companies like coinbase can't afford to have non builders in leadership because they don't have a strong product market fit compared to Facebook, Tesla cars, AWS etc.
Almost every public company has a CFO and/or COO that has an MBA. It's not an 'in spite of;' financials get complicated as do business operations and those two things are what an MBA is for, other than networking.
Also, I know a lot of entrepreneurial people that do not do very well when the company gets beyond a certain size. They can't operate within a system of greater restriction and don't want to follow best practices for employees. Managers are often not good builders and builders aren't always good managers.
Addendums to fix the initial assessment? It's overrated that engineers and entrepreneurs can self manage. Look at any team of engineers without a good EM or PM
Looks like lots of commenters here don't realise this, believe anything and hastefully jump in without questioning this as it could be made by a random user. Always be skeptical around the source of this.
> It seems completely anonymous.
That's the case here since the Ethereum address has absolutely 0 iterations, making it more harder to trace.
Its short interest has increased by almost 200% since April, now at about 20% of the float. So now that there's a lot of money riding on people hating Coinbase, I expect we'll continue seeing more articles like this.
Sounds like those employees that took exit packages to leave after their "apolitical" pivot 2 years ago, got a good deal. There was a lot of congratulatory posting here then, about how the company was going to come out of that a lot better, and with less of the fat. Now it doesn't look like that really happened.
We can't possibly know that solely based on (what other comments have rightly pointed out) a vague, anon petition lacking nuance or details. This could just as well be a very small, vocal minority. We have no way of knowing without more information.
One of the stated goals of the no-politics at work stuff was to allow Coinbase staff to "Support each other, and create team cohesion". It doesn't look like that has happened!
Chief People Officer in the list. To any young, fresh eyed college person taking up their first job - don't believe HR is your friend (as I did, when I started my career). They are not.
It might seem silly to point out the obvious, but a lot of people still genuinely believe HR is their friend, especially those starting their careers.
487 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadExecs often hold too much power in tech companies, and I’ve worked enough to see how condescending they can be to people even just 1-2 levels below them.
If the choice is between many the of employees that are actually building the company and a few bad execs, it seems easy to me.
edit: That said I don't see any proof that this was written by Coinbase employees. Will treat it as unconfirmed although that doesn't change anything about the criticism being correct.
This is the key problem with crypto only exchanges.
At some point (probably further down in share price) they will become a target for existing exchanges looking to diversify - ICE, CME
Unfortunately COIN is currently worth 15, and was worth around 70Bn last year.
What are some ideas for how to do this? Maybe start with the assumption that each employee has an ECC key signed by a corporate certificate authority.
Not saying they shouldn't throw Coinbase management in the trash, just commenting on the reality of IPO stock prices.
I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
Sounds like hell.
There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this person a good teammate, yes/no?" and the person gets many no's...perhaps it's something to look into?
No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever).
If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I should intervene. In this case, I will contact them directly trying to understand them and solve the problem in an amicable way, without involving any external party. This helps in a vast majority of cases. Only in extremely rare cases, once in a few years, the problem becomes so grave that another person needs to be involved. In any case, giving anyone a thumbs down doesn't solve anything.
Perhaps coinbase doesn’t target employees like you. Maybe they like happy clappy medicinally-well-adjusted type employees?
I would like to say I occasionally write low quality comments to empirically test my personal self-judgement about my own metrics of reality.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?
Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.
Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.
I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.
And of course that Black Mirror episode. Constantly evince a super positive energy or else.
Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.
One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.
AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.
These happy clappy "systems" usually fail to take into account (almost biological) realities of how power structures work.
I'm not familiar with other companies that have the same reputation of using a system like this the same way Bridgewater does.
You have to remember you give real-time feedback during the meeting itself.
> happens all the time
Hmm how do the CEOs react to that? I imagine that the good ones are happy for feedback
The others though?
(I understand if you were exaggerating a bit, wrt "all the time")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-asking-staff-rate-e...
[1] https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...
I shall check it out!
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work, because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance.
One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.
No one is positive and happy all the time and having to fake it "as a job requirement" sounds wrong on so many levels.
I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.
That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."
I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.
My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.
As an aside: I assume that you know this from your own life, and appreciate when people behave in a manner that cares for the emotional commons of wherever you are. Is your objection to it here the fact that it's a giant stupid company ostensibly trying to curate your feelings, and that's annoying and (probably) hypocritical? Or do you really object to the premise?
We don't need you dragging yourself in to work after caring for your cancer patient family member or newborn.
Not sure what you are trying to mean.
Sounds like standard corporate usistan.
Fair enough, but why single out Coinbase when the same kind of BS goes on in pretty much every large corp over there?
This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.
There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
https://youtu.be/avJnpDKHxPY?t=13m24s
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.
I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.
The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.
I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.
I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?
It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…
A) it's a strange request B) it's an imposition C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly? D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.
I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.
(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)
Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.
Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".
This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
And who required us all to use the horrible XBugTool, which got extremely angry if you used it to file bug reports against itself:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...
>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
https://web.archive.org/web/20120216050221/http://toastytech...
It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who...
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.htmlFor context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...
https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203
The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186
That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it...
Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html
- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow
- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances
- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)
During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.
If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.
(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).
They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Just imagine if all companies were run like your high school social hierarchy, except that this also determined whether you kept your job or not.
Great insight! It's like an ouija board. It feels like you're making independent decisions and a gestalt outcome "appears", but it's much more social than we perceive.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
Where is the middle ground?
Depending on who is it that people do and don’t want to work with, we might call it “discrimination against a protected class”, which is at least bad enough that it’s illegal in many countries.
That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when you have the clout to do so, because there's no manager to protect them from the bullshit anymore. It's basically inviting these sorts of shenanigans rather than forcing saboteurs to do a lot of extra work to get people fired.
Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actually were the asshole here? Wouldn't you be saying the same thing? Maybe this incident made people realize that "you" weren't a good person to work with?
If you were on the other side, isn't that a good outcome?
If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.
When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.
If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.
Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.
The dot system would probably *help" here, because a sudden drop in ratings right after the incident would merit an investigation.
It is if there is no objectivity to it. It wouldn't be the first time I get a bad review because I do things slightly different.
Another way to look at [high school cliques] is that people who other people want to be around get high [social] ratings. Is that bad?
From experience: yes, it is. The fact that this criticism can be reframed in a way that hides the problem, that something we've all experienced becomes invisible, shows that it is a problem. There is a kind of problem with group social dynamics that can't be easily ironed out; the real experience of existing high school cliques is proof of this. Unsurprisingly, this same problem that comes up in high schools appears in workplaces also.
Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social acumen can easily see.
Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones. The quarterback’s popularity doesn’t rest on whether or not he’s pretty.
Whether or not the social dynamics of big established companies and high risk startups vary due to this is interesting to consider.
Sounds very defeatist to me. Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
> Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones.
I think it’s telling that your example here is high school. IMO the focus is always on who has the most power. In high school, yes, the pretty girls have power, because of the way the boys treat them. I can’t say I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in adult workspaces.
Improve and do better for whom? Those of us with adequate social acumen can deal with human nature just fine.
It is observably true though that low status persons often fantasize about somehow overturn the social order such that when it all shakes out they come out on top. It’s so common that it’s a well-known and frankly overworked trope.
The world has seen plenty of revolutions and other social disruptions and every single time those with a good grasp of human nature come out on top. You can fight reality if you wish, but you can never beat it.
> Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
And it’s telling how reliably chumps fall for that story. The process is observably no more than a fig leaf covering office politics except perhaps at the levels where nobody with influence gives a fig.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
Learning through others' mistakes instead of ones own :-)
Also, interesting to read
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.
Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity and Wiles.
Normally, I try not to value any principle over the others, but today, I'd have to say Cheer is my favorite.
The app is based on his philosophy https://www.principles.com/
But, like major thumbs down on their vibe. They need more positive vibes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
Ray Dalio to me seems like a bright person, having glanced at:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio
They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs.
This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above.
A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
I don't understand -- what should I look for, how should I act (and why)?
(I've never been in such an environment)
Interesting to read about their system!
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
BTw Kerala supposedly.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_combat
“ The Kerala practice was discontinued in the 19th century under the British Raj.”
For instance there are 10 people in a meeting and Person 1 is talking about the Bank of Japan effect on the EUR/USD. The other 9 would rate that person on this specific topic in terms of "credibility, experience, etc...". The results would then be displayed after all people talked and were given so the team could come to a consensus on correct action.
Brilliant if used correctly. Does not sound like it's being used as intended.
But yeah that alone sounds like hell.
Also, Bridgewater associates were being paid ridiculous amounts (I think, haven't run specific nubmers on this) by someone widely regarded as a visionary, so they were much more incentivized to stay and deal with this stuff. I suspect that there wasn't a comparable job opportunity for them at the time, whereas with Coinbase in a market downturn...
Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captured over IP protocol, with Bitcoin I expect the base layer to capture most of the value, and not the companies on top of it.
https://www.usv.com/writing/2016/08/fat-protocols/
Coinbase made more money on trading fees than the whole ICE exchange, it's not sustainable.
https://www.afr.com/wealth/people/crypto-billionaires-fortun...
The CEO and his C-suite all have agency.
If one member of the C-suite misbehaves professionally, you are suggesting that the one who hired/managed him/her should be punished alongside the errant person by virtue of association, rather than by establishing concrete evidence that they both acted in concert?
Premature judgement is what is causing a lot of commenters to elevate these anonymous claims to the level of facts, rather than wait until an interested party (like an external investigator commissioned by the board of directors, or a regulator like SEC) is able to substantiate any or all of the claims.
I don't work for Coinbase, so I am in no position to speak on whether the CEO is at fault or not. Any attempt to do so as an outsider with limited information would be pure speculation.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31697142
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_judgment
Not very strategic or well thought out.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/coinbase-ceo-offers-severanc...
I remember reading about him as the guy who got over $600 million [1] in compensation for 15 months of work (factoring Coinbase’s high share price at the time of its direct listing)…mind-blowing
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/google-ex...
The one valid criticism is that they had a wildly ambitious hiring plan that they had to scale back in a hurry, resulting in severe fallout. However, any such plan had to be approved by the CEO, it's not clear to me why the Chief Operating, Product and People Officers specifically should be ones falling on their swords here.
While it looks like coinbase had a toxic work culture I have no sympathy for those “mercenaries” joining companies on exceptionally great times then complain when things get back to reality
- The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
- Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
- A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
- Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
> ..fluff like "a generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" is not actionable
Feedback like 'apathy' and 'condescending attitude' are very legit for employees and even to the interview candidates. Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
It comes down to someone's judgement call. It's usually not possible to quantify if "certain products" should be prioritized over "other important issues" or vice versa. Particularly so for someone who does not have the full picture.
> Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
Is it objective or just an opinion? If objective, how is it measured?
> Why fluff and not actionable in this case?
Because "Someone anonymous said some of you were generally apathetic and sometimes condescending". "Well, can you give specific examples? No? Then it's fluff and not actionable".
The petition is immature and maybe 'condescending attitude' towards petitioner is deserved.
It has everything to with Coinbase and it's execs. The astronomical compensations at C-suite and leadership is to build strategy and vision around where to invest (e.g. NFTs?), how to differentiate your offering (e.g. vs. Open Sea), and how to minimize risk, and maximize success (e.g. adoption).
Investing too much in new initiatives, while not building the right platforms, and tech infra for it, will lead to even higher tech debt and more chaos - so they seem like logically reasonable complaints. Whether they are true or not I have no idea but the points do not seem vague at all.
It’s poorly worded and broadly vague in most places.
If the criticism is valid but you’d never know it for lack of details. It just reads as disgruntled workers trying to stir things up.
They'd be better off either trying to form a bargaining unit and attempt to get management to rollback on the performance management changes.
DHH recently said at a conference on how people always tell him they were happy when the company was small, and asked "Why scale then?" (the panel agreed that some things, like building a commercial airliner might take large teams).
This has been to my heart for years https://www.radicalsimpli.city/
Looking at HN, enjoying the single founder SaaS threads, this is the future for a lot of business models.
People don't want to have meaningless jobs [1] and want jobs that make sense to them. But the other force is VC driven startups where the mantra is "Scale, scale, scale" by hiring hundreds of people - with the goal to make people rich. I do assume for more and more people money is no longer a substitue for sense though, several of my coachees want new jobs with less pay but more sense. I do believe this becoming a mega trend for the next decades (AI, 3d-printing, ... will accelerate this trend). We're at the very very beginning.
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2015/...
You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.
To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.
Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.
Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.
I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.
In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.
2MB/minute is 33KB/second.
How is that impressive?
maybe the presentation was called "Timmy's first named pipe" or "Sally explores /etc/logrotate.d"
to clarify could you say the same thing, in a different way?
In ABNBs case, business going to almost zero overnight was a forcing function to a level not often seen. After being forced to lean up and prioritize, they were well positioned for the market to improve.
FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.
This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick.
If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small.
It is for this reason that I find Apple fascinating. They have their issues but if there is a company that seems to have somehow escaped this jinx, they are it. (I know, I know, YMMV. Please don’t turn this in to an Apple thread.)
They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.
There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).
I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.
Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.
TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas". Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.
In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.
Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.
Do i understand it correctly?
60k ppl left ur job and went to zoom?
Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?
This could well be true, but it seems far from obvious to me. Do you have any evidence? Clearly netflix stock is doing poorly in recent months, but this seems much more of a consequence of content issues rather than engineering talent.
Oh wait. That isn't what happened.
Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.
The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.
The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.
Genuine question
Whats the diff between them and yt?
At it's peak Netflix accounted for ~35%+ of traffic on the Internet (around 2014-2015 era) alone. Times have obviously changed since then. Not because it had more users than YouTube or more playtime but because it was delivering long-form content in high resolution. Which at the time was a considerable technical challenge, from bandwidth and distribution itself but also to encoding infrastructure.
More broadly Netflix also had a profound impact on the CDN landscape. They made use of all existing CDNs (Akamai, Cloudfront, old stuff I forget) while also building out their own POPs, they paved the way for modern CDNs in many ways. The style of which would eventually be cloned by many players but most importantly Fastly. Fastly would then go on to provide this service to new players like Bytedance to rapidly deploy massive delivery capability with very little ramp-up. They did some less-cool things ofc, they bowed to the HDCP mob and did dumb things like build a Silverlight based client etc. By and large however Netflix has had a positive impact on the industry.
YouTube on the other hand (after acquisition) was largely built with Google tech on Google infra. The only major project to come out of it isn't delivery related is Vitess - a sharding system for MySQL. Its largest impacts on the industry are unfortunately much less savory. Mostly pioneering inventions like pre-roll ads and targeting based on content in which the video is embedded, heinous recommendation algorithms that send people into procrastination spirals etc.
Well that isn't entirely fair, we can thank Youtube for pushing for better encoding standards and tangentially through Chrome making HTML5 video not suck (arguably though, Safari/Webkit was also influential there).
In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000.
I have never worked somewhere with larger teams so I may well be wrong, however there is definitely a step in small businesses with two founders at about the 20 people point.
Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
The worst company-level experience I saw in my career was seeing over-hiring only with a massive downsizing later on. It was during that time, that first employee I was directly involved in hiring was part of the layoff. A company that goes acquisition crazy and trying to boost staff rapidly seemed at first like a good thing. In my case, I saw sales staff grow a lot. However, executive leadership, with whatever responsibilities they have, will always have different agendas. Hiring sprees can probably build credentials for managers, whether or not it is a good investment in the first place.
Hiring sprees and acquisitions towards some business goal that doesn't match the current product goal can also cloud judgement on what can actually be delivered. If your product is optimized for a certain set of things, but it is being sold for other use-cases because "meh, we need to compete", you create a multi-year issue when that business plan fails (in an R&D perspective, since that's only what I am interested in.) I bet this is exactly going to happen to Coinbase. Just jumping on that NFT craze instead of developing out their core business more is probably an example that can be relatable (but I am speculating here.)
True but not fatal. Being equal to the first employees isn't a requirement: as long as the employee creates more value than they cost, it's worthwhile. Facebook is a simple premise that could be (and was) created with a skeleton team but it's still worth hiring the person to work on Linux's networking stack if that enables them to make it more efficient.
So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders will be left with 60%. After the 2nd hire 1st hire would give up 5%, and founders 10% to get 15% ...
My idea was that this would disincentivise hiring new people, so that new people would be hired only when absolutely necessary .
I'm still planning on experimenting with this at some point in my life.
It's an interesting concept, but it feels like there would be significant pitfalls any way I think if it.
There are lots of details that I thought about, and surely many others I didn't. That's why I'm still ruminating the idea in my head, until I feel it is complete enough to apply it.
When we hired the next 10 people, the value/% of my shares did not get affected. So, I in a way I, as an IC with 2.5% of shares could push to hire more people to do more of the work I did without any negative direct impact to me (I know the impact comes as the company spends more money, has to raise more and then dilute the value of the stocks in theory, but that's something employees rarely see).
What I want is being able to sit down with say, the team of 10 people in the startup and ask them: Hey, do we REALLY need to hire this 11th person? we all are going to have to give X% of our share of the pie to him. And particularly, when starting the project, the first 5 or 6 should have a sizeable chunk of the pie, and not 2.5% ... ideally, a 1st employee would get to 2.5% once there are about a 100 people in the company (i.e. after hiring the other 97 people)
Where did the new hires' shares come from, if not dilution?
They might have come from an option pool, but that just adds a layer of indirection. When the option pool runs low, typically it is replenished with new shares, diluting existing ones.
So I think the dynamic you're describing already exists in most startups.
This conversation happens when fundraising. Usually the lead wants to see the option pool replenished at the same time.
In the days of horse-delivered mail, you wanted all your employees in one big building, and you wanted to cover all the functions inside your own org so you don’t have to send many slow, expensive letters.
Fast forward to email and zoom and automated SaaS businesses - there is very little friction in engaging a third party to do the things you don’t specialize in. You don’t need any employees beyond your core team anymore.
Compile time per person and code understanding time per person grows linearly with the number of people (which grows exponentially as revenue grows), which means that the total time people are spending with understanding the code base & total compilation time for the code server grows quadraticly with number of engineers (+ exponentially with revenue).
Total code size should be kept under square root of number of engineers in an organization probably to keep product velocity OK, and engineers should spend significant time minimizing the number of changes in the code base after they have the first proof of concept.
Hire builders. Not resume builders.
However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions)
I think it's very hard for non-builders to really understand the underlying processes that result in success.
This is also a common English proverb
The last part (in casibus non exceptis) is usually omitted, giving it the meaning we have now. The original meaning was a little different.
Jeff Bezos was a programmer?
It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful.
My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels.
Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.
I think companies like coinbase can't afford to have non builders in leadership because they don't have a strong product market fit compared to Facebook, Tesla cars, AWS etc.
Also, I know a lot of entrepreneurial people that do not do very well when the company gets beyond a certain size. They can't operate within a system of greater restriction and don't want to follow best practices for employees. Managers are often not good builders and builders aren't always good managers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Kirkhorn
Looks like lots of commenters here don't realise this, believe anything and hastefully jump in without questioning this as it could be made by a random user. Always be skeptical around the source of this.
> It seems completely anonymous.
That's the case here since the Ethereum address has absolutely 0 iterations, making it more harder to trace.
So it probably isn't fake.
It might seem silly to point out the obvious, but a lot of people still genuinely believe HR is their friend, especially those starting their careers.