I think you misunderstood: Coinbase is offering to pay for the first 6 months of COBRA for the laid-off employees. They can still continue with it for the following 12 months if they want, paid out of pocket.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work.
Sure, nothing can go wrong there... Even if they didn't have non-managerial work to do, 15+ direct reports is just too many. They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.
I think as layoffs emails go, it's a pretty good one (as the current top comment points out[0]), but boy, I would not want to be working at a company like what Coinbase is turning into. Non-technical teams shipping code to prod? No thanks. "AI-native pods"? No thanks. I do like the idea of one-person teams; I was at my most productive when I was in that kind of role (though I'm not sure my experience generalizes). I get that companies are still struggling to figure out how to adapt to LLMs, but... damn.
Pretty solid severance package for the folks being laid off, though.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
This jumped out at me right away too. What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports? What now? AI is going to double the communication bandwidth with these reports and further double the free time they have?
I do think the most efficient form of team is a "cell" of three people. One is a little unstable.
> What happened to the days when a dedicated manager would manage 8 reports?
Cheap money went away which caused companies to start asking hard questions about productivity and how much those dedicated managers were contributing.
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically.
Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the team (or the one that wanted to get promoted). Being a manger meant you were respected directly for your skills and you were expected to still be a full time contributor. Directors meant you were one of the best ICs out there.
Now, being a manager or a director means you sometimes did an MBA in an unrelated field. This brought a ton of politics, nonsense meetings (because the most visible output for managers is more meetings where they can posture).
Let's go back to what it used to be. We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings. We don't need a full layer of managers syncing with each others and taking political decisions that will mainly advance them. We don't need another layer of gatekeepers.
I'm not saying all managers are bad, but this charade has been pushed a bit too far.
As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.
In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.
Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).
It is a terrible environment to work in.
I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.
Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.
>> Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important.
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
Its because when something is illogical, these "brains" retort to using some kind of a streched out metaphor which dumbs it down and makes it make sense, to them at least. So they invent the stupidities like treating a team as a Navy-SEAL unit or a sports team or... coming up with something like "player-coach"...
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.
Oh, c'mon, that's a huge exaggeration. US companies commonly incorporate in Delaware due to its generally-friendly business regulation with a ton of legal precedent surrounding it, and a court system well positioned to handle business-related cases.
If they're incorporated there because that makes regulatory compliance easier, then that's not "dodging", that's just... doing what's allowed.
And it's not like incorporating in Delaware is a get-out-of-jail-free card. If the company does have a presence in other states, the laws of those states are binding in many circumstances; the state of incorporation is irrelevant there. And there's always US federal law. Choice of state isn't going to change anything when the feds come knocking.
The issue at hand is Polymarket claiming they are based in Panama, outside the US's jurisdiction, but presumably being headquartered in the US. You might say this is no different from a company being incorporated in, say, the UK, doing business there, hiring people, maintaining an office, and then also having offices in the US, but... this is not the same, and it's a little odd that you seem to be missing that fact.
And on top of that, often multi-nationals will have a legal entity in every country where they operate. Do they have one in the US? If not, and they are de-facto headquartered here, that's beyond sketchy. And even if they do, if they've structured things such that they can shield their assets from US legal judgments for crimes or torts committed on US soil, that's also pretty damn sketchy.
Polymarket is clearly flying close to the sun, at a minimum. There's plenty of evidence to show that, but "every company with legal entities in some other place is doing something wrong" isn't one of them, as was claimed by others in this thread. Delaware is a convenient example of why this just simply isn't true.
> the claim "most of the companies registered in Delaware are not trying to dodge US federal regulations" strikes me as dubious.
Why would it? Choosing the state to incorporate in has very little to do with US federal regulations. If the US wants to come after your company for some reason, they file in federal court, and the state you're incorporated in is irrelevant.
When incorporating, you choose the state based on its business-related laws and how they might apply to your company. You choose based on the experience of their judicial system in handling business matters. You might choose because there are a ton of other businesses incorporated in that state, and that's created a lot of court cases and a lot of precedent that can give your own legal team more confidence in how different sorts of legal challenge might play out.
If you were trying to avoid US federal regulations, you might incorporate in Delaware for the simple reason that Delaware is a safe default, given how common it is for companies to incorporate there. Incorporating in an unusual state could raise an eyebrow here or there. But ultimately it's not going to matter all that much. And even if it's true that a federal-regulations-skirting company would have a measurable benefit to incorporating in Delaware, there's no reason to believe that lots of companies incorporated in Delaware are trying to skirt federal regulations. That's just an unfounded assertion.
As an aside, it's not true that every company wants to decrease its regulatory burden. Once a company gets large enough, lobbying for extra regulation can be a barrier to entry for possible competitors. Also consider that "reducing regulatory burden" doesn't necessarily mean doing something illegal. In the case of Polymarket, they probably are, but plenty of other companies find ways to reduce their regulatory compliance needs in perfectly legal ways.
My comment was unclear. That quote was intended to connect with the parent claim that Polymarket was unique in "trying to dodge US federal regulations". The chain was:
> I don't get it. Most companies registered in the state I live in, for example, are not actually located here. They simply receive mail through their registered agent there. Why would this be news?
>> On the other hand, most of the companies registered in Delaware are not trying to dodge US federal regulations.
What I found dubious was predicated on this "on the other hand" - that is the notion that Polymarket is really doing anything unique re its dealings with US federal regulators.
As per your last paragraph that touches on this, I already addressed this in another thread, but I'm simply not convinced that Polymarket is very unique here. It is common for new enterprises creating new industries to come into conflict with the law, and for both to evolve. Obviously Polymarket is not some large incumbent. The point was I find the notion that they are doing something singularly illegal or out of step with how most businesses operate dubious.
I detect that in comments around this chain you and some others seem to want to create a hard barrier between the law and enterprise. That's not how reality works. Regulations change. Policies are modified. New laws are passed. Governments and businesses often collaborate in this process. To get back to what I was trying to respond to, I am simply asserting that indeed this should really not be "big news".
That doesn't seem wild at all. Laws are written by humans, and, as such, there's inherent ambiguity.
Given that, would you rather have a case tried in a court that has only tried a handful of other cases, or would you rather be in a court that has handled a mountain of cases, with lots of information as to what the law really means, as it has played out in real-life scenarios?
Being tried under a legal regime where there is a ton of past history seems a lot easier to reason about than one where there isn't much.
> It's as if one is joining a club that has rules of business conduct clearly documented.
Well, yes. The law is the law, sure, but the "documentation" is much more than just the law, as written.
Not sure about initially, but the big benefit to Delaware today is essentially network effects: so many companies are and have been incorporated in Delaware that there is a mountain of case law and precedent, so corporate legal teams can have a very good idea of how rulings will go if the company is taken to court under Delaware law. The state's judicial system is also set up very well at this point to handle the cases put in front of it.
(It also doesn't hurt that most businesses also find Delaware's business law to be reasonably fair and advantageous. Musk notwithstanding, of course.)
Tree maintenance labor, harvest labor, storage before shipping, labor to load the truck, labor to unload the truck, supermarket storage, supermarket shelf-stocking labor, supermarket disposal labor and cost for any stock that spoils.
That's for peaches intended to eat whole. The peaches we're talking about here are intended for canning, so you also have to add the cost of running the processing and canning machinery, the cost of the cans themselves, and the cost of labor to run and coordinate all that.
Also consider that no single supermarket is going to buy out the entire truck, so you're going to be stopping at many supermarkets, and unloading multiple times.
For larger chain supermarkets they may be buying a full truck (or multiple), but then you'll probably be delivering to a distribution center, where the supermarket then has to pay for that storage, plus labor to re-load onto other trucks, ship to the supermarkets themselves, and unload again.
Your analysis is missing nearly everything. Driving the full truck from point A to point B is a tiny part of the process, cost-wise. And I'm sure I've left things out too.
> Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.
The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.
This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.
Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.
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