Coinbase CEO Explains Why He Fired Engineers Who Didn't Try AI Immediately

Not surprising. This is one of the CEOs who wants "special economic zones", i.e. a place where they can be fedual lords.

I think it’s more likely, “engineers who didn’t try the tool their CEO specifically asked them to, warning them that there would be consequences if they didn’t.”

What's telling is that, even if his story is remotely true, his target audience for this tale are people who won't blink at potentially destroying peoples lives just for corporate point scoring or, worse, terrorising surviving employees into blindly obeying questionable actions. Anyone with an ounce of empathy would think how terrible it would be to be fired and maybe lose your home or end up in debt because your insane boss bought into the latest fad.

Based on the article, my understanding is that the people fired were unwilling to "onboard".

I assume "onboard" means something like "set up an account and get it working locally".

I get that everyone wants to dunk on the crypto/AI guy, but their claim boils down into "AI is helpful but it shouldn't do all the work for you" which is a stance almost everyone has.

I don't think the CEO should know whether or not I've used AI though nor do I think it's fair to fire people for it.

I guess I could maybe see a case for catching someone saying "I don't care about trying out new tools" - it's a position held by some of the least productive people I've ever worked with. But there other reasons why someone might not have picked up new tools yet, like "I'm just trying to get my damn work done" or "I tried this tool but it just seemed distracting".

I fall into those camps all the time wrt new tools.

Hand-waving negative externalities is maybe the biggest part of the job.

It's not a contradiction. AI is now an important tool to have for software engineers. It's not at the stage where you can just let it do the work without supervising and refining what it outputs.

I agree for "won't", but not for "don't".

Just because I've found it to be very helpful doesn't mean everyone will.

So he's bald? From everything I've read about him he actually seems like a pretty conscientious guy and a good leader. He's been in crypto for almost 15 years, which is a lot more than you can say about some other folks in crypto.

What happens when you try it and it sucks?

They had one week to “onboard” and then were fired with no warning. The fact iscoding assistants show promise but just aren’t that helpful for most experienced engineers at this point, so installing the tool is just another time-wasting task. Maybe they didn’t get it done that week for the same reason people put off TPS reports and other management-driven make-work?

Companies always dole out slop enterprise software their employees don’t use. Ours pays for g suite and ms products that serve identical uses just to keep up with the expectations that this is what enterprise software purchasing looks like. Am I to use both outlook and gmail simultaneously in order to not shirk the provided tooling?

Because I have plenty of opportunities that don't involve dancing for a micromanaging sociopath.

My gut reaction is that becoming dependent on an employer to provide access to proprietary tooling is a step backwards for worker empowerment.

My take on the past 20 years or so is that programmers gained enough market clout to demand a fair amount of agency over things like tooling and working conditions. One of the results is, for instance, that there are no more proprietary programming languages of any importance, that I'm aware of. Even the great Microsoft open-sourced their flagship language, C#.

Non-developers like myself looked to the programming world with a bit of admiration or perhaps even envy. I use programming tools in my job, and would not choose a proprietary tool even if offered. The engineering disciplines that depended on proprietary tooling tend to be lower paying, with less job mobility.

Maybe the tables have turned, and employers have the upper hand once again, so this may all be a moot point, or a period to look back on with fondness.

AI is just a tool, and depending on ones seniority, a tool of possibly low value. Sacking people who elect not to commit to a tool, a tool THEY are best placed to evaluate in terms of value, is just as unhinged as sacking someone who uses VSCode over Rider. This is just another example of an idiot CEO, and it's depressing to think anyone might consider this anything else.

IMO, an engineer who refuses to explore a technology when paid and directed to do so isn't likely to be someone I'd want to work with.

It's... "uncurious" is the best way I can think of to describe it.

I've known him for bucking trends actually. Back when every company was tripping over themselves to say how "Black Lives Matter" they were, he sent a memo to the company saying "if you support that stuff, that's fine, but do it on your own time. When you're at work, the focus is the company's mission. If you don't like this, here's a nice severance package." Something a low single-digit percentage of employees took the severance offer. It was a pretty brave move when the prevailing wind was towards all these social justice issues.

And he also bucks the trend by running a crypto company in the US instead of some random island in the Carribean and actually talking to regulators in the hopes of getting regulatory clarity.

> Meticulous code quality, and perfect understanding of every detail

I'm sorry but there's just no fucking way. Even before AI these crypto coins companies were absolute clown factories. There's no way they ever had it.

4. He probably fired the best engineers who were concerned that a financial application actually works correctly instead of toying and vibing around with Copilot.

Going to agree somewhat with the sibling comment on this: (2) & (3) are of significantly greater concern here than (1).

Sure, code quality is important everywhere, & even moreso in finance, but if you're going through this world believing the mean standard across financial tech is high, even before considering the likely rot of coin-brained companies on their engineer's standards, then you need to readjust your skepticism.

On the other hand, the cultural implication of feeling my superiors even have any level of granular interest in monitoring the individual tools I personally use to generate outputs that benefit the company... outside of obvious security/endpoint concerns, there's no world in which that's an environment conductive to quality.

Because consumer investments is where we should "appreciate mediocrity." And yes, that's a real quote from a pro-vibe coding blog post whose URL ends with /youre-all-nuts/ [1]. Absolutely wild, lol

[1]: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

Good news is it's not real money: vibe code for your digital vibe-dollars.

I'm not a fan of AI coding as well, but you shouldn't be lying in your job interview.

It's just a tool, right? I'm not an AI enthusiast, but I use it quite a bit, from googling to learning and checking my understanding of stuff.

So I would steer the conversation towards ways of using AI for dev-related tasks other than coding: understanding codebases, confirming my intuition/hypotheses. For example, I find LLMs pretty shitty at modifying larger codebases, but it's been helpful to, say, point Codex at the github repo of a large unfamiliar codebase that I had to learn and run my ideas about it by the LLM as I was learning.

Also, you probably don't want to succeed at job interviews with managers that will insist on your using AI in ways you don't like. A job interview is a two way process and all that.

As someone who is very much "pro-AI", I'd say:

"I'm interested in the technology and have been paying attention to its development, but it's not yet to the point that I believe it will be worth integrating into my workflow."

I've tried Claude Code out at work and found that our codebase is too big and too specialized for Claude to do anything particularly useful. Could go with that.

I suggest honestly, generally. That will also help you select a place that fits you better.

Though I will say, if you copy and paste that question into ChatGPT, it can give you some options to respond in a diplomatic way ;)

As an interviewer: basically nobody gets 'caught lying' in an interview. You have to lie about something that can and might be checked within the confines of the hiring process. Sometimes people fail a vibe check though. It is well worth it to take an afternoon to learn the workflows and the terminology. Confine yourself to ideas where the output is cloaked in your previous employers' IP (or better, confined to your head), and is robust to various degrees of success. Whether you used a tool to translate a fragment from an unfamiliar language, summarize a codebase, do internet research, or develop a high-level design for a feature is essentially an unknowable fact.

If something increases your productivity 50%, you don’t need to ask people to use it. They’ll be beating down the your door begging to use it.

The few people who don’t will be forced out naturally when they can’t keep up.

>> Are there any anti-AI religions yet?

No. The Butlerian Jihad (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) hasn't happened yet.

I would guess that something similar could exist in the Terminator / Skynet timeline, but I am not aware of the religious beliefs of the humans struggling there.

It's not even about AI. That's just the tag they using for "justifying" these terminations. Gotta blame something other than management.

This was my experience too. The tools you get at work are the lowest common denominator tools.

"You want to use Claude code? Prove to us why copilot cannot do its job.". Wtf. I'm trying to do my job and the admins act as effing roadblocks so they can tick a box showing they gave everybody access. Now my job has suddenly become a judge of llms instead of doing actual work!

To quote Office Space:

> Well, I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself

A/V reference, for those inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno