Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

I work in crypto and have done for the last couple years. To be totally transparent, I worked on Cardano, then a couple random projects including a cosmos DEX and writing test suites for a qa consultancy, and now a startup DEX. I've been active in the scene (investing, reading papers, talking about crypto etc) since around 2016 and worked in it since 2019.

I think there's a few things here. I don't believe that many people are actively and knowingly working on deliberate scams, but there definitely are some. I do think a lot of people are working on trash and it's only sustainable as a business model because people are making speculative investments, such as Decentraland clothing brands (wtf?). I'm in the field because I like the technical challenges - I've been really lucky at working on some pretty hard/cool things with some really smart engineers. However I do find the constant onslaught from HN, news articles, random people on the internet and in real life, to be too much for my mental health and I'm considering leaving the industry to work on something else. Even if you're just trying to have fun working with a tech stack you enjoy (I've spent time in Haskell, Rust, Go, etc... most of the hip cool ones), being accused of being a scammer every 5 minutes is just very very draining. I still don't believe I have enabled any scams directly but I don't want to spend the next few years of my career justifying that either. In fact I just was talking to my wife about this before opening HN and seeing this question.

I think I need to take a few months off and start looking for something that's tangible like robotics, or something more visual. I'm just not in the position to do that right now. All the best to you anyway - I hope you can keep it all together better than I can!

I have a job satisfaction indicator I like to call “the barbecue factor”.

You’re at a social event with friends and friends of friends. Someone asks “so what do you do?” and you answer.

They either go “huh?”, “ooh neat!” or “oh, gee, yeah isn’t it awful how $industry is $negative_outcome?”

Which of those answers you get can have a big bearing on your job satisfaction.

It feels like the opinions of others shouldn’t be such a big deal. It turns out they are a pretty big deal for me, though. It sounds like it might be the same for you, and I suspect it’s the same for most humans. We’re tribal animals.

Once I figured that out, I started factoring it into my career decisions. I’ve been much happier for it.

Thanks for the idea David, I think I'm going to take that into consideration a little bit more.

This so much depends on your audience.

Outside of the tech industry, "software engineer" alone has negative connotations and stereotypes, so some of my friends - when single - deliberately hand-waive past what they do by saying they're a "consultant" which somehow. In a brief period of trying to be a very different person when meeting girls, I referred to myself as a "professional problem solver". (yuck).

Working at Amazon and Facebook is another one where your audience differs dramatically. Some people are much more impressed if you work at Amazon on the "retail website" because that's the part they know, while others associate that with dehumanizing treatment of warehouse workers. Others are impressed (and won't shame you) if you work on AWS because the cloud doesn't have the same stink of wage slavery, but to others still they understand this so little that they literally have no reference point to react. Working at Facebook gets you a bad rep, but working on Instagram/Whatsapp doesn't, so now everyone gets to say you work at Meta and get told "Oh yes, I did see something about the Metaverse on CBS. Very nice, dear."

> However I do find the constant onslaught from HN, news articles, random people on the internet and in real life, to be too much for my mental health and I'm considering leaving the industry to work on something else.

Maybe this is harsh, but I'm glad to hear it's having an effect.

I hope you find work that's exciting and meaningful to you in whatever industry you like, but you should really consider the source when it comes to the anti-crypto moralizers. If someone accuses you of being a scammer when they know nothing about you or what you do, is their opinion really worth your time?

People will always be resentful of success and even just the attempt of it, whether it's a business growing big or putting a man on the moon. Made an advance in robotics? Given the obvious military applications, someone somewhere is going to call you a murderer. You have to get used to this if you want to accomplish anything great. You can't let yourself be ruled by someone else's morality.

Where do the crypto-haters cluster? With those who praise accomplishment and greatness or those who are resentful of it? My view is that they are clearly in the camp of the latter. You have to start hearing the "constant onslaught" as praise, my friend.

> I don't believe that many people are actively and knowingly working on deliberate scams,

Really.

Hi cosmos friend (I assume you mean $ATOM unless there is another cosmos)

I agree there are some (how many is another topic) not very long term worthy projects out there being worked on due to this being a new area being explored.

However value are given by people and who knows how different projects would evolve and there might be new value created/discovered later.

There are definitely BOTH scams and real value projects and you definitely have to DYOR (Do Your Own Research). Ultimately Web3/decentralization is about taking back control but that also comes with responsibility. If anyone is feeling unable/unwilling to take the risk by investing time into that company/work field then consider pausing/pulling out.

You sound like a bot.

Interesting response.

Would you share what makes you think that?

Thanks for writing this out! I am in a very similar spot. Just resigned. I think it's ok to enjoy the perks, but at some point hypocrisy it takes is a bit too much

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