Coinbase

• Make a lot of money.
• Crypto is exciting and novel.
• Remote work plus a publicly traded company is sort of rare.

They don’t care about the people. This is just what it is. Brian Armstrong is a meathead who doesn’t seem to understand human emotions. If you work at Coinbase, you will have to pay fealty upward to succeed. You’ll also need to outcompete your peers on cheerleading for your work. Politics is deeply ingrained into the culture. At the end of the day, it’s a finance company, so it’s all about the bottom line. Don’t pretend for a minute that they will hesitate to lay off their entire workforce in a crypto winter. They’ve done it plenty of times before.

Coinbase is a reactive company, and the company culture is toxic. This is reflected in the BS values like “Play like a championship team” and “Top talent in every seat.” What meaningless value statements!

These are actually top-down euphemisms for “Work harder pions!”

If you guys actually want to improve, which, having worked for Brian for a few years, is highly doubtful: Invest in your people and they will invest in you. Until then, you’ve got an enterprise full of employees who don’t trust management and are too afraid to innovate.

Oh, and hire some program managers. Stop thinking Coinbase is somehow so special that it will work to have your engineers plan everything. If you think that is working, you’re not listening at all.