A Toronto-area recuiter has mentioned a suprising amount of money for what appears to be a run of the mill cloud-aware ops job.
Berachain offers generous salaries ($400k) as well as STRONG Token Equity Packages ($300k p.a.) and amazing team culture, with an office based in Toronto
(Obvious answer is that the actual offer is lower, of course.)
I’m figuring the catch is something less obvious than:
- blockchain company
- headquartered in the Cayman Islands (https://twitter.com/berachain, https://github.com/berachain)
- pseudonymous founders pivoted from NFTs (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/defi-focused-layer-1-berachain-130000958.html)
Assuming for this post that this was a $400,000 salary with the usual corporate addons, how would somebody go about finding the catch that the salary is the red flag for?
having accidentally interviewed with a couple of awful blockchain companies in the past, the catch may be that the position being described doesn’t exist at all. they can always just claim the position is full or you don’t qualify for it and effectively rugpull you into a much worse position with much lower compensation. or, much less legally (but these sorry fucks are already in the Caymans so who cares), you might receive your employment contract only to find out your entire salary is in worthless tokens they control, and the Token Equity Package is just there to make you think some of your pay will be in actual money. none of this is uncommon in the blockchain industry.
All the reasons mentioned are true, and also I think there could be a more insidious one.
Back in the day, walmarts were really good at showing up in small towns, reducing their prices to a massive loss (unsustainable), drive out the small town’s other retail options, then jack prices back up the moment they become dominant and control the market.
I understand Canada isn’t a small town, but the field of DevOps/Infrastructure engineers with relevant skills that would work in an office in Torronto? Leverage your fictional pile of investment from tether to temporarily take losses on labor to squeeze the market, then dump / downgrade the value of labor as soon as conditions are more favorable.
This is in many ways way the major tech companies do all the time: overhire cynically not because the extra hands have meaningful projects, but precisely because they don’t want upstart competitors from any of the talent.
How many catches do you need? Best case scenario, it’s some serial grifter high on his own hype and VC money. Would you expect a cayman islands cryptobro company to be above scamming anyone dumb enough to have anything to do with them?
I was definitely hoping it would be some kind of fascinating non-obvious catch. I think this thread is teaching me that often it’s just the usual everyday buttcoin catch.
I remind you of how Harry Clynch bluffed his way to a six-figure job with Binance on no evidence, and only dropped out at the point it would have been actual fraud:
an estimable chap