Coinbase

Full disclosure: I made a few million here just by being in at the right place and time, where my option strike price was basically nothing. Which is awesome, life-changing for those of us who lucked into that. I can't, in good faith, recommend anyone new to work here, though.

• Above-average pay plus equity compensation (though stock only goes down)
• Remote work is nice
• Used to have really great perks; may one day again
• Modern dev practices
• Good diversity if you care about that
• Sounds sexy on your resume, I guess?

The company has pretty much been in a downhill spiral since about 4 months before it went public. This has nothing to do with the decisions about "no politics at work" and everything to do with outwardly hostile, sociopathic senior management that was all hired about this time.

As an engineer, you will spend 2-10 hours of your week interviewing new candidates (apparently the 'hiring' team is just a passthrough), more time learning new interviews (we all have to learn 20 new ones by the end of the year!), and if you're anything past a junior engineer, about 20 more hours a week will be interviews. Oh, and if you're in charge of bootcamp mentoring or on call, another 10-20 hours is gone from your day. So you then have to work evenings and weekends, or your work just won't get done. And don't think they won't notice if you skip a Saturday; they will.

Don't expect your manager to help either because they're required by the new rules to spend 50% of their time on new hire headhunting and interviews. And if you ever see your manager's schedule, it's meetings 9-5 anyway. They'll message you at 8 PM asking you to do something, have a weekly sync with you where they tell you you're off track and need to work harder or you're fired in 60 days (new 'on track pulses' every quarter to keep you motivated by fear), and throw new work at you and say, 'Figure it out.'

Upper management sits around spewing nonsense about NFTs and how we're totally going to be saving starving African farmers with crypto any second now. Self-righteous lip service while they basically hold employees hostage to 80-hour work weeks with their stock option vesting schedule. You're here making the execs (and, if you're lucky, yourselves) and Chinese speculators richer; don't kid yourselves.

Oh, and there's no QA or testing. Nope, zero. Don't believe in it. Instead, we sneakily try to fix things in production by constantly firefighting with 'incidents.' I can't tell you all the shady, borderline illegal things I've been asked to do to cover this up either. Couldn't actually test things; better put that on the engineers too.

If this all doesn't put you off though, I will admit, it's a great place to make money. If the stress doesn't kill you by 40, you can retire.

Pull your head out from behind. This company makes money hand over fist just because it has market share, and somehow you're finding a way to turn it into a modern Yahoo or AOL.

My 'Chief People Officer,' I know you're reading this, and if you honestly do care about this company, please consider changing your ways. You're actually destroying this company with your sociopathic behavior, and honestly, I'm impressed at how you can make Elizabeth Holmes look like she cares about her employees. I don't even work with you personally; I feel bad for people who do. It wouldn't surprise me if they sued me for libel for this review, but I have said nothing that is untrue.

Literally, all you have to do is have decent work-life balance and focus on growth areas, and you can make money and not have garbage PR. Too many of you in upper management leveraged some company name like Google to get a sweet payday here and think you can slave-drive your employees into putting a few more million into your own pockets before things crash. Really sad to see.