I was interviewing for a position at coinbase in 2021 and man, it was the worst interview process I have ever gone through. All technical interviews seemed to be extremely specific around knowledge for tools outside of what I was interviewing for. (Senior/Staff level IAM) I am not sure why an IAM engineer needs to be asked tons of questions about specific big data and ML libraries but that level of bad interviewing made me tell them no before finishing all of them.
The real red flag though was that not 1 interviewer had been at CB for longer than 3-9 months. It sounded like in 2021 alone the company 2-3x'd headcount. I can only imagine the absolute shit show that must've been on the inside.
I still think CB seems like one of the better companies in their sector, but compared to the larger tech industry, I think it still has some maturing to do.
I think there are situations where directors were managing 3-5 ICs while taking home near 7 figure total comp.
This layoff corrects some of the issue, but is likely still not aggressive enough (at least for the management stack) for the market we're in.
Much of the staff hired through the last two years does not contribute to revenue generating products -- almost everything shipped in the last two years has not added incremental revenue to the company's bottom line and the company is operating on lower revenue but much higher costs for the last year.