I can't even get companies to trust my open source portfolio, with all of the work public on GitHub, and my long list of references from credible places like NASA. Most companies still insist on 8+ hour sample projects. There'd have to be a huge change in the way companies think about hiring for them to someone simply because their work history is verified on a block chain.
I think plausibly your cv, recommendations from people and credentials could be listed on a Blockchain and verified by your id tied to it, but:
- I don’t see why you need NFTs
- I don’t see how it’s better than e.g LinkedIn. Or maybe it could be the back end to LI’s front end
It’s really a distributed way of storing your cv - how does that benefit your job search?
One comment in the thread was that employers would search and compile your experience, in order to end up to selecting you…. So why aren’t they doing that now on LinkedIn as all that info is there already?
Linkedin is a walled garden. They make it really hard to use "their data" - the professional profiles of their users - outside their ecosystem, which makes sense as their business model optimises to sell Linkedin Recruiter Licences.
The fact that professional identities live in a closed ecosystem prevents real innovation to happen on top of the network.
Why do we even need NFT or blockchain? Couldn't we just have some open standard and maybe PGP for endorsements? Now generating chain from PGP might be bit more tricky, but I don't see blockchains or NFTs adding anything extra.
Having an on-chain professional profile that is part of your (web3) identity does make sense to me. People are already willing to share their Linkedin profile with the world, why not replicate that in a system that is user-owner vs. Microsoft owned.
So put it on your own website, or as part of your profile on any of the tons of other sites you use professionally. Burning the planet to share a cv with a handful of people is bonkers.
In the buzzword industry, the goal is typically finding a problem for the solution you're hyping, rather than finding a solution to your problem like how the rest of the world typically operates.
Seems like the idea has nothing to do with NFT (idea = 'employment db is good'), but the author is selling his book / course on NFTs and is making the thread into an advert for his product.
That sums up everything to do with NFTs for me. The smell remains rotten and I will, again, run away and fast.
Exactly - and this behaviour is a defining characteristic of blockchain technologies because of the money involved.
I never see posts like “how event-sourcing will change hiring forever” but that’s just as valid from a technology perspective to meet the implied requirements.
If it has ANYTHING to do with cryptocurrency/blockchain you can be guaranteed the grifters are Everest high waiting for naive adoption to make them profits.
You can. But why? Hertz probably likes managing their inventory with an in-house database rather than integrating with some other ecosystem they have limited control over.
NFTs offer the ability to separate ownership and management of a thing from the business that created that thing. That makes no sense for a company that has inventory they personally control and doesn't want people to resell for liability reasons.
I’ve had people make arguments like this before. Sure, it could be used but if it offers no benefit over a traditional database, or in some cases, drawbacks, what’s the incentive?
Someone made a similar argument about Steam adopting NFTs a while back, which made no (business) sense to me.
Have you ever worked at a warehouse? Companies keep inventories in a database. This database often does not reflect reality
I bought some lumber a few weeks ago. Bought a cedar board that they had in their inventory, went out to the lumberyard to find they were out of stock. Ended up swapping the it out for some cedar deck board they happened to have
Suppose you own a car rental. You can represent the available cars as NFTs and use a blockchain to make reservations and payments
And either give that information away to your competitors if the chain is public, or just implement a far more complex tech that could have been a straightforward database if it's private. Either way you lose.
Can’t imagine wanting to work, or really have a beer anywhere in the vicinity of, somewhere that hired like this. But VCs will fund this stuff, some companies will use it, and mostly we’ll carry on as before.
1. its focussed on "how" we hire, not "why" we hire which seems like a red flag for me.
2. it's a human - human interaction. all the humans involved should consent to it, requiring a human decision which must be done at human speeds.
3. people, their skills and interests change. we forgive and forget. success is chancy and sparse. the block chain is immutable.
4. the vision of the future reminds me a lot of the CCCP's social credit score system which does not fill me with hope.
5. it's entirely from the employers perspective with little to no consideration for the job seekers needs beyond "need a job". how do review, agree, negotiate the contract?
hiring isn't "broken", it's just a system being wrenched along with the wild pace of change
that said, maybe in a different system where things worked differently it wouldn't feel such a jarring idea
Agree with some of the points here. In my mind some of the company-sided dynamics he sketches can serve as a way to do better talent discovery (instead of full hiring). Obviously for a real job, versus a gig, you want to have assess someone as a person and not just as a nested list.
I think NTFs would make sense in some cases by providing a publick ledger of properties. It would avoid situations like that when a Luton man got his home stolen from him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-59069662
The problem in that case is trying to reverse a fraudulent transaction. Blockchains not only do not solve that, they make it impossible to solve: phish someone or exploit their computer and you can instantly make an irreversible transfer of their assets! If you have a mechanism where a trusted third party can reverse a transaction, you don’t need a blockchain and all of the expense and inconvenience was worth nothing.
This concept sounds like tyranny. Would it really stop at credentialism? How would this work for the self-taught? If I quit a shitty employer after 2 weeks, is that going to follow me for the rest of my life?
It kind of baffles me how people act like interviews are a one-way street. I get that applying and interviewing can be a slog, but you should be interviewing your employer as much as they are interviewing you. There have been several instances where I turned down jobs because the employer failed the interview process in my eyes. I shudder to imagine how my life would have turned out if I ended up working at that one place where they wanted me to speed-code under 1 minute per challenge while the interviewer stood behind me with a stopwatch.
Lost all respect for Greg Isenberg. This thread comes across as a scam artist. The underlying proposed concept doesn't need NFTs nor does it need blockchains.
Skillset and capabilites are a small part of the process when hiring for full time roles. The person has to work with a team full of highly unique individuals. This thread misses the whole point there.
I think working, at all, will totally become optional by the time we reach the point what author imagines. If it is just the skillset that matters, you can hire a freelancer in 6, not 60, seconds even today.
This is daft, it’s assuming the only thing important in hiring is previous technical experience. As Dee Hock said : “ Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”
This seems like the games and aptitude tests that some employers make you complete near the start of the process. There is a difference, currently most tests are critical thinking tests or personality quizes that may not match up to the skills you need for the given job. But the important difference is one of test design, not whether it is on the blockchain or not.
The thread really jumped the shark when the author shared a “glimpse of the future” and cited an example of some organization that doesn’t appear to exist, and some project the author made. This idea is so bad for so many reasons that others in the thread have already outlined.
1. None of this requires blockchain or NFTs and is 100% technically feasible today
2. This has all been tried before and failed to show real improvement for either candidates or companies
3. Contrary to what the thread suggests, the biggest problem on recruiting is fraud; this proposal doesn’t do anything to prevent someone else interviewing for you
It's all fun and games till there is blackmarket service for faking your skills by someone else much more qualified pretends to be you in exchange of some coins.
The overwhelming consensus in this thread and in the replies to that tweet is dissent on the basis of the many completely obvious holes in the author's reasoning, which I won't get into here.
What I'd like to appreciate is the uniqueness of the blockchain space in its seemingly bottomless capacity to generate these bold propositions for which blockchain is _blatantly_ ill-equipped to solve whatever problem is at hand.
This is seen virtually nowhere else in tech with such regularity: engineers are obsessed with picking the "right tool for the job," entrepreneurs are obsessed with finding "product-market fit," etc.
This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi. The type that could influence otherwise intelligent, well-meaning, technically-inclined people to make glaringly absurd claims like in the linked thread as a pretext for luring in investors.
The typical response to that explanation is to split hairs over whether NFTs, or Bitcoin, or whatever token this guy is selling (I didn't check) fits the classical definition of a Ponzi.
I say "typical" because we re-engage in this discussion anew every day here on HN -- apparently in direct proportion to the total cryptocurrency market cap, with the occasional two-or-three year relief period when retail money dries up.
>What I'd like to appreciate is the uniqueness of the blockchain space in its seemingly bottomless capacity to generate these bold propositions for which blockchain is _blatantly_ ill-equipped to solve whatever problem is at hand.
>This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi.
snake oil, that is a phrase that is commonly understood as metaphorical and nobody is going to argue that "it is not matching the classical definition of snake oil so it can't be that".
> The type that could influence otherwise [...] well-meaning, [...] people
If any thing, this sector tends to prove the emptiness of the "well-meaning" term. It reminds me of Arendt's claim about the banality of Eichmann's evil .
In the current case, well-meaning simply doesn't exist. It's an excuse people use after the fact, but in reality, the people described this way are usually either thoughtless about the morality of their actions or corrupted by their own interests. They can't be well meaning, because their means don't factor in ethics.
The point Arendt makes is that you don't need to deliberately do evil to be evil. Not thinking is enough. As for the crypto crowd, I hope that the people that didn't think through the consequences of their actions will come to realize it before they do something really fucked up.
There is no general financial literacy education in the United States. This education void has been filled in by weak teaching of financial gambling logic. Lacking any true understanding of how money, finances, interest/loans and non-theoretical real world economics operate, educated and technical individuals use pure logic to create incompatible to the real world financial systems, where the real world systems follow the logic of old world social constructs and not pragmatic logic.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] thread- I don’t see why you need NFTs - I don’t see how it’s better than e.g LinkedIn. Or maybe it could be the back end to LI’s front end
It’s really a distributed way of storing your cv - how does that benefit your job search?
One comment in the thread was that employers would search and compile your experience, in order to end up to selecting you…. So why aren’t they doing that now on LinkedIn as all that info is there already?
The fact that professional identities live in a closed ecosystem prevents real innovation to happen on top of the network.
That sums up everything to do with NFTs for me. The smell remains rotten and I will, again, run away and fast.
I never see posts like “how event-sourcing will change hiring forever” but that’s just as valid from a technology perspective to meet the implied requirements.
NFTs are just a way to represent something unique on a blockchain. The smell comes from the pixel art NFTs.
Your position on a uniswap v3 pair is represented as an NFT (no pixels associated), while v2 used ERC20 tokens (fungible)
Suppose you own a car rental. You can represent the available cars as NFTs and use a blockchain to make reservations and payments
NFTs offer the ability to separate ownership and management of a thing from the business that created that thing. That makes no sense for a company that has inventory they personally control and doesn't want people to resell for liability reasons.
Someone made a similar argument about Steam adopting NFTs a while back, which made no (business) sense to me.
I bought some lumber a few weeks ago. Bought a cedar board that they had in their inventory, went out to the lumberyard to find they were out of stock. Ended up swapping the it out for some cedar deck board they happened to have
Warehouse inventory/control is a great example of something that would be an incredibly poor fit for blockchain.
And either give that information away to your competitors if the chain is public, or just implement a far more complex tech that could have been a straightforward database if it's private. Either way you lose.
largely because:
1. its focussed on "how" we hire, not "why" we hire which seems like a red flag for me.
2. it's a human - human interaction. all the humans involved should consent to it, requiring a human decision which must be done at human speeds.
3. people, their skills and interests change. we forgive and forget. success is chancy and sparse. the block chain is immutable.
4. the vision of the future reminds me a lot of the CCCP's social credit score system which does not fill me with hope.
5. it's entirely from the employers perspective with little to no consideration for the job seekers needs beyond "need a job". how do review, agree, negotiate the contract?
hiring isn't "broken", it's just a system being wrenched along with the wild pace of change
that said, maybe in a different system where things worked differently it wouldn't feel such a jarring idea
None of the problems in that article were caused by having a hard to edit public ledger. In fact most problems were caused by it.
It kind of baffles me how people act like interviews are a one-way street. I get that applying and interviewing can be a slog, but you should be interviewing your employer as much as they are interviewing you. There have been several instances where I turned down jobs because the employer failed the interview process in my eyes. I shudder to imagine how my life would have turned out if I ended up working at that one place where they wanted me to speed-code under 1 minute per challenge while the interviewer stood behind me with a stopwatch.
Just the prejudice when adding events to the chain.
I suspect the author would be opposed to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
No prejudice, no wasted time, no pain"
Absolutely piss off. This is the same crowd that thinks that algorithms cannot be prejeduiced, after all "it's just maths".
Why don't you advocate for a social score as well while we're at it.
We all know how fabulously certifications work for hiring people, after all.
1. None of this requires blockchain or NFTs and is 100% technically feasible today
2. This has all been tried before and failed to show real improvement for either candidates or companies
3. Contrary to what the thread suggests, the biggest problem on recruiting is fraud; this proposal doesn’t do anything to prevent someone else interviewing for you
What I'd like to appreciate is the uniqueness of the blockchain space in its seemingly bottomless capacity to generate these bold propositions for which blockchain is _blatantly_ ill-equipped to solve whatever problem is at hand.
This is seen virtually nowhere else in tech with such regularity: engineers are obsessed with picking the "right tool for the job," entrepreneurs are obsessed with finding "product-market fit," etc.
This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi. The type that could influence otherwise intelligent, well-meaning, technically-inclined people to make glaringly absurd claims like in the linked thread as a pretext for luring in investors.
The typical response to that explanation is to split hairs over whether NFTs, or Bitcoin, or whatever token this guy is selling (I didn't check) fits the classical definition of a Ponzi.
I say "typical" because we re-engage in this discussion anew every day here on HN -- apparently in direct proportion to the total cryptocurrency market cap, with the occasional two-or-three year relief period when retail money dries up.
>This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi.
snake oil, that is a phrase that is commonly understood as metaphorical and nobody is going to argue that "it is not matching the classical definition of snake oil so it can't be that".
Hyping the possibility of NFTs solving everything is how he sells NFTs to join his expensive course.
He doesn’t really believe NFTs will make people instantly hired by companies. He just wants to sell more tickets to his NFT course.
If any thing, this sector tends to prove the emptiness of the "well-meaning" term. It reminds me of Arendt's claim about the banality of Eichmann's evil .
In the current case, well-meaning simply doesn't exist. It's an excuse people use after the fact, but in reality, the people described this way are usually either thoughtless about the morality of their actions or corrupted by their own interests. They can't be well meaning, because their means don't factor in ethics.
The point Arendt makes is that you don't need to deliberately do evil to be evil. Not thinking is enough. As for the crypto crowd, I hope that the people that didn't think through the consequences of their actions will come to realize it before they do something really fucked up.