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smt88 4y ago

> Seems like a horrible and shortsighted hiring practice if you ask me. Why? Most smart developers know that crypto companies are capitalizing on Ponzi schemes. If they don't know that, then they don't know their own industry very well. We're never going to need 100+ developers, and there are plenty of people to hire that have never been involved with a scammy industry. > Is your employer “for profit”? Chances are they’ll do all the same things any other company will do to keep the boat afloat. Yes, and we're profitable. I own 30% of the company and make technical hiring decisions. We will not forego our morals to hire additional developers. We don't need 10,000 (or even 100) developers, so it will be easy to find as many as we need. > Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal. There's a difference between Boeing (a company with deeply unethical leaders, but a perfectly legitimate product) and Binance (a company with a deeply unethical service). I can believe a software developer at Boeing didn't know what was happening or was just doing what they were told to preserve their career. I can't believe the same for people in crypto (or repeat offenders, like Facebook). > Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope. Boycott is one of the only tools I have to preserve my own morals, to try to prevent others from doing what I consider to be evil, and to stay sane. I can't enforce my morals, but I can exercise the "invisible hand" of my market power and refuse to advance the careers of people who don't care about harming users. This is partly a personal decision -- I don't want to work with people I think are unscrupulous -- and partly a business decision. If those developers were so disrespectful of their users' wellbeing at their previous employers, why wouldn't they be at mine? Can I trust them to do all the tedious things that developers have to do for security? Can I trust them not to sell our clients' data?

mtnGoat 4y ago
ive found that how we see the world is a reflection of self. i tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, i guess that is not universal.
- smt88 4y ago
  I think that's great, and I'm glad people like you exist. No one's past should be a death sentence for their career (or social life), depending on how they make amends for mistakes. If I ran a bigger company with more money and more time to vet candidates, I would soften a lot of my filters and try to be more like you. As it is, I need to sort through dozens or hundreds of candidates without it becoming my full-time job, which means some of my filters are going to result in some false negatives (people I won't consider, but should have considered). Unfortunately it's a tradeoff I have to make. I still won't ever hire someone who worked at Facebook, though...

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

I hope your company doesn't hire from Facebook either.

smt88 4y ago
We don't, for the same reason.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  What about porn? oil? alcohol? tobacco? weed? Uber (they broke lots of laws)? traders? anti-virus companies? firearms? companies using cheap Chinese labor?
  - smt88 4y ago
    > What about porn? oil? alcohol? tobacco? weed? Uber (they broke lots of laws)? traders? anti-virus companies? firearms? companies using cheap Chinese labor? Porn: No. Not because I disapprove of porn as a concept, but because the larger porn companies are extremely exploitative and don't try very hard to purge themselves of illegal content. Oil: No. Tobacco: No. Alcohol: Yes. Alcohol is regulated enough that I don't think alcohol companies are really able to exploit people too much. It's also just something humans (and many other mammals) consume naturally, even before civilization. It might bother some people, but it doesn't bother me. Weed: Yes, as long as the company isn't mislabeling products or making false health claims. Uber: Yes. They did break laws, but the laws they broke were government-mandated monopolies on taxis. In my city at least, Uber made their users more safe, not less. Taxis were scary and I have multiple female friends who were attacked by taxi drivers with no way to identify them afterward. Traders: Not sure what this means. Like day traders? Anti-virus companies: No. Firearms: No. Companies using cheap Chinese labor: Yes. This is all companies and all people in tech. I would avoid it if I could, but I can't. Every electronic device I have used in the last 10 years has probably been made with unethical labor.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Thanks for the interesting response. By trader I mean wall street style trader, more the “big short” style in my mind, but algorithmic traders and the stay at home day trader too.
      - smt88 4y ago
        I would be very skeptical of someone who worked at a company like Robinhood, which has essentially profited by encouraging risky day-trading. Day-trading is gambling anyway, but Robinhood seems to be "saying the quiet part out loud" in their product/marketing strategies.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    Are any of these supposed to be a "aha, got you!"? Because they're not.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      No. It is interesting to see where people draw the lines. No right or wrong answers in my mind.

mike_d 4y ago
Here is the "random" that wrote the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cohan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cohan
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  You can trust this random, or just read the filings for yourself. The nice thing about public companies is you can stop listening to pundits and just get the info yourself.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    But by your logic can we really trust the SEC? That is just a bunch of randoms that work for the government, man. Why not go directly to the document published directly on Coinbase's investor website that I mentioned in my first comment? https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q1/Coinbase-Q122-Shareholder-Letter.pdf https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q1... (Hint: page 11, "Total expenses" has been north of $1.5b for the last two quarters)
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      The SEC don't make the filings. The company sends them to the SEC, who just hosts them... Ok, in your link..."expenses" on page 11 doesn't include revenue.... so no, that's not burn. You want to add the money coming in to the money going out to calculate burn. Look at pages 20 onwards. Same data they send the SEC. You have revenue and expenses in an income statement. But, many of the expenses are non-cash. And many balance sheet changes (like receivables, inventory etc) affect cash but not the income statement. So, if you want to understand the burn rate the easiest place to go is the cashflow statement. That's page 22. Look about 2/3 way down and you'll see "net cash (used in) provided by operating activities". It's worth investing a few hours to understand basic accounting if you want to understand the basics of companies. Lots of info at your fingertips if you can be bothered. You'll even be able to see where random forbes contributors go wrong.
      - mike_d 4y ago
        The dark money illuminati might have conspired with the SEC to modify the documents, therefor they are just papers from randoms and can't be trusted. This is the whole you dig yourself into when you start attacking sources rather than taking a step back and realizing you might be arguing on the wrong side of the facts. The burn rate is the amount of cash the company is spending per month. It does get murky post revenue, but is generally understood to be the rate at which a company is spending - I understand it might be confusing to someone who hasn't been in the trenches of startups and investing so I'll give you a pass on that. Close to $600 million a month going out the door is stupid high compared to what they actually do. The executive leadership agrees with me and is cutting high costs.
        danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        The SEC docs and the docs posted to a company's investor relations page always seem to match... so unless the company and it's auditors are in on it (rare), unlikely. An accounting class, it's worth it. Burn is practically synonymous with operating cashflow (at least when negative..) and is always inclusive of revenue, never inclusive of non-cash charges (like options/equity comp). Pointing out operating expenses as though it's burn suggests a lack of accounting basics. What's next? Google is burning $70 bill pa? Plus, loads of people on HN have either been involved in startups, or investing, or both. It's pretty silly to assume they haven't.