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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

> Heading into this year, we planned to triple the size of the company.

I wonder what "slow down" means exactly in this context. Complete hiring freeze? 10-50% growth? Even if there was no market downturn, how were they even planning to integrate 3x the people within the company in such a short period of time.

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I interpret this as hiring freeze.

When I read corporate emails and “official” messages, I always take the least charitable interpretation. So what’s the most unattractive thing that fits their definition of slowing down, that’s a hiring freeze.

This uncharitable view is the opposite when I encounter genuine human interaction where I try to view the most charitable.

But if a lawyer has read through it, then the most weaselly interpretation is probably truist.

Corporations are sociopaths, and we think this is a good idea for some reason

Of course they are. It is good. Corporations, like functions, are sociopaths. They’re just rulesets. They aren’t real people so they can’t be anything but sociopaths, although I don’t think that’s an accurate term for a non-person. Are deer sociopaths? Or trees? Or virii? Or bags of rice?

I want the emotions to be with the people who make up corporations (and write the functions).

Except these rulesets are at the top of the food chain within our society.

As for the people who make up the corporations, they turn into sociopaths themselves as their emotion and empathy dissipate the higher they get in the pecking order.

I don’t think that’s true. Or would need to see a lot of studies. I’ve interacted with c-level execs in many industries and companies and sociopaths are pretty rare.

Also, sociopaths aren’t bad, they just extremely focus on goals. Psychopaths are bad sociopaths who harm others. If you have a sociopath surgeon or something that could actually be beneficial to society as they’d just perform tons of surgeries.

"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

Idk spend more time on the robo phone line with CVS trying to get a prescription you need to live and tell me it’s a preferred state of order

They have 3.7k employees, which means by the end of the year two thirds of the employees would have been there less than a year. Did anyone ever go through a similarly extreme hiring period as an employee? I can't imagine how disorienting it must be.

Coinbase revenue increased 514.76% from 2020 to 2021. They were also profitable in 2021. Adding 3x people probably made sense, if they think that that revenue will continue to increase.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/COIN:NASDAQ

Something maybe more worrying is that you can see in the financial results of Coinbase that they invested into BTC themselves, and there is threshold where they would lose funds and likely have to liquidate BTC aggressively :/ (it's public)

If they're profitable why would they panic sell?

What's their average buy-in price?

Out of my head (has to be verified), it was around 25'000 USD.

I deducted by comparing their portfolio value at last quarter vs this quarter.

Negative growth

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