Prospective Coinbase employees were left in the lurch after the crypto exchange announced it would withdraw job offers as part of cost-cutting measures in a bear market.
CoinDesk spoke with three of those employees who said they felt blindsided by the sudden about-face from the company they had assumed was the most stable brand in the crypto world - a place worth choosing over Snap, Meta, Roblox or other tech giants. One software engineer, a recent college graduate, said he turned down offers from all three companies to work at Coinbase instead.
Another software engineer, who said he signed his Coinbase cloud offer in mid-May, was just days away from leaving his Wall Street job: He was at a farewell happy hour with work colleagues when he received the termination email. Now he's sticking around.
Many of the potentially hundreds of applicants who lost their jobs weren't so lucky. The college graduate was actually planning to start in September.
"Now I'm desperately looking for a job, and most companies are either fully booked or have put a hiring freeze in place," the graduate said.
Coinbase had announced earlier this year that it planned to triple its headcount by the end of 2022. One of the recruiters CoinDesk spoke with said he believes several hundred people may have been in the recruiting and onboarding process this week.
On Thursday, Coinbase Chief People Officer L.J. Brock announced that the company "will be withdrawing a number of accepted offers." And it appears to have wasted no time in doing so.
Several near-employees posted on Blind's job posting forum that they had left their old jobs or turned down other offers to take a position at Coinbase, which announced two weeks ago it was slowing its hiring process. One person said he was a new graduate who applied in November.
According to a copy of an email Brock sent to that person, she will receive one month's salary as severance.
Other users said her start date should be June 6, just four days after Brock's blog post.
Coinbase's share price was trading around $67 on Friday and fell 9% during the day amid a general decline in tech stocks.