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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Knew someone who worked at Binance, as support. I'm sure he's competent enough at his job, but he has no special skills or anything. He made more money than I did as a senior software dev at the time. It seems not only did they hire a lot of people, they also paid them an ungodly amount of money.

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High salaries are part of the grift.

Makes you look really successful (they pay a lot, so they must be super profitable!) and helps, at least partially, select employees who won’t be asking questions, just do their job and collect paychecks.

This comment reminds me of the movie Boiler room and now that I think of it reminds me of this whole crypto industry imo.

Probably mitigates the risk of whistleblowers, if you can keep it up.

I guess that's a possibility, ut my bet is they just had more money flowing around than sense.

Typically it's more growth than money/sense.

Growth without proper management papers over a lot of stupid hiring decisions, 'because we need more people ASAP'.

Hope for their sake they were paid in actual money.

They did pay their bonus in some Binance crypto coin, but at least their base salary was relatively high.

It sounds like he didn't make that much money for long. Better to have a real career where you're making good money every year, year after year.

I don’t think those exist. It is much, much better to continually hop when the raises are 20% or more for doing so.

Huh? You don't think real careers making good money exist? I don't know what to tell you.

But the main issue here is that someone without any special skills ended up making a shitload of money as a fluke by working at Binance for a short period of time. It's very unlikely they're going to be able to get another job even nearly that good, let alone more jobs 20% better, because they don't actually have real marketable skills and it was just a fluke.

>Huh? You don't think real careers making good money exist? I don't know what to tell you.

They were talking about how wages at most jobs stagnate if you are a long-term employee. Which I find to be true as well.

My annual comp increases at FAANG are not 20%, but they have been consistent increases of roughly $45,000 a year, for little effort. I suppose it is a trap, but I am still content.

Humble brag

Doing a support role on a titanic is just as much potential beginnings of a good career that pays forever. I've known plenty of devs and bar passing lawyers that got nowhere in their career and plenty of support engineers that followed roughly the same user base across multiple bankrupt software companies.

Right. so Binance over-hired and over-paid for roles just like the rest of the tech industry in 2021 - 2022 then, as the free money and zero interest rate mania came to an end.

Cash comp or was he also compensated in tokens?

Important point — many of these employees were “paid” at least half of their salary in the company’s own scrip, a shitcoin, and with extra social pressure to not convert it to real money.

Isn’t that like any startup? Options in early stage companies are basically shitcoins, and you’re discouraged from selling them.

Knowing myself I probably asked if he got paid in real money or monopoly money, but I don't recall the answer. It's a friend of a friend I've spoken to a few times over the last ten years, and the last time was a little over a year ago (when we talked about his job, among other things).

Did they really pay him a high salary, or did he take his salary in BNB which then massively increased in price?

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