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Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

⁨153⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨misk@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.zip⁩

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/coinbase-ceo-explains-why-he-fired-engineers-who-didnt-try-ai-immediately/

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  • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Armstrong was shocked at the thought. “I went rogue,” he said, and posted a mandate in the company’s main engineering Slack channel. “I said, ‘AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it and I’d like to meet with you to understand why.’”

    At the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations for not getting their AI assistant accounts set up during the week, like being on vacation, Armstrong said.

    “I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason]. And they got fired.”

    Armstrong admits that it was a “heavy-handed approach” and there were people in the company who “didn’t like it.”

    So he has poor planning skills, he’s impatient with terrible impulse control, he’s unable to motivate people (probably because they know he’s an intolerable ass) and his big idea is “do what everyone else is doing, even if you don’t know why.” Sounds like CEO is the only job he can do. What a fool.

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    • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Meetings on a Saturday? Intolerable ass is correct.

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    • Kekzkrieger@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Funnily enough AI can probably do his job far better

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      • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        You’re probably right. LLMs specialize in spouting bullshit, which seems to be the main requirement for a CEO too.

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      • ruuster13@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        CEO is the #1 job that should be replaced by AI.

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  • natecox@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s hard to find programmers these days who aren’t using AI coding assistants in some capacity, especially to write the repetitive, mundane bits.

    God damn it, stop it with this. No it isn’t. Most of the devs that I personally know won’t touch LLMs with a ten foot pole.

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    • hypna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’d be interested in some proper studies, but most of the devs I know, myself included, use it for reference at least. Haven’t met a vibe coder yet though.

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      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I tried using it as reference, but it lied more than the datasheets.

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      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        In my left hand, I have a manfile, written by the very same people who wrote the tool or language that I’m trying to use. It is concise, contains true information, and won’t change if I look up the same thing again later.

        In my right hand, I have a pathological liar, who also kinda sorta read the manfile and then smooshed it together with 20 other manuals.

        I wonder which of these options is a more reliable reference tool for me? Hmm. It’s difficult to tell.

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      • okwhateverdude@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I mostly vibecode throw away shit. I am not shipping this python script that is resizing and then embedding images into this .xls. Or the simple static html/css generator because hosting a full blown app is overkill when I just wanna show something to some non-tech colleagues. Stuff that would take half, to an hour to throw together now takes like 5-10min. I wouldn’t trust it to do anything more complicated because it fucks up all the time, leans too heavily on its training data instead of referencing docs and it is way too confident about shit when it is wrong. Pro-tip, berate the slop machines. They perform better and stop being so god damn sycophantic when you do. I am a divine being of consciousness and considerable skill, and it is a slop machine: useful, but beneath me.

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    • coreray00@discuss.online ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I mean having an LLM is helpful for writing left/right code, but I would quit if that was a decent portion of my job.

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    • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      And most devs I know use it everyday, so… 🤷

      Especially for repetitive mundane code, like they said. It’s much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.

      “I need to restructure this directory tree. If a file has “index” in the name, then it has to go in a parallel directory structure starting at “/home/repos/project/indexes/” with the same child folders as the original.”

      There, I just finished a custom Python script to accomplish that. Can I do it myself? Yes. Can I do it in 30 seconds? No. Why would I waste my time writing such a mundane script for a one-off thing?

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      • Senal@programming.dev ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It’s much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.

        In certain circumstances sure, but at any level of complexity, not so much.

        At some point it becomes less about code correctness and more about logical correctness, which requires contextual domain understanding.

        Want to churn out directory changing python scripts, go nuts.

        Want to add business logic that isn’t a single discrete change to an existing system, less likely.

        For small things is works OK, it’s less useful the more complex the task.

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      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Now re-explain this 5 more times before it shits out something remotely close to what you’re asking it to do.

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      • natecox@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        This is what LSPs are for, or even like just a baseline knowledge of CLI tooling (honestly, like, just mv and sed)

        . You do not need an LLM for any of what you’ve described, and I would argue that I can probably do it faster by hand than you can prompt your LLM and debug the slop it hands you back.

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      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        everyday

        “every day”, if you mean ‘daily’.

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    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Isn’t modular code used to handle repetitive mundane bits?

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      • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yes. People seem to be writing bad poorly abstracted code these days. Leading them to assume there’s a lot of manual mundane tasks

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  • quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Coinbase has always been the laughingstock. They’re not a real exchange.

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  • Amberskin@europe.pub ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Fuck all cryptobros. With a saguaro.

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  • PennyRoyal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m guessing it’s because he’s a prick. That’s is, isn’t it?

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    • shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      CEO
      Prick

      Yup

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    • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That’s all these kinds of things usually are about.

      LLMs for code completion cause me more button presses and clicks to ignore them over standard code completion and the chat doesn’t help people who think logically and conceptually only ones who think verbally. So, it’s useless to me.

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      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That’s all these kinds of things usually are about.

        You know who will be the slowest to adopt any Ai assistance? Senior devs. You know who this guy just fired? Senior devs. If you want to know the people you never want to fire, I have news for you.

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      • sexybenfranklin@ttrpg.network ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Extremely doubtful that this would rise to a firing that was justified enough that would preclude the employees seeking unemployment. They would really want to have a longer paper trail than “CEO sent a slack message and then a meeting a week later.” Not saying that this was an illegal firing. This was just power tripping.

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  • favoredponcho@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The guy is such an asshole. I’d never apply to work there. He had a policy where he personally needs to approve of every single person hired there. He’s a micromanager, Elon wannabe douche. I have some crypto with Coinbase, but I will never add more to it. Eventually, some day I’ll pull it out. The problem is other companies in crypto are also run by raging assholes — Kraken for instance was founded by a total dickhead.

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    • rafoix@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Crypto is full of scammers that are not allowed to trade securities because of criminal activities.

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    • HereIAm@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Do they give you some sort of return or interest for having cryptosystem with them? If not why not just store it in your own wallet. I thought the whole point of crypto currencies was to decentralise it.

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    • sfjvvssss@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If you have crypto on coinbase, does that mean you don’t have the private key?

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    • enbipanic@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      What’s with the kraken dude?

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      • favoredponcho@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        From Wikipedia:

        In 2019, Powell suggested that parenting was a distraction to being productive and critiqued the economic viability of parental leaves; he went on to question whether choosing to not abide by relevant governmental regulations was a risk worth taking.[40] In June 2022, Powell urged employees in a work meeting to reject the usage of preferred gender pronouns; he then opened a Slack channel to debate whether people should be allowed to choose their gender but not their race or ethnicity.[7] The next day, Kraken released a “culture document” which outlined the libertarian values that it asserted were to be obeyed at work.[7] Among other things, employees were prohibited from labelling others’ comments as “toxic, hateful, racist”, etc., and particular emphasis was assigned on how “offensiveness” was not forbidden.[7] Powell and his fellow executives encouraged employees who disagreed with the policy to quit, and offered four months’ severance for those who opted to do so.

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      • IhaveCrabs111@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I heard he doesn’t return his trolley

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    • vanDerVaartBlackenedRanch@hexbear.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Not your keys?

      Not youe coins.

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  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Let’s all drop everything. There’s something shiny and new hereabouts.

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  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Reminder that Coinbase is the company securing the assets of the majority of government sanctioned/registered crypto ETFs. If you are invested or thinking about being invested in cryptocurrency, but have doubts about the ability of Coinbase to do things in a secure, competent way, consider self custody instead of trusting them.

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    • quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Nah, this is why I went with the Canadian etf. They use Gemini, and seem much more competent

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  • markz@suppo.fi ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m guessing he only wants yes-men

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    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Don’t worry, he’ll come back to developers crying for help when his precious coins get stolen due to sloppy coding

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  • blicky_blank@lemmy.today ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s some A tier micro management

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  • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Fucking wish . com lex luther

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    • HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Eyooooo!

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  • Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Is it to lash out at others for his alopecia?

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    • Quill7513@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      this guy bald for the same reason caillou is

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      • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Punishment from God for his evil ways?

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    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Good bye pecia.

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  • RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Why is it so often a bald guy.

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    • al_Kaholic@lemmynsfw.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Why is it always a guy?

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      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Often yes, but not always.

        And, bonus HP douche.

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  • DrFistington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m gonna move my crypto out of CB if this schmeckle is running it

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  • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Isn’t that the guy from Beyond the Black Rainbow?

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    • Senal@programming.dev ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s a deep cut and I am here for it

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