Coinbase purchased enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor to provide AI coding assistants to every engineer. Some engineers predicted slow adoption, estimating months to reach half usage. Company leadership mandated that all engineers onboard the AI assistants by the end of the week and scheduled a Saturday meeting for those who had not completed onboarding. A few employees who lacked acceptable reasons for not onboarding were terminated after the meeting. The company acknowledged the approach was heavy-handed and that some employees disliked it. The firings sent a clear message that AI tool adoption is not optional.
I said, 'AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don't have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I'm hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn't done it and I'd like to meet with you to understand why.'
I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn't [have a good reason]. And they got fired.
Armstrong admits that it was a "heavy-handed approach" and there were people in the company who "didn't like it."
Collection
[
|
...
]