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The entire software developer career isn't exactly being competitive right now. You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary exp

The entire software developer career isn't exactly being competitive right now. You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster. While the cryptocurrency developers make more than all. So, the relativity of "oh no I wish our best and brightest did something more productive with their time" becomes extremely apparent very quickly. Is it really that tempting to debate when you know the outcome of the debate? But hey it's good to believe in something.

woodruffw 5y ago
I won't attempt to justify adtech or startups (I work for/on neither, and couldn't care less about them), but: comparing them to cryptocurrency feels like setting a low bar. The former have all kinds of socially negative incentives; the latter is designed to maximize negative social and environmental outcomes as part of one of two explicitly reactionary worldviews (conspiratorial fiat/economic doomerism for PoW and neofeudalism for PoS).
- vmception 5y ago
  These are good points, there is a lot more going on than the consensus models, even if they are inseparable. Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. The only approach to the grandparent poster’s “nemesis” all leads to contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as you can only improve some parts of the stack, as opposed to hoping the stack disappears. And a high probability of making a lot of money in the process.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    > Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average. Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Its a stack. That part is done, so you dont work on that, you work on things at a higher part of the stack: wallets, standards, libraries, node communication software, applications, employee at a startup doing applications…Nothing to prove there, just a fundamental understanding. Maybe a tech recruiter can help you with numbers? This is like one of those studies where people are thinking “academics really spent time and resources to make a study on this topic?” when its true that someone in an obscure forum asked “source?” and there simply needed to be a source to point to eventually. Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code. In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        I think you've misunderstood or are misinterpreting: I'm not claiming that the majority of people are working on the "proof" aspect of PoW or PoS. Those are, indeed, mostly settled. The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.
wins32767 5y ago
> You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster. There are other options. For example, I've spent the best years of my life on startups building things that are doing good in the world and trying to get them to scale. I haven't had any home runs, but I've helped get a faster acting anti-psychosis drug approved for people with severe schizophrenia, gotten a COVID vaccine approved faster, and now build tools for social workers that have gotten hundreds of people out of homelessness and helped people get out of housing that was making them sick. Despite not yet having a winning startup lottery ticket, that I've made a small positive difference in the world is enough for me, especially because I earn more than enough to have a comfortable life.
- vmception 5y ago
  There are a lot of people at every category passionate about what they do. I’m glad you are finding something fulfilling. Most crypto developers have causes that have nothing to do with intentionally believing nonsense for a limited time, or greed, or the environmental concerns over using a fraction of the energy that other industries do.
alesua93 5y ago
> So, the relativity of "oh no I wish our best and brightest did something more productive with their time" becomes extremely apparent very quickly. Is it really that tempting to debate when you know the outcome of the debate? I'd argue that the fact that we got to the point where the options are what you described might be an indicative that they (we) were never the best and brightest in the first place.
- vmception 5y ago
  I’ll take that Its more that other people say that about a very few select industries and trades, I've heard this many many times levied at the finance industry and the last two decades thats been specifically software engineers (the “quants”) at finance firms, software eating all

woodruffw 5y ago

I won't attempt to justify adtech or startups (I work for/on neither, and couldn't care less about them), but: comparing them to cryptocurrency feels like setting a low bar. The former have all kinds of socially negative incentives; the latter is designed to maximize negative social and environmental outcomes as part of one of two explicitly reactionary worldviews (conspiratorial fiat/economic doomerism for PoW and neofeudalism for PoS).

vmception 5y ago
These are good points, there is a lot more going on than the consensus models, even if they are inseparable. Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. The only approach to the grandparent poster’s “nemesis” all leads to contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as you can only improve some parts of the stack, as opposed to hoping the stack disappears. And a high probability of making a lot of money in the process.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average. Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Its a stack. That part is done, so you dont work on that, you work on things at a higher part of the stack: wallets, standards, libraries, node communication software, applications, employee at a startup doing applications…Nothing to prove there, just a fundamental understanding. Maybe a tech recruiter can help you with numbers? This is like one of those studies where people are thinking “academics really spent time and resources to make a study on this topic?” when its true that someone in an obscure forum asked “source?” and there simply needed to be a source to point to eventually. Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code. In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      I think you've misunderstood or are misinterpreting: I'm not claiming that the majority of people are working on the "proof" aspect of PoW or PoS. Those are, indeed, mostly settled. The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.

wins32767 5y ago

> You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster. There are other options. For example, I've spent the best years of my life on startups building things that are doing good in the world and trying to get them to scale. I haven't had any home runs, but I've helped get a faster acting anti-psychosis drug approved for people with severe schizophrenia, gotten a COVID vaccine approved faster, and now build tools for social workers that have gotten hundreds of people out of homelessness and helped people get out of housing that was making them sick. Despite not yet having a winning startup lottery ticket, that I've made a small positive difference in the world is enough for me, especially because I earn more than enough to have a comfortable life.

vmception 5y ago
There are a lot of people at every category passionate about what they do. I’m glad you are finding something fulfilling. Most crypto developers have causes that have nothing to do with intentionally believing nonsense for a limited time, or greed, or the environmental concerns over using a fraction of the energy that other industries do.

alesua93 5y ago

> So, the relativity of "oh no I wish our best and brightest did something more productive with their time" becomes extremely apparent very quickly. Is it really that tempting to debate when you know the outcome of the debate? I'd argue that the fact that we got to the point where the options are what you described might be an indicative that they (we) were never the best and brightest in the first place.

vmception 5y ago
I’ll take that Its more that other people say that about a very few select industries and trades, I've heard this many many times levied at the finance industry and the last two decades thats been specifically software engineers (the “quants”) at finance firms, software eating all