
Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days? - jurgenwerk
Last couple of weeks the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges seem to be gasping for air. The incredible demand is causing the exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, Bittrex,...) to be incredibly slow and unresponsive. Trade price updates are getting delayed. Withdrawals and deposits are sometimes barely working. Some of them report they&#x27;re getting an average of 50k new users on a daily basis.<p>How are the development and support teams handling this constant stress? How to even work efficiently when everything is on fire at all times?
======
throwaway55356
I interviewed at Gemini. My impression was of a business environment somewhere
between a startup and a Wall Street boiler room. Glass walls and a beer tap.
Lots of extra hours. They told me that there is some turnover and they had
trouble finding competent candidates.

The engineer who conducted my principle technical interview seemed to be
pleased to find himself in the position of quizzing somebody. "Let's start
with some whiteboarding." I did not immediately pick up the marker, but asked
him to describe the problem to me, and he looked surprised. There were trick
questions, and sometimes the answer was to buy the most expensive equipment.
"Wow, I have not heard about that device." He looked really smug when I said
that.

The other people I met were pleasant.

At the end, their secretary came to my room and told me "You're done here". At
lunch, I noticed a half-dozen missed calls from her saying that she had
dismissed me too soon and I had been scheduled to interview with a fourth or
fifth person. I did not bother to call back.

------
richardknop
Probably similar to a typical startup engineering job. Lots of these exchanges
started with little funding or were originally hacked together in a basement.
Then they grew very quickly and suddenly had budget to hire serious
engineering teams.

I assume you’d deal with supporting lots of buggy legacy code, either fixing
bugs or refactoring. You could also be working on a new green field code to
replace the old platform. Or anything in between.

They also seem to have trouble scaling and keeping their servers running
during peak times. Assume there’s a ton of dev ops work as well as
optimisations and performance tuning / scaling related engineering going on.

Finally, since these exchanges keep peoples’ cryprocirrencies On hot and cold
wallets they probably have a lot of engineering resources focused on security.

------
hulkisdumb
I may be the least qualified person on here, my here's my guess. Imagine
you're a normal developer, minding your own business .. even so you have
dozens of problems that plague your world of programming ... overtime, no
actual formalization of requirements, n-number of tradeoffs and the worst part
your main product is a damn customized cms system, now all of a sudden this
cms explodes and is in demand . Now all your problems are made 100 fold and
your pretty little world has disappeared .... that is pretty much what I
expect the average answer to be on here

------
djellybeans
For me just starting to get into Ethereum Dapp programming and still being a
lot of new concepts to me, working for an exchange seems more within my reach
as it crosses into my experience as a web developer.

What I'm curious about these larger crypto exchanges is if any of them has
tried to acquire talent from more traditional trading websites (eToro, etc.)
Though it's still the wild west in comparison so they would need to offer some
very good incentives.

