What I'd like to appreciate is the uniqueness of the blockchain space in its seemingly bottomless capacity to generate these bold propositions for which blockchain is _blatantly_ ill-equipped to solve whatever problem is at hand.
This is seen virtually nowhere else in tech with such regularity: engineers are obsessed with picking the "right tool for the job," entrepreneurs are obsessed with finding "product-market fit," etc.
This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi. The type that could influence otherwise intelligent, well-meaning, technically-inclined people to make glaringly absurd claims like in the linked thread as a pretext for luring in investors.
The typical response to that explanation is to split hairs over whether NFTs, or Bitcoin, or whatever token this guy is selling (I didn't check) fits the classical definition of a Ponzi.
I say "typical" because we re-engage in this discussion anew every day here on HN -- apparently in direct proportion to the total cryptocurrency market cap, with the occasional two-or-three year relief period when retail money dries up.
Hyping the possibility of NFTs solving everything is how he sells NFTs to join his expensive course.
He doesn’t really believe NFTs will make people instantly hired by companies. He just wants to sell more tickets to his NFT course.
>This would make complete sense if the sector as a whole were, to put it crudely, one big Ponzi.
snake oil, that is a phrase that is commonly understood as metaphorical and nobody is going to argue that "it is not matching the classical definition of snake oil so it can't be that".
If any thing, this sector tends to prove the emptiness of the "well-meaning" term. It reminds me of Arendt's claim about the banality of Eichmann's evil .
In the current case, well-meaning simply doesn't exist. It's an excuse people use after the fact, but in reality, the people described this way are usually either thoughtless about the morality of their actions or corrupted by their own interests. They can't be well meaning, because their means don't factor in ethics.
The point Arendt makes is that you don't need to deliberately do evil to be evil. Not thinking is enough. As for the crypto crowd, I hope that the people that didn't think through the consequences of their actions will come to realize it before they do something really fucked up.
It kind of baffles me how people act like interviews are a one-way street. I get that applying and interviewing can be a slog, but you should be interviewing your employer as much as they are interviewing you. There have been several instances where I turned down jobs because the employer failed the interview process in my eyes. I shudder to imagine how my life would have turned out if I ended up working at that one place where they wanted me to speed-code under 1 minute per challenge while the interviewer stood behind me with a stopwatch.
That sums up everything to do with NFTs for me. The smell remains rotten and I will, again, run away and fast.
I never see posts like “how event-sourcing will change hiring forever” but that’s just as valid from a technology perspective to meet the implied requirements.
NFTs are just a way to represent something unique on a blockchain. The smell comes from the pixel art NFTs.
Your position on a uniswap v3 pair is represented as an NFT (no pixels associated), while v2 used ERC20 tokens (fungible)
Suppose you own a car rental. You can represent the available cars as NFTs and use a blockchain to make reservations and payments
NFTs offer the ability to separate ownership and management of a thing from the business that created that thing. That makes no sense for a company that has inventory they personally control and doesn't want people to resell for liability reasons.
And either give that information away to your competitors if the chain is public, or just implement a far more complex tech that could have been a straightforward database if it's private. Either way you lose.
I bought some lumber a few weeks ago. Bought a cedar board that they had in their inventory, went out to the lumberyard to find they were out of stock. Ended up swapping the it out for some cedar deck board they happened to have
1. None of this requires blockchain or NFTs and is 100% technically feasible today
2. This has all been tried before and failed to show real improvement for either candidates or companies
3. Contrary to what the thread suggests, the biggest problem on recruiting is fraud; this proposal doesn’t do anything to prevent someone else interviewing for you
No prejudice, no wasted time, no pain"
Absolutely piss off. This is the same crowd that thinks that algorithms cannot be prejeduiced, after all "it's just maths".
Why don't you advocate for a social score as well while we're at it.
We all know how fabulously certifications work for hiring people, after all.
largely because:
1. its focussed on "how" we hire, not "why" we hire which seems like a red flag for me.
2. it's a human - human interaction. all the humans involved should consent to it, requiring a human decision which must be done at human speeds.
3. people, their skills and interests change. we forgive and forget. success is chancy and sparse. the block chain is immutable.
4. the vision of the future reminds me a lot of the CCCP's social credit score system which does not fill me with hope.
5. it's entirely from the employers perspective with little to no consideration for the job seekers needs beyond "need a job". how do review, agree, negotiate the contract?
hiring isn't "broken", it's just a system being wrenched along with the wild pace of change
that said, maybe in a different system where things worked differently it wouldn't feel such a jarring idea
NFTs are magic internet beans that don't solve any problem they themselves didn't create.
Just the prejudice when adding events to the chain.
I suspect the author would be opposed to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
rates your set of on chain experiences and credentials
- If above a certain rating, you’re hired within 60
seconds
And it is similar in a more professional context. Hiring on UpWork is hard work. Even though they have a lot of scores. But for some reason the scores are not enough to base decisions on.
- I don’t see why you need NFTs - I don’t see how it’s better than e.g LinkedIn. Or maybe it could be the back end to LI’s front end
It’s really a distributed way of storing your cv - how does that benefit your job search?
One comment in the thread was that employers would search and compile your experience, in order to end up to selecting you…. So why aren’t they doing that now on LinkedIn as all that info is there already?
The fact that professional identities live in a closed ecosystem prevents real innovation to happen on top of the network.
Senior Oops Engineer @ReinH
Nov 5
a way you can use NFTs to improve hiring is you ask the candidate if they own any NFTs and if they say yes you don't hire them
You'll learn and earn on-chain credentials
You’ll use your credentials to prove who you are, what your skills are and what people say about you
You can't hide from the blockchain ;)
How it will work:
- You apply for a job - It scans the blockchain and rates your set of on chain experiences and credentials - If above a certain rating, you’re hired within 60 seconds
No prejudice, no wasted time, no pain
This, to put it mildly, is simplifying the affair a bit. Whoever endures a lot of "quests, adventures and courses" on the internet in front of their computers may be a good candidate for e-sports or online gambling. Any person who has a moderately engaging life in the real world or is aged > 40 will, in this discipline, be put in by an army of nimble kids, otakus and net junkies. The idea that we can and should replace real-world interactions with "the cyber" and that this is a good idea for everyone is bonkers, yet—like "the blockchain" and the "OMG digitalization OMG must optimize this process quick OMG these people still work manually just think of the children OMG digitize digitize OMG the gainz OMG" meme—draws people in with its sweet smell like a rotting apple draws in fruit flies.
The other big thing here is of course that yeah, ok, once I have a number of credentials in my favor (on the blockchain whatever doesn't matter really) then it's a simple matter of 60 seconds to just look whether my rating is above a certain threshold and boom!—hired you are. If that's the case, if hiring someone is just about mechanically checking the boxes and do a sum over a few numbers, why should it take all of 60s to hire me? I want that job now you see, means now! I think the truth is rather that (1) you have to check and weigh different skillset combos against whatever you surmise might be advantageous for a given position, which is in itself difficult to get right, and then (2) square that with an assessment how a myriad of other factors might play out. I don't think it's a solved problem; I think there's a huge interest on the side of big-corporate employers to "optimize" the process (i.e. throw a computer at the wall and hope it sticks), not least to reduce costs in the HR dep. There's an incentive for the hoi polloi to buy into this, too, and since we now know how wide a base there is for believing in flat earth and injecting bleach, why not this?
> You'll learn and earn on-chain credentials
> You’ll use your credentials to prove who you are, what your skills are and what people say about you
So how will this apply to people who are using their time for work or personal projects (or indeed anything else), and not for "web3 quests and adventures"?
It scans the blockchain and rates your set of on chain experiences and credentials
The hard part of hiring is that rating work. Comparing candidates is 99% of the work. He just hand waves that away, which shows a lack of understanding at best.
None of the problems in that article were caused by having a hard to edit public ledger. In fact most problems were caused by it.