Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?
I would describe myself as having neutral stance towards the crypto industry, DeFi/Ethereum more specifically. I am not a fan of most other alternative chains or Bitcoin. I understand that the majority of tokens and services are scams and markets caps are a bubble driven by speculation, but I also see true potential in the technology and ideology. Both of these opinions kind of cancel each other out leading to me being neither fully pro- nor fully anti-crypto.
However, the constant backlash from the public is nagging me. All the hate for crypto, even though much of it is uninformed, makes me question my decisions. I am also worried about future employability. If crypto fails, which is a real possibility in my mind, will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?
Just feeling a bit lost. Anyone else in a similar position?
344 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadI work in this industry because it combined my libertarian beliefs with my software skillset. I work with a lot of like-minded people, and the atmosphere is very freedom-oriented and open to debate compared to the average tech company.
The 2018-2020 bear market was a true test of die hard crypto employees. Bitcoin went to $3k as the tech industry boomed. So many talented people capitulated and went to FAANG pa$ture$ but those of us who stuck it out also got paid.
I can’t really give you advice other than, if the industry and / or company disagrees with your moral beliefs, you should find another line of work. Similarly I don’t work in adtech or social media because I find it distasteful. You can’t earn a paycheck that makes up for a dissonance in your sense of self.
I agree there are more scams than most in crypto, but I don’t work for scams. I greatly enjoy the technology and the freedom it enables. YMMV
I suspect, your definition "crypto" is not the same as the definition of OP.
Can you elaborate more, why do you think it's a fad?
Have you tried to write, deploy or at least use any Ethereum contacts? Do you know how Merkle trees work or at least what are they useful for? How about elliptic curves?
I worked on this off-chain technology a few years ago: https://github.com/enumatech/sprites/tree/master/examples/pa...
Cryptocurrencies will always have the problem of interacting with the real world, where people are not bound by smart contracts and do not behave "rationally". Not everything is codifyable, especially not people.
> The 2018-2020 bear market was a true test of die hard crypto employees. Bitcoin went to $3k as the tech industry boomed. So many talented people capitulated and went to FAANG pa$ture$ but those of us who stuck it out also got paid.
Only if they sold and this money came from other people who put it into this negative sum game. Remember that the true winners of it all are the electricity providers that are delivering the power to drive mining all those proof of work coins. The losers are the people who put in their money last and are left holding the bags.
Talks of ideology aside, the conversation on fiat, central banking, etc. in the public consciousness predates the rise of crypto by a lot. If we can call it "public consciousness."
The idea of crypto as a game changer has long sinked in the harbor. What has sailed is that it is a new notch in the portfolio belt of institutional investors and banks. A cursory glance at who invests or has invested in cryto companies is telling.
No it didn’t. This topic comes up all of the time in different contexts. Interest rate decisions, dropping the gold standard, switching to the Euro, running a constant deficit, etc all bring up these exact same topics.
It may seem like crypto brought those topics up, but that’s just because you haven’t been around long enough to remember the 2008 financial crisis and the discussion of the bailouts, or more recently the discussions around the debt crisis in Europe with Greece, etc.
People that worked at Enron, Lehman, LTCM, et al all got new jobs quite easily. You'll be fine.
> the constant backlash from the public is nagging me
The public is mostly angry that they paid too much. They were speculative gamblers that bought into the bubble extremely late. This is no different than people who aggressively took loans to play landlord at the height of the housing bubble. I can empathize with people that buy idiotic scam tokens as well as people that end up holding a ton of debt as their houses get foreclosed but at the end of the day they, not you, are responsible for their poor decision making. Do you really think it is your fault that people out there mortgaged their house to do 100x leveraged longs on dog themed coins?
If the wheel of fortune had gone their way instead of those shorting them, they wouldn't show any sympathy for the shorts.
A lot of them probably struggled quite a bit to recover.
Also, you don't know which opportunities you don't have access to anymore. People won't tell you: "I don't want to work with you because you worked for an obnoxious ad tech company", but quite a few people will think this very hard in their head.
Don't underestimate the ethical questions in your career choices.
The ones that were a party to fraud or extreme folly, sure, but competent people generally had the same difficulty finding a new position as anyone else after their company goes under. I knew people at Enron and Lehman that had new jobs within days and weeks of the blowup. It isn't a big deal and no reasonable person is going to hold normal employees responsible for the blowups of executives or tides of the market. Especially when useful developers are in extreme demand.
> but quite a few people will think this very hard in their head.
Not having to work with people who think this about potential colleagues is a blessing in itself.
At this point, you may as well stick around and make a dent in the crypto world.
Find a way to have an impact. Write blog posts. Get a serious project delivery under your belt.
As to what you (or other people) think about your resume: don't be so hard on yourself. You made this choice for a decent reason. Follow your intuition and try to have fun / have an impact somewhere.
If op doesn’t believe in what they’re doing, and knows it’s not for them, throwing more of your energy and time into it could just be a waste.
(This is true of any career. More time invested means better prospects means harder to start over because you’d be starting over without experience for likely less pay. Breaking that cycle will get harder the longer you wait.)
To quote a great man:
“No amount of money ever bought a second of time.” - Howard Stark, (creator of Web 4.0 and inventor of Recentralised Finance).
My point was _assuming_ that the OP believed in what they are doing right now.
If not, that's a very different story.
A good reason to continue on your path.
I’m curious because many of these protocols, such as dex/farms or maybe tomb forks etc, claim they earn pretty well either through fees or what not from participants, and their tokenomics often have a good portion going to devs.
Also, if defi protocol devs really do make that kind of money and I was one of them, I wouldn’t be too worried about employability because I know I could easily retire within a few years! But that’s just me though.
Back end engineers and data engineers are very much sought after and the distributed nature of tokens in general give raise to a large set of interesting problems, that in my opinion are some times better solved without involvement of the blockchain. But a lot of other concepts do still hold.
Seniority and being a good team member are also invaluable and hard to find, and something that doesn’t matter what technical skill you’re involved with.
So in short I wouldn’t think to much on the fact that you spend time in crypto, but rather spend the time thinking on what concepts and systems are transferrable to other domains and roles and have it be reflected in your resume and cv accordingly. Being a good team member is much more than technicals. You’re a human in a team with insights and knowledge.
I wouldn't worry that much about employability. If you're honest, hardworking, and love writing software then I don't see any issues there. I'm sure you've solved enough hard interesting problems that'll carry over to other industries. It's all about moving bits anyway. You'll even have a leg up if you have a better than average understanding of security.
You may be holding yourself back because it does take some time to ramp up in a new "vertical" (so to speak). Building new professional connections, etc. So like... maybe in an alternate universe you'd be working your way up the ladder at Apple or Google or whatever. That time invested does pay off and there's an opportunity cost there.
The tough one is the ethical question. Sometimes it's hard to tell if our disillusionment is internal or external. In other words, is it nagging you because you can see why the public is negative towards crypto or is it nagging you because you don't want to alienate yourself from the crowd?
If it helps, I've long held the strong belief that I should wake up in the morning guilt-free about my job. I need to feel excited about coming in to work and tackling the next big problem. I refuse to work for or with jerks. I refuse to work on products that aren't striving to make things better. I refuse to work on exploitative or manipulative products. I refuse to work for unfairly low pay. And all of that positive energy (great product, great people, great mission, good/great pay) make the dark/hard times easier to manage.
In the long run I feel like this philosophy has made me a happier and more successful engineer.
EDIT: Just to give you an idea of how I applied the above philosophy. I once quit a well paying job in the very first month because a senior engineer was an insanely venomous person and no one seemed interested in stopping them. I didn't make a big stink about it, just quietly moved on. The next job I found was amazing and I'm so glad that I did what I did. Yes it was scary.
That said, we're in a far smaller market. I've suggested he look for full time remote work for overseas companies instead.
Just make sure your company isn‘t scammy.
It looks like higher interest rates is going to burst a lot of bubbles. So maybe the industry will go back to its non-speculative roots soon.
That said, the environmental aspect is an issue that will linger.
There isn't a constant backlash from the public - most people don't care, the ones that like it buy and the ones that don't write grumpy blog posts about it. The people who do care have split into the aye and nay camps and are arguing the situation out. The usual anti-capitalist types will hate it, but they hate everything financial.
Although any specific crypto is probably a mad idea that will eventually go bust, it is pretty clear at this point that the industry as a whole is here to stay. It has been more than a decade now, it is hard to come up with a scenario where all the money goes away.
Crypto has pluses and minuses and you should determine whether it’s a technology you believe in or not. I think basing your opinion of it on “the public” or (notoriously uninformed about crypto) HN opinion is just a bit mentally weak. Either believe in what you’re doing, or do something else. But don’t base your feelings on what the mob thinks.
The public morality once thought it was unethical to help humans escape slavery. It is not a good barometer, especially when the tide against crypto has turned strictly because it stopped making speculators and scammers cash.
The turning point was seeing my name on the company website, I was embarrassed for myself. Was an easy decision to quit.
Whether you work in crypto or, say, defense or oil or animal testing or AI or finance or just plain ol' Big Tech, your labor output will contribute value to somebody in society (that's why they're paying you), while probably also hurting someone else in society in some small way (luring clueless investors, causing pollution, killing foreigners, exacerbating social conflicts, outcompeting small businesses... whatever). None of us are pure good or evil, and the majority of us live paycheck to paycheck under some corrupt government controlled by ruthless elites, no matter what particular -ism they call it. Your part is unlikely to be more than a cog in somebody else's big, unforgiving wheel.
You choose your battles, do what you can, give back when you can, and try not to cause unnecessary harm, while also taking care of yourself and the people, beings, places, and values you care about. That's already asking a lot of a species barely differentiated from chimps and suddenly given the power of electricity and machines.
As a developer (or some other techie), you have a pretty rare opportunity (in terms of human history, and even most other professions in today's world) of being able to float between verticals with relative ease. Most people can't switch careers without going back to school or going through years of training, but those of us in tech, we can keep mostly our same jobs and skills no matter which industry we choose work in.
So, whatever... self-reflection is a beautiful thing, and the whole point of it is to figure out where you stand relative to your values. Just like you wouldn't blindly follow speculative bubbles, you also don't need to let random online naysayers get to you. They don't get to judge you without knowing your story and situation, and the personal tradeoffs you've had to make in your life.
Consider yourself lucky that you're in a position where you're able to choose. If you decide to stay in crypto a bit longer to see if the technology (and ideology) matures, you can do whatever's in your power to make it less speculative. Write articles as an industry insider to educate people on the differences between exploitative speculation and peer-to-peer decentralized trust networks. Come up with democratic, open-source solutions to distribute the power among individuals, instead of replacing governments with unregulated centralized exchanges that hoard all the tokens, capital, etc. Don't let crypto become the next Wall Street, minus regulation -- and by that mean I mean big investors pooling individual savings and playing dumb games with them for personal gain. Do whatever the opposite of "privatize profits, socialize costs" would be in the crypto world (if such a thing were possible).
Crypto as a speculative financial tool might fail, but crypto the technology is here to stay, just one more chapter in our long book of accumulated human learnings, both good and bad.
If you eventually decide crypto isn't right for you, and you can afford to do so, take a few months off to evaluate your life and your options. Your values don't have to be a static thing, and neither do your passions. Explore both a bit before choosing your next path, and if you can settle on a profession or industry that would make you feel better... great, go for it! You can always reevaluate it again in a few years' time.
Tell your next employer why you entered crypto in the first place and why you left it. Honestly, they probably won't care... unless you switch to the nonprofit space, most employers' primary value is just profit, no matter what the feel-good whitewashing says on their website. And in the event they happen to ask, you'll be able...
It's like allowing / disallowing casino gambling.
"people like it!"
"it's verifyibly awful for you!"
"but it's fuuuuuun."
"it's ruining the planet."
"Don't be an asshole! Apes!"
...
"aaaaand we didn't make it"
seriously tho, you can focus on your skills and carefully re-label them such that your future job prospects aren't affected. crypto became a scam because that was the only way to kill crypto and the Bitcoin's movement. the technology will probably be around in new forms sometime next decade, but the stigma will make it hard to find jobs until then.
Then I started to recognize that its predatory and actually not benign or harmless. It is taking advantage of people. It started to become gross, and nobody I worked with shared any views or skepticism that I had. They all pretty much treated it like a religion across the board. Glad I left. I turned down money that most would not get a chance at in their lifetime, but where that money came from did not sit right with me, nobody in that company deserved any of it. I guess I was not cutthroat enough ... seems like this space is reserved only for snakes, and fools.
Cryptosphere is certainly a place for predators, that don't give a slightest f*ck about where the money come from.
No many do care where it comes from.
They deliberately seek and out target vulnerable people e.g. third world countries, retirees who they know will be susceptible to their scams.
When a description such as that starts to sound like a 1:1 Venn diagram overlap with multi level marketing, yeah, it's time to bail.
Can't this be applied for most jobs in social media, advertising, lending and discretionary spending?
Some people get hurt and you could think the scammer portion outweighs the benefits. But saying there are no benefits is wrong
I don't know how much sports gambling is regulated but I doubt its meaningful. Gambling is dangerous because a certain personality cannot control themselves. What can regulation do? Put a little warning? Make sure the house advantage is no more than X? That's not what makes gambling dangerous.
Drugs are same story. Heavily regulated to their detriment. At least with illegal drugs you know it's dangerous and could be abused. But when a doctor prescribes you heavy pain killers for a simple injury, it's not obvious how dangerous they are.
But they are planning to.
* An Ugly Truth
* The Coddling of the American Mind
* Stolen Focus
It is horrifying what this does to us.
But if you are going for any of these non-shiny companies (some of them are doing really hard engineering work), the pay and the benefits will be normal and maybe over below market-rates.
Honestly, I will be a bit skeptical if I was hiring a crypto developer. But I wouldn't make a blanket decision. I would carefully analyze on a case by case basis but by default I will surely be less trusting initially. Sorry but this industry is full of scammers.
I also don't find crypto very useful but how does it take advantage of people? do companies developing for crypto gain from someone using their services?
I understand that some people just need a job to pay rent, and we all need to be a little selfish, making decisions that are right for us, but tech employees have a choice.
You can afford to not work for a sector of tech that is involved in predation on the gullible, or harvesting and selling personal data for profit, or trying to "hack" your brain by developing "addictive" technologies.
It will make things harder, but the places you really want to work will recognize the truly difficult technical problems you are solving and look past the industry.
I worked with a couple of guys who used to work in porn -- some of the best engineers I ever worked with. It took a while for them to find a place that would move them past the recruiting screens, but once they did they ended up with great jobs that recognized their talent.
Actually I can barely find any crypto posts on the hiring threads. Maybe 5%.
At the very least you're not working for Meta.
I think there's a dark side to most things, and that in the beginning it's not easy to see what it is. For example, I think that social media can be destructive to society and to individual people in a variety of ways that weren't at all obvious to me when I was younger. I don't think it was bad to believe in it, though -- it did, in fact, make the internet useful and accessible to way more people, and that's probably a good thing in the long run, even with all the problems that come with that.
In the worst case, you'd have to tell a future employer, "I went to work in DeFi because I believed in the potential of the underlying technology, but [IT DIDN'T WORK OUT || I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT ANYMORE] and now I'm ready to move on." That sounds pretty reasonable to me?
Welcome people's ideas, but pass them through your filter and do what you feel is right, not what people think.
If you believe crypto is good and love working for it, keep on.
If you don't believe so, and have a good alternative to switch, do it.
Just don't make a decision because the people around you tell you so.
Not only about crypto but pretty much applies everything in life.