Bitcoin Forum

Hopefully not too far off topic...

With mining being so specialized, would you consider a full-time mining job a career killer?  I'd hate to wake up in 5 years to realize that my skills have gone to crap and find myself unemployable.

Thoughts?
 

What?  A full-time mining job what is this black magic?

I somewhat agree but would think it depends on what part of "mining" they are doing and what they do with their free time when the mining does not need upkeep.

The ones developing chips and software around digital currencies most likely won't experience any skill loss.

Mining by hand is not the best career decision. An average of .67 hashes per day will net you around 1219 hashes over the next 5 years, while an old Pentium 3 can give you about 390 thousand hashes in 1 second. I suggest sticking to your current IT job and let hardware do the mining for you.  ;)

Lol, mining as a job!

Let's see...turn on machines, look at stats every few hours, worry about the price of BTC and difficulty increases. Yep, that's workin' fer ya!   ::)

The position I'm considering is in a decent sized datacenter.  The money is pretty good for the location, and the location is pretty much where I want to be (just one county away).  I'm just not sure that it would present a sufficient challenge to keep me interested and afford me the opportunity to maintain and improve my skills.

Many people are happy being drones, doing the same thing day after day without change.  Dear old dad worked the Post Office for 35 years.  I could never do that.  I like network and systems because there's always something to upgrade, as everything is new every couple of years, and I enjoy making sure that the routers and switches do their jobs, keeping the servers up and running, ensuring that everything is backed up, and that the software stays patched and is kept up to date.  Once or twice a year, a massive project comes up as either the swtiches, routers, servers, or softwares come to the end of life and have to be replaced, upgraded, or moved around.

In the bitcoin mine, you're talking about a raspberry pi, a custom rom of linux that someone else has provided for you.  As new ASICs come in, they get installed.  As old ASICs die, they get replaced.  As we run out of room, slow ASICs get replaced by new ASICs.  The network seems like it would be pretty flat.  With thousands of machines all doing the same thing, there's very little need to do much more than plug them in and provide them with an address.  It just sounds so tedious.

Haha, that's great!    ;D

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2hqbsf/mining_bitcoin_with_pencil_and_paper_067_hashes/

your mining gear vs a mining farm lets see who will be put out of job. the mining days are over it will take you months to get an ROI. Good luck with your job.

I think OP was saying someone was offering to hire him to watch a farm

Well, you don't really need many knowledge to run ASICs. But if you know how to make them and repair the chips then yes, it can be a good full-time job.

clearly u have no idea what are you talking about

Well, I would do it to be honest. I mean, it might be tedious, but you could do a lot of different stuff in your spare time. You could try and improve existing miners (like Wolf0 does) or just invest your own Bitcoins in Altcoins and start trading them, that will suck up a lot of your spare time.

The real question is, do you have currently have a job or anything holding you back? If not, why not do it, see how it goes. You can always go back.

Stick to a real job, if you want to mine on the side as a hobby that's fine.

The skills to plug and unplug ASICs, monitor stats, and babysit a mining farm is just for that...Bitcoin mining.

Stick to regular data center jobs, those can always translate to Bitcoin mines.

Don't make it your focal point or career.  Mining technology moves way too fast, and what's good now gets obsolete in a couple months.

Servers and network equipment are good for years at least, and the skills and experience dealing with this tech is way more valuable.

Not that I don't like mining, but just being a realist.

This. I'm not sure if such jobs exist since there really wouldn't be any real "work" involved with a mining "job".

Obviously, the ASICs do all of the mining for you. You plug them in, point them to a pool, and then what else would you do?

Why would anyone pay someone to sit around and do nothing?

You might learn a lot in the first few months if you need to develop custom automation and monitoring software to manage a large ASIC farm, but after that what would you do? Replace old machines with newer ones? You don't need skills for that.