Just had an interview with AlphaChain to become a ‘Crypto Trader’ and it was terrible.

I recently made a post about applying to various crypto jobs ( post here ) so I and have been taking interviews. One of the companies is called AlphaChain (https://alphachain.co.uk/) and I just got off a Zoom call with their, what I can only imagine to be there hiring manager.

First off, the only reason I got this interview is because the company charges £2,250 ‘as an investment’ to learn a 1 month course (10-15 hours a week) to learn MetaTrader4, an electronic trading platform widely used by online retail foreign exchange speculative traders. After the course and a forward/back tested trial period you are granted a trading account of $10,000, that can ‘grow’, on which you make 50% profits. Sounds great, no? No.

You only get to trade 5 crypto’s at the moment (presumably the top 5), but that they are going to bump that up to 25 (out of the top 50) next year depending on volatility.

The interviewer, who was in Dubai at the time, said he had only been working for the company for 7 months, and CLEARLY did not care about any of the answers to my questions.

I told him I was in my last year of my PhD candidacy, to which he say, “oh okay you study” – an infuriating belittlement of 4 years of project management, formal academic journal writing, tutoring students, data analysis, and much more – but whatever, non-academics make that shitty comment all the time. He didn't even ask my age which was a red flag.

He kept saying I get to ‘work with major players’, always quoting their portfolio values (he must have said the phrase ‘millions of dollars’ about a dozen times) and kept repeating that the managers give ‘1:1 trading’ and will ‘share knowledge’ with me as if that’s a godsend.

I asked what the turnover rate is for employees – he said they do not have ‘employees’ they have ‘self-employed traders’. Okay, so I asked what the turnover rate is for ‘self-employed traders’ – he said he did not have the information.

I asked how many traders progress past the first $10K stage – he said he did not have the information.

I asked what the growth rate of the company is - he said he did not have the information.

At the end of the interview he agreed to schedule me for interview 2/2 which will be a 20min live presentation of one of the managers using MetaTrader4, and then a Q&A session that I should prepare questions for. To not seem rude, I agreed to have it next week.

What do you guys think? Have any suggestions for the types of questions I should ask during my next interview? I have very little intention of taking this job, as it just feels like a $3000 trading course cash grab, but hey, what is 30min of my time to learn what’s out there?