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Comment by dataangel | Hacker News Reader

I understand your argument but this kind of reasoning consistently fails to be predictive. If things worked as you describe, there would be way more consensus amongst skilled engineers on political topics. In practice people are very skilled at selectively turning off their brain, especially when they stand to benefit.

“It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

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I completely agree in principle but the nuance here is that I’m leaning on the belief that people joining Axie do not “…stand to benefit…” because the long term prospects of Axie Infinity are not good (and have never been good) and so anybody analysing the benefit of joining them — who has a broad range of opportunities available to them — would immediately see how little they stand to benefit from getting involved with Axie Infinity.

I’m under no illusions about the intelligence of software engineers (of any specialism) — we are all idiots at least some of the time — but I struggle to believe that a competent engineer with lots of opportunities would somehow believe that Axie Infinity is the best opportunity available to them, hence, their system is built by people who don’t have other opportunities and have produced an insecure house of cards (more insecure than the average system anyway — all systems are insecure in some capacity).

I disagree. Competent engineers go where they will be paid, and crypto startups are often one of the few places that can pay our frankly insane compensation requirements.

I had a recruiter contact me just recently for some crypto game that was offering something like $600k/year (which I unfortunately assume was at least partly stock) for one of them, and that would certainly have been enough to attract real security talent.

I think examining the incentives of the managers is far more likely to be informative than looking at IC engineers. The best security engineer in the world probably couldn’t have prevented this hack if management doesn’t listen to what they say.

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