The "hackernews bubble" is full of people literally working at all these companies, so I very much doubt that's in any way an accurate representation of the average communities opinions.
Re:The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
by twblalock on Friday March 25, 2022 @02:35PM
(#30805626)
Most people who work at those companies don't read or comment on HN.
And most people in the US also don't read or comment on HN, nevertheless HN is full of people from the US.
I’m basically a Stalinist relative to the community here, but among those listed, only Uber and Facebook would fall into don’t-work-for-them-territory.
The others are regularly criticised to varying degrees, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to work there for people somewhat conscious of their conscience. It comes down to the question “can you honestly expect to have an impact on the organisation, or is it more likely to hollow you out and make you into another one of their cynical libertarian defenders?”
This happens to be exactly the same misunderstanding as calling all criticism “cancel culture”.
How much do engineers really have to do with the (bad) business of a company? Facebook has a high technical standard even if you question their societal impact, for Amazon I'd be concerned about the cliche backstabbing culture.
Disclaimer: I worked at Uber in the past
In reality, practically nobody cares and most employers are more than happy to hire experienced engineers who happened to work at some employers who did sketchy things.
But, if we're going to drill down into the ethics of crypto startups, I think they come out looking pretty good in comparison.
It's worth noting that the author of this post works at Hubspot which literally had an entire book written about how its workplace culture was highly discriminatory, particularly against older workers.("Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble ")
Engineers in glass houses....