So you think most of them are purely drawn to the money? You think any of them actually thought "hey there might be something to this" after working on this stuff for some time?
Just to be clear I don't really have a side. I'm just curious since I'm not really at the front lines of this stuff
I suspect most of the devs in this space are actually agnostic to this. Enough money for the company to exist for the foreseeable future, big enough compensation, and tech problems abstracted away enough from the end result to be interesting in themselves; all of this can make it quite compelling. Just like you don't have to use Netflix or even enjoy video content to work for them, you don't have to even care about web3 and its future to work in it.
I think there's a combination of both. I'm interested by the concept of the blockchain but I'm also apprehensive of the companies/projects that are created on it (for a lot of the reasons outlined in the original post).
However offering £150K + sign on bonus is enough for a lot of people (maybe even me) to overlook these issues and jump in for short term gain and the possibility of massive long term gains.
If they paid the same as a traditional startup the equation would be different and I think you would see less people making the switch.
you are asking this question in an echo-chamber. :)
you’ll find a lot of developers who feel there is plenty of interesting work in blockchains and crypto. one example is zero knowledge research and how it applies to crypto (zk rollups, zkEVM, privacy-preserving attestations and financial proofs, etc).
But yes I feel that 250k+ salaries are outliers, most of these companies are just smart enough to hire remote-first, and 150k or even 100k takes you pretty far if you hire outside the US.
That's why the claim above that big tech employees would be jumping ship to web3 opportunities sounds far-fetched, even anecdotally my friends making 2-3-400k at "web2" companies are definitely not going anywhere near web3.
