The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
YMMV, I suppose, but this combined with the AI nonsense just makes the dislike even harder.
I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
Knowing what you don't know and knowing how to get qualified information from people around you makes up for a lot of not having a programming background.
If anything, the managers with technical backgrounds who weren't active programmers tended to significantly underestimate the difficulty of doing something because back in their day, things were different or some such nonsense.
It can certainly overlap with what makes a great engineer, but not most of the time.
This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
Internal tools keep the lights on and allow customer facing code to function!
Operational tooling also isn’t a sexy thing, but it’s vital for any company to function.
Do fintech customers share your ideals as to what is "critical stuff" and what isn't? How much of this business could _plausibly_ be "non critical?"
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
Your coins frozen with no reason given even internally except for "machine said no" - no one gets any slap on the wrist unless you sue real hard, happen to win, and most likely that'll be just a scratch that won't be noticed enough to change any attitudes.
The Man sees that someone they don't like transferring their coins through the fintech company - that's what those companies are really concerned about, because it would be a punch in the gut the company will feel.
Thus, the incentives. Current social design doesn't punish for false positives (until they hit really high levels), only false negatives.
What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.
Just a vague nonsense about compliance, that magickly aligns with padding their float. In reality they are using compliance and regulatory language as a shield to prop up their numbers. They are using KYC/AML to hold your funds hostage, as it's the most plausible explanation that also allows them to legally seize it under a legal sounding explanation. The fact that they do have to perform KYC/AML and there are penalties for not doing so just happen to make it a valid enough sounding excuse for when it's used overly aggressively because it lines up with other goals.
If they move the hair trigger to freeze funds 2x as often as they need to against the innocent false-positives to pass compliance checks, due to a hair trigger, then it falls under plausible deniability and even better when the regulator comes they can say some insane bullshit about how good their KYC/AML is. If they freeze it less often but instead just steal some for a little while and then return it, then it's more obvious a crime has been committed. It's obvious what they're up to.
Of course the KYC/AML/ regulatory officers are probably just pawns in this. The executives in the crypto and fintech space tell these people they need to set the sensitivity up to the 9s which does increase KYC/AML 'true positives' but the unspoken part is that money is now locked up into the company's accounts which creates a moral hazard in their fiduciary duty. They know damn well what that actually does is inflate their float, at the cost of a bunch of false positives. In theory that's satisfying AML because a function of doing so is you trigger more true positives, but in reality it's merely stealing money to increase floats not actually optimizing to meet the cutoffs to keep your license. But no one is actually going to come out and say this. It will probably take a class action suite, which I have little doubt will eventually happen when someone comes out and admits one day that these regulatory compliance triggers were intentionally set on the sensitive side for non-regulatory reasons.
As far as I understand, they're often not allowed to disclose that. E.g.,
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
> In the specific case of “Why did the bank close my account, seemingly for no reason? Why will no one tell me anything about this? Why will no one take responsibility?”, the answer is frequently that the bank is following the law. As we’ve discussed previously, banks will frequently make the “independent” “commercial decision” to “exit the relationship” with a particular customer after that customer has had multiple Suspicious Activity Reports filed. SARs can (and sometimes must!) be filed for innocuous reasons and do not necessarily imply any sort of wrongdoing.
> SARs are secret, by regulation. See 12 CFR § 21.11(k)(1) from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency...
It's obvious when someone gets their money frozen for a month only to just have to perform a KYC check that even if the KYC check was legitimate, and these kinds of results are common over years, the delay was a result of a business decision that increased their float.
I think you're conflating the requirements with the BSA with how executives are using it in a hostile way against customers. They can make the deliberate decision to slow down KYC/AML officers and checks after a trigger, while putting them on a hair trigger, while citing secrecy under the BSA. That is the regulatory nonsense under which they are dressing up a business, non-regulatory decision. It's there to provide plausible deniability.
The compliance officer in this case is plausibly just following the law but in reality they're just running cover for increasing the float -- maybe even unwittingly.
They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.
Put otherwise, suppose I run a bank and you deposit your paycheck. I decide our reserves are a little low so I set KYC/AML triggers even more sensitive on a hair trigger so that an extra of 0.2% of innocent paychecks get held up an extra 4 weeks (I have also conveniently slow down / underhire customer service) which also causes me to catch 1 or 2 more real criminals. That's not KYC/AML even though that's the mechanism by which I claim to have held it. I'm not bound by the BSA secrecy in such case since the underlying trigger was for increasing the float rather than actually KYC/AML compliance.
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I am accusing fintech and crypto businesses in general of committing mass fraud through intentionally setting KYC/AML on an artificially sensitive trigger to increase their floats, yes.
I do not know if Coinbase specifically does that -- my limited experience with them is they are one of the few fintech companies that hasn't fucked me over.
I have an absolutely massive body of evidence that leads me to that conclusion, through my own transactions and frozen funds as well as studying a wide amount of CS complaints that show evidence that KYC/AML checks on frozen funds are stalled for weeks to months without any plausible explanation of what is happening which is not a KYC/AML regulatory action but rather an intentional choice to raise floats for free interest and padding their numbers.
Of course what's extraordinarily ironic here is when fintech claims you violate KYC/AML then "law says we provide no evidence" but if you turn around and accuse them then the industry shills will scream "without evidence" while simultaneously saying your counterparty doesn't have to provide it! They are hypocrites! The very people accusing you without evidence betray their own sins accusing you of same! They were the ones that set the bar that they don't need to present evidence, not me.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.