5 ms·

I don't know, but my company doesn't hire people who have worked in cryptocurrency, just like we don't hire people who have worked in gambling. The concepts ar

by smt88 4y ago

I don't know, but my company doesn't hire people who have worked in cryptocurrency, just like we don't hire people who have worked in gambling. The concepts are fine and everyone is a consenting adult in theory, but the reality is that those industries just hurt people and concentrate wealth among people who are willing to cause harm. We're not interested in working with people who are suckers at best and mercenaries at worst.

mtnGoat 4y ago
Seems like a horrible and shortsighted hiring practice if you ask me. Is your employer “for profit”? Chances are they’ll do all the same things any other company will do to keep the boat afloat. Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal. Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Refusing to hire people for choosing to work in an industry you consider immoral is fine. Many companies do so already only the industries they discriminate against are subclasses of pharmaceutical retail sales or aggressive asset acquisition. If you think crypto is a massive scam and immoral, why would you want to hire people from there?
  - smt88 4y ago
    The same is true of people who have worked for PornHub or Enron. There were some incredibly talented people there, but most companies don't want to work with them (rightly or wrongly).
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Many divisions of Enron had a toxic culture that makes Amazon's force ranking look like a team building exercise. Anyone who thrives on one of those divisions would not want to be someone I worked with, regardless of talent.
    - mtnGoat 4y ago
      as someone who worked in the adult industry i can attest that some are unwilling to hire after looking at my work history(two in twenty years, both were extremely christian oriented companies), BUT many are excited about it, due to having experience with scale and technologies that cant be had at many companies outside of F500. streaming, ad serving, video encoding, etc.
  - mtnGoat 4y ago
    Just because a business has practices you do not agree with, does not mean the people working there are all bad. I'm not sure why that is hard to understand. A lot of folks around here hate on Amazon, but would happily hire Devs that worked there, in fact many will pay a premium to do so. Oo when its amazon abusing employees, thats ok, and we rush to hire their ex-employees, but if the employer was in crypto thats not OK and we ostracize these workers? seems pretty hypocritical if you ask me.
    - smt88 4y ago
      > seems pretty hypocritical if you ask me. That's going to be true of everyone else's morality. Even your own is not 100% consistent. You can't let perfect be the enemy of good. The difference between crypto and Amazon (as I said elsewhere) is that Amazon has ostensibly a good product: they sell people things. Their business is abusive of workers, but most people don't really know that. "We" (the people on HN) know about it because we're very-online people, but it's not common knowledge. So I'm willing to believe that someone is well-intentioned, takes a job at Amazon without knowing how abusive they are, and has good values in the end. I believe that many crypto employees are good, moral people, but they don't really understand how the industry works. That's fine -- I don't want to hire them because they don't understand the space, which tells me they aren't very smart. I'm hiring very few people, and I want to hire ones that understand systems very well (if I can!), including social and financial systems. The people who know it's a Ponzi scheme and still work there are the ones I would call immoral and refuse to hire on moral grounds.
- moistly 4y ago
  > Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope. Not judging them is a damn sight more slippery. All it took for German society to go straight to hell was to not judge their madman’s claims about minority groups. Far better to refuse the business of the corrupt, than to ignore it and participate in it.
- Kbelicius 4y ago
  > Seems like a horrible and shortsighted hiring practice if you ask me. Is your employer “for profit”? Chances are they’ll do all the same things any other company will do to keep the boat afloat. What are these "the same things" that crypto/gambling companies do that others also do to keep themselves afloat? > Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal. How is what a company does without employees knowledge relevant to that employee? Are you saying that crypto/gambling companies are dealing in crypto/gambling behind their employees backs? > Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope. WTF does this mean? We shouldn't judge anybody for anything ever?
- 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...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jansen555 4y ago
  Work in HR. Have been in this industry for decades. There is at least half of companies I dealt with will not hire those from gambling-type of industries (this include crypto). Moral has nothing to do with it. It reflects on people who work there with a specific type of behavior. Exception do given on those working for short stints like less than a year. But the longer one is in that kind of industry the stronger their "specific behaviors" ingrained in them and hence many employers exclude them from being hired. This is more of oral things and wont appear in any emails or paper trails.
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.
nurettin 4y ago
>> those industries just hurt people and concentrate wealth among people who are willing to cause harm I am no fan of cryptowhatever, but how are you any better?
- smt88 4y ago
  Our customers are unable to hire enough analysts to work as Excel jockeys, even at $160k+/year salaries. Most of them have at least 5 job posts up for analysts at any given time. Our software automates the tedious parts of what analysts do, so our customers can take down their unfilled job openings and make their analysts happier. It's not saving the world or even making the world a better place, but it's a software business that does what software is supposed to do: automate work that humans can't or won't do.
  - nurettin 4y ago
    At least at Facebook they don't have to rationalize taking over jobs and destroying lives through automation.
    - smt88 4y ago
      Pretty dramatic! All software eliminates jobs. If a computer does something that used to take humans thousands of hours, jobs disappear. The question is whether those were jobs people wanted or needed. In our case, the answer is no. Our clients are extremely traditional and would prefer to throw more people at these problems rather than adopt software. The only reason they're talking to us now is because people are quitting these jobs and they can't find anyone to hire to do them. We've never eliminated a job, but even if we did, these are Ivy League accountants, often from wealthy backgrounds. They're all going to be fine. One of them just quit our client's company without a job lined up, just because she hated the Excel work so much.
      - nurettin 4y ago
        Haha good times. Anyway, to feign moral superiority is despicable. I will make sure to filter this kind of person while hiring.

by smt88 4y ago

mtnGoat 4y ago

Seems like a horrible and shortsighted hiring practice if you ask me. Is your employer “for profit”? Chances are they’ll do all the same things any other company will do to keep the boat afloat. Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal. Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope.

HWR_14 4y ago
Refusing to hire people for choosing to work in an industry you consider immoral is fine. Many companies do so already only the industries they discriminate against are subclasses of pharmaceutical retail sales or aggressive asset acquisition. If you think crypto is a massive scam and immoral, why would you want to hire people from there?
- smt88 4y ago
  The same is true of people who have worked for PornHub or Enron. There were some incredibly talented people there, but most companies don't want to work with them (rightly or wrongly).
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    Many divisions of Enron had a toxic culture that makes Amazon's force ranking look like a team building exercise. Anyone who thrives on one of those divisions would not want to be someone I worked with, regardless of talent.
  - mtnGoat 4y ago
    as someone who worked in the adult industry i can attest that some are unwilling to hire after looking at my work history(two in twenty years, both were extremely christian oriented companies), BUT many are excited about it, due to having experience with scale and technologies that cant be had at many companies outside of F500. streaming, ad serving, video encoding, etc.
- mtnGoat 4y ago
  Just because a business has practices you do not agree with, does not mean the people working there are all bad. I'm not sure why that is hard to understand. A lot of folks around here hate on Amazon, but would happily hire Devs that worked there, in fact many will pay a premium to do so. Oo when its amazon abusing employees, thats ok, and we rush to hire their ex-employees, but if the employer was in crypto thats not OK and we ostracize these workers? seems pretty hypocritical if you ask me.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > seems pretty hypocritical if you ask me. That's going to be true of everyone else's morality. Even your own is not 100% consistent. You can't let perfect be the enemy of good. The difference between crypto and Amazon (as I said elsewhere) is that Amazon has ostensibly a good product: they sell people things. Their business is abusive of workers, but most people don't really know that. "We" (the people on HN) know about it because we're very-online people, but it's not common knowledge. So I'm willing to believe that someone is well-intentioned, takes a job at Amazon without knowing how abusive they are, and has good values in the end. I believe that many crypto employees are good, moral people, but they don't really understand how the industry works. That's fine -- I don't want to hire them because they don't understand the space, which tells me they aren't very smart. I'm hiring very few people, and I want to hire ones that understand systems very well (if I can!), including social and financial systems. The people who know it's a Ponzi scheme and still work there are the ones I would call immoral and refuse to hire on moral grounds.
moistly 4y ago
> Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope. Not judging them is a damn sight more slippery. All it took for German society to go straight to hell was to not judge their madman’s claims about minority groups. Far better to refuse the business of the corrupt, than to ignore it and participate in it.
Kbelicius 4y ago
> Seems like a horrible and shortsighted hiring practice if you ask me. Is your employer “for profit”? Chances are they’ll do all the same things any other company will do to keep the boat afloat. What are these "the same things" that crypto/gambling companies do that others also do to keep themselves afloat? > Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal. How is what a company does without employees knowledge relevant to that employee? Are you saying that crypto/gambling companies are dealing in crypto/gambling behind their employees backs? > Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope. WTF does this mean? We shouldn't judge anybody for anything ever?
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...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jansen555 4y ago
Work in HR. Have been in this industry for decades. There is at least half of companies I dealt with will not hire those from gambling-type of industries (this include crypto). Moral has nothing to do with it. It reflects on people who work there with a specific type of behavior. Exception do given on those working for short stints like less than a year. But the longer one is in that kind of industry the stronger their "specific behaviors" ingrained in them and hence many employers exclude them from being hired. This is more of oral things and wont appear in any emails or paper trails.

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.

nurettin 4y ago

>> those industries just hurt people and concentrate wealth among people who are willing to cause harm I am no fan of cryptowhatever, but how are you any better?

smt88 4y ago
Our customers are unable to hire enough analysts to work as Excel jockeys, even at $160k+/year salaries. Most of them have at least 5 job posts up for analysts at any given time. Our software automates the tedious parts of what analysts do, so our customers can take down their unfilled job openings and make their analysts happier. It's not saving the world or even making the world a better place, but it's a software business that does what software is supposed to do: automate work that humans can't or won't do.
- nurettin 4y ago
  At least at Facebook they don't have to rationalize taking over jobs and destroying lives through automation.
  - smt88 4y ago
    Pretty dramatic! All software eliminates jobs. If a computer does something that used to take humans thousands of hours, jobs disappear. The question is whether those were jobs people wanted or needed. In our case, the answer is no. Our clients are extremely traditional and would prefer to throw more people at these problems rather than adopt software. The only reason they're talking to us now is because people are quitting these jobs and they can't find anyone to hire to do them. We've never eliminated a job, but even if we did, these are Ivy League accountants, often from wealthy backgrounds. They're all going to be fine. One of them just quit our client's company without a job lined up, just because she hated the Excel work so much.
    - nurettin 4y ago
      Haha good times. Anyway, to feign moral superiority is despicable. I will make sure to filter this kind of person while hiring.