"While we did not make this decision lightly..." Yes but you aren't doing it humanely, either.
I've been through the dot com crash and several hard economic downturns. It really puts your company's humanity on full display. It's the real test.
Preserving cash flow is important. But you also have to do things carefully, openly, and with genuine care for the people who've believed in your vision.
People will respect the hard decisions but not sloppy or careless execution.
The worst part is that Coinbase's interviews are difficult. If I'd spent months studying, rejecting other (good faith) offers, and then had this happen I'd not only be in a bad spot (without a job entering a recession) but I'd be furious at the inequality of input and output.
I've been interviewing for the past month and I made a rule that I won't be doing any algorithm interviews. I didn't have time to study; some friends questioned whether this was a good idea or not. I ended up submitting code samples when recruiters or managers would try to go through that kind of phone screening. Not only am I interviewing at better quality firms, but it's not nearly as stressful.
Anecdotally there is a high correlation between firms that tell me they're freezing hiring, etc and algorithm interviews.
This sentiment seems common on Hacker News but I'm not sure its wise.
Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code.
It's definitely true that not all companies that use these algorithm interviews are worth working for. But, at least in my experience, companies that don't require them at all are pretty awful places to work. It demonstrates that management doesn't care who they hire.
The industry is at a point where there are plenty of clueless cookie cutter companies cargo culting Leetcode just because those interesting companies engage in it.
As far as interesting companies that don't require that, there's at least Stripe, famously, and surely more from this list: