While you can make choices about what kind of work you think is ethical or worthwhile.
It is immoral to judge a candidate by the first but not immoral to judge by the latter.
A hard pass on crypto means passing on people who
- wanted to bank the poor
- wanted freedom
- wanted self sovereign identity
- wanted border-less transfers for their family abroad
etc... Many people want to do good with crypto.
Questions: is it immoral to be in it only for the money at a carbon sequestration startup? How do you tell, from a resume? What if this startup is just greenwashing bs in the end? What if the money is to help his grand parents in the Philippines?
I think there's no clear cut way to judge the morality of someone from their resume: not from their skin color, nor from their previous work places. And I think it's unethical to judge people on what you presume of their own morality.
- wanted to bank the poor, with crypto.
- wanted freedom, with crypto.
- wanted self sovereign identity, with crypto.
- wanted border-less transfers for their family abroad, with crypto.
They could have chosen any of those areas without, but they chose to do it with crypto. There is a clear choice for them to do that, as well a very reasonable option for an employer to choose an employee "who wanted freedom, with XXX" over an employee who "wanted freedom, with ZZZ (crypto)". This does not equate to racism (neither is it unethical imo), regardless whether the employer chose to exclude based on perceived morality of their crypto choice.
One crypto position probably wouldn’t raise eyebrows like having Mindgeek on your resume wouldn’t, but having multiple crypto roles probably would imo. Not that OP has indicated they have multiple crypto roles unless I’m parsing their post incorrectly.
And as to why, it’s an industry full of scams and a lot of wishful thinking that I wouldn’t think would help actually build out a stable business. You might have worked at only the “good ones” but given how modern hiring works with regards to hundreds of applications, I probably wouldn’t spend the effort to check the quality of those firms.
He ought to search and replace crypto with fintech startup in his resume.