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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?

We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.

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Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.

I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?

Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.

If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?

The kinds of people who really can do all three always have options. It means you end up with a lot of turnover in these types of teams.

Seriously. Why is everyone just silently accepting this?

What is the alternative

Beatings will continue until morale improves

Start your own company. If you’re already doing everything yourself then you don’t need to do it for someone else.

Starting a company needs a lot more than those three skills. Plenty of people choose a pay packet with less stress.

Many founders recycle into tech jobs after they discover exactly why failure rates of startups are so brutal. Apparently 15-25% of employees aged 30–39 at major SV companies have a failed or acquihired startup in their history. Golden handcuffs can appear very pretty after you've missed out on striking gold by yourself.

Organized labor

History has always been kind to inefficient systems organizing together for protection /s

Efficient system is when worker does work of 5 people for the same salary and CEO makes billions.

I'm not arguing what defines inefficient in these situations, just that "if we group together we'll be okay" for tech workers will go about as well as 1960's longshoreman unionization

Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.

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