Fintech and swinging for the fences is not a bad thing per se. As long as you aren’t an executive for a scam or something; I have never seen in my career experience being treated as a bad thing. Might perhaps get some added questions to get you, but it is also a unique selling point.
Crypto essentially allows you to make trust less systems with tokens, what those tokens mean or not depends on the situation. Writing that off as purely speculative isn’t necessarily fair. Utility tokens are a thing after all.
Black mark is exactly right. I wouldn’t hire someone who spent more than a couple of months at a crypto job — that’s enough time to realize what’s going on and get out. If they stayed longer, it invites the question of whether they’re gullible, incompetent, pathologically greedy, or too good at compartmentalizing.
Do you think “I was an accountant at Enron” is considered positive career experience in that field? Crypto is the equivalent in software engineering.
Are you actually responsible for hiring people? If so, it's quite a narrow-minded and borderline silly take on things. I've been hiring people for the last 8 or so years and if I come across a good engineer, I really don't care what industry they worked in, as long as they are capable, motived and a pleasure to work with.
I think crypto is mostly pointless but I've been working in and out of the sector for nearly 10 years. Why?
1. I have a family to look after and it pays quite well.
2. I get to work on technology which is very interesting and applicable to other domains - consensus alogirithms, security in a highly adversarial environment, peer to peer networking and associated networking alogirthms, the intersection of finance and technology, the intersection of economics and technology.
3. I get to use tools and langauges I enjoy working with.
4. I work with smart, interesting people from a variety of backgrounds.
5. The industry moves fast, so there's always something new to learn.
I get constant inbound from recruiters and no-one cares that I work in crpyto.
I'm responsible for giving hiring input and I've talked to multiple people who are solely responsible, and working in crypto isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but for me and those people you're definitely competing at a disadvantage from the outset.
Okay, I may be a bit blunt, but to spend any significant time with crypto means that you are either a) illiterate in finance, b) illiterate in technology, c) into scamming people, d) into gambling or e) into illegal things. If a or b, you yourself probably do not realize it. Anyway, any combination of these would constitute black mark in my recruitment process for most of the jobs.
But as soon as there's a conversion to/from fiat or anything else in the real world, you have to trust whatever exchange or vendor you're dealing with. That means it's still a system that requires trust. With cash and banks I can go to the legal system to get issues with trust violation addressed. With crypto, I'm up shit's creek with no recourse when the exchange I used gave my tokens away or my computer was hacked with malware. This is not exactly "better" by any stretch of things. For many people it is turning out to be immensely worse.
When and whether it should be a black mark is separate to whether it will be.
On highly technical roles with a highly technical hiring process, sure, it'll be fine. I think, however, lots now are scrambling to decrypto their image.
Fintech and swinging for the fences is not a bad thing per se. As long as you aren’t an executive for a scam or something; I have never seen in my career experience being treated as a bad thing. Might perhaps get some added questions to get you, but it is also a unique selling point.
Crypto essentially allows you to make trust less systems with tokens, what those tokens mean or not depends on the situation. Writing that off as purely speculative isn’t necessarily fair. Utility tokens are a thing after all.