Sociopathic Management Ruining Foolproof Cash Cow Company - Senior Software Engineer Coinbase Employee Review

1.0
Sep 23, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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 + equity comp (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?

Cons

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, great place to make money. If the stress doesn't kill you by 40 you can retire.

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Coinbase Response
4y
We appreciate your feedback, and are sorry you had a negative experience. Hopefully you find something that is a better match for you. L.J. Brock, Chief People Officer

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4.0
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Pros

- Very interesting technical challenges - A LOT of autonomy (could be a con) - Amazing perks (WFH stipend, random gifts all the time) - Very smart colleagues - Great communication all around the company - Exciting - Brilliant CEO and engineering execs - A lot of useful education and automation regarding processes

Cons

- There is a lot of autonomy so if you're the kind of person who needs the work to be handed to you, you'll have to adjust - Since crypto is a very fast paced field, you will often have multiple projects on the go at the same time so work-life balance is usually relatively bad, although the company does offer re-charge days (and weeks) so that we can all take time off. - This is the biggest con: you get assessed if you're "on-track" or "off-track" every quarter, if you're "off-track", you have 60 days to fix it. Quite an aggressive stance, similar to Amazon's PIP program which is notoriously toxic.

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