alt Hacker NewsThat's 2 major layoffs this week (Coinbase being the other). Is there an underlying common reason for this? And is it indeed AI-driven productivity as both companies claim?
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Employees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years.
Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
Coinbase lost 40% transaction revenue. The AI thing is just smokescreen
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...
AI productivity is a lie. It’s AI spending because the revenue hasn’t gone up.
I think there's also a certain permission structure that once one sufficiently large org does a big round of layoffs and doesn't get punished, a bunch of others will run the same playbook. We've seen this before -- back in 2022 when Elon fired like half or more of Twitter and the service didn't immediately implode, it gave other CEOs permission to do massive layoffs in the guise of "efficiency" even though the real reason was ZIRP was over. Now they're claiming it's because of AI when it's really that their margins are eroding because the overall economy is slumping and they need to offset AI spend.
Is Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.
Meta's layoff was also last week, much bigger than both.
Coinbase for sure is driven by declining Bitcoin fundamentals and entry of other big players in the Trump inner circle. The AI narrative is a lie.
Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now).
By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.
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There's multiple simultaneous narratives: the industry-wide one of slashing well-paid tech talent under the guise of AI productivity boosts, and what's actually going in at each company.
Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves alone could cover ~9 more years of losses), but still enough to warrant some cutbacks - and AI is the current scapegoat, thus they finger AI and throw folks out the door.
Coinbase's story is different: they're making good money, but their industry is inherently volatile. Again, recent volatility in the crypto markets related to...things...is dragging down long-term prospects for currencies, while ongoing trades are broadly just insiders doing insider things or exiting their positions for liquidity. Still, their share price is down 27% over 5 years and 18% YTD, so they also need to pump their share price so the executives get paid; layoffs are consistently rewarded by the shareholders, thus they axe part of their workforce for the bump and fingerpoint to AI.
Never take what a company says at face value, and always check their balance sheets. What Cloudflare did sucks but could be warranted to some degree; what Coinbase did has no justification whatsoever beyond naked greed.