Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwawayuydw 1360 days ago
Facebook substantially altered lives: it is used for genocide, recruiting insurrections, and ruins mental health -- and nobody here is wringing their hands about working on the broader ecosystem. Engineers who worked to build out DTC brands aren't considered lepers.

It feels like a double standard and pulling the ladder up, so even if the next generation of startup programmers get work, they'll be "tainted" by starting in crypto. I am in a sophisticated niche of the industry just like many readers here are in their comfortable niche of their industries and reasonably distant from the most harmful practices.

Maybe I just need to accept that SV programmers don't like to look in the mirror and see that most of our work is ultimately as pointless/destructive as crypto but with a couple extra steps.

2 comments

This comment is so confusing. You first seemed to take offense at the term "cryptocrap" but then here call crypto "pointless/destructive." Facebook is obviously mostly garbage these days (IMO) however I think it's hard to argue that it provides no utility to people. My family members are spread out across four different countries and mostly stay connected via Facebook. I'd argue that Facebook provides more utility to people than crypto at this point. That says a lot more about crypto than it does about Facebook.
I was careful when I didn't write any positive things about facebook, but it is used by the entire world which was my point.

Also, I'm nowhere near SF or in the SV sphere. I'm a plain, old .NET and Typescript developer. lol

I didn't say crypto was doing good or ill. I'm just saying it's done nothing that a critical mass of users has used besides speculation.