Plus, many mainstream companies have been sued for all kinds of terrible stuff, sometimes even criminal.
Judging others’ morals is a slippery slope.
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?
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.
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...
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.