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.
Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal.
Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope.
If you think crypto is a massive scam and immoral, why would you want to hire people from there?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
i tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, i guess that is not universal.
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...
I am no fan of cryptowhatever, but how are you any better?
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.
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.
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.