Coinbase Slows Hiring To Help Weather Market Downturn (theblockcrypto.com) 19
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has reined in a plan to triple its headcount this year in response to turbulent market conditions. From a report: Emilie Choi, Coinbase's president and chief operating officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the firm would be slowing hiring to "reprioritize our hiring needs against our highest-priority business goals." The note had been circulated among staff earlier. "Heading into this year, we planned to triple the size of the company. Given current market conditions, we feel it's prudent to slow hiring and reassess our headcount needs against our highest-priority business goals," she said. "Headcount growth is a key input to our financial model, and this is an important action to ensure we manage our business to the scenarios we planned for, specifically the potential adjusted Ebitda we are aiming to manage to."
Stupid plans anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
I never understand goals like this: "let's triple our headcount". Why is the number of people on payroll relevant? You have projects, you need people to carry out the projects. Those projects obviously have budgets for hiring. Fine. But starting with the headcount is putting the cart before the horse.
Moreover, tripling the personnel represents an absolutely massive disruption. Can any management team, however competent, really deal with tripling their headcount?
Re: (Score:2)
Well... their customer service sucks, for one thing. Try opening a ticket with them, and it will take a week to get back some canned response that doesn't solve your problem.
Nice to see that they're using the downtown in crypto as an excuse not to fix that.
Re: (Score:3)
There's the common (and many times true) trope of government departments operating under the principle that "we need to spend all our budget or it gets cut next time" but I think that can also apply with private companies especially when they are fueled by large amounts of investor cash.
You're flush with cash with no upcoming expectations of turning a profit so having an office full of people "doing work" is part of "growth". Once the purse strings start getting pulled companies are compelled to start find
Re: (Score:2)
It's true for any hierarchical organization, private or public. Departments in private companies absolutely do have budgets and if they don't spend their budget it's likely to get cut the next year. Private companies also have the issue that money that's not spent isn't doing anything useful.
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds like they are hiring for specific projects, but are now putting less important projects on hold, meaning they will hire less people.
Re: Stupid plans anyway? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Generally what that really means is that specific departments or projects or positions have an increased allotment rather than an across-the-board increase. Some other departments like HR and facilities will often have a fixed increase to accommodate the additional headcount.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't understand why having any number of heads is useful to start with. And don't they run out of freezer space to keep them all? Surely they don't just leave them lying around on desks and things? That would start to smell pretty bad.
Silly management speak reflects silly management thinking. In reality, they don't have much conception of what those "heads" actually do, but having more of them seems good. Certainly when you talk to other managers they get all impressed when you say you're the boss of suc
Re: (Score:2)
"But starting with the headcount is putting the cart before the horse."
OTOH, if the projects you are already doing need people you don't have it is too late.
There are projects you *could* do, if you could staff them. There are staff you *could* hire, if you had projects that could use them. The staffing you need for any project changes over time. You align the projects so the staffing needs fit within to your ability to bring people in, which may be zero people or a lot of people. You align you staffing inc
Idea (Score:1)
Why don't they just pay their staff using fake money, call it "plebcoin" or something? That way they can easily ride out any financial consequences and their staff will show they're committed to the crypto dream.
Re: (Score:1)
I remember during the dot-com heyday around 2000-ish seeing how low the salaries were during my job search, as I was trying to transition from desktop apps to web. They'd say something like, "The base pay is low, but we offer great stock options!" I asked them if I could reduce my percent of stock in exchange for a higher base salary. They usually said, "no", probably because the co's bank account was slim. Not a good sign, as it meant they had no margin of error.
Re: (Score:2)
To pass the time help yourself to some more stock. [frinkiac.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that most long-term Coinbase employees would fall for that. They got the see the 80% crash of Bitcoin in 2018 first hand, so they're keenly aware that they can't count on crypto for a reliable salary.
Oh, and before you mention stablecoins in a reply to this, I have just one word for you: TerraUSD.
That was the whole point of raising interest rates (Score:2)
Whenever our government has to do something about inflation it always does it on the backs of working Americans and never on the mild inconvenience of the rich.
It's something I never noticed until a comedy YouTube channel called some more news pointed it out to me. There's lots of things we could do to reduce inflation that don't hurt working people but they inconvenience the wealthy and powerful.
Re: (Score:2)
Weather the market? (Score:3)
Can you really call 'people realizing it's a scam' a 'market turndown'?
Seems like yesterday they were giving away bitcoin (Score:2)