3 Key Blockers Stopping the Next Generation of Devs from Entering web3
😀 “Guys the web3 job market is booming!” 😀
😀 “Tons of web2 talent is migrating to web3!” 😀
😀 “Learn Solidity today and get a 6-figure salary” 😀
These all sound great
And tweeting them out will safely net you hundreds of empty feel-good likes
The only issue is, in my experience as a crypto builder, they’re simply not true 🤔
The Bankless guys go full-on cheerleader mode in the jobs section of their Weekly Rollup podcast, then pretty much read out the same 2-3 job listings each week
We repeat these statements to ourselves because we want to believe them, but the truth is in web3 we don’t yet have a healthy thriving careers market to attract new devs to the space
So let’s explore why, below are 3 key blockers stopping devs from entering web3 & flourishing:
Caveat 1: I’m not saying there are **no** jobs/opportunities in web3. Just that the amount is vastly overstated, especially compared to other industries that devs could choose to work in
Caveat 2: Maybe I’m just spoilt coming from web2 dev where recruiters shower you with compliments & eye-popping salary ranges daily
Caveat 3: In case it wasn’t clear, I’m specifically referring to development or dev-adjacent roles. Maybe the market for web3 marketers & human resources people is genuinely booming? I’d actually be interested to know feel free to DM me
1. No Juniors Allowed 🙅♂️ (due to Industry-Wide Lack of Personnel)
“Thomas mi amigo, how can there simultaneously be both no jobs in web3, and also a lack of personnel in web3? Have you been putting whisky in your protein shakes again?”
There aren’t that many web3 dev jobs in general, but what’s more impactful is the fact that the jobs that do exist are verrrry heavily skewed towards senior profiles
Literally nobody is hiring junior web3 devs
The cold hard truth is in reality there are not good onramps into a web3 career
Many people who are hiring are even quite open that they are specifically *not* hiring juniors - and anecdotally I’ve seen posts looking only for ‘thought leadership’ level people
There’s a very good reason for this though, as a fellow business owner I’m well aware nobody would voluntarily choose to pay humongous 6-figure salaries if juniors were a viable option to build their team
Junior devs are a fantastic investment when done right, I’ve witnessed firsthand how they can pay back many multiples over their worth when invested in properly (training, guidance, a proper roadmap of increasing responsibilities)
The issue is that junior devs require your team to have a surplus of senior dev-power in order to have the time to invest in mentorship & guidance
The overwhelming majority of web3 dev teams don’t have the capacity to make this investment
They need to focus on product market fit. They’re in a rapidly evolving industry where they can’t strategically plan for the long term. They don’t have the senior devs to spare on skilling up juniors
Yeah it’s a hell of a 🐥 and 🥚 problem
And it’s exacerbated in web3 dev because the stakes are so much higher
The immutability and financial nature of blockchain dapps mean that when your junior dev does an oopsie during a deployment on a Friday afternoon, they might not just cause a 2 hour outage and a funny story to tell at the (delayed) Friday evening drinks, instead they might permanently break your protocol or open up a door for hackers to irreversibly steal millions of dollars of your users’ funds
Smart contract code is high stakes & needs to be correct & audited, in fact the job title ‘junior smart contract developer’ is kinda an oxymoron when you think about it 🤔
(although admittedly I realise there is more to web3 dev than just writing smart contracts, I think this point still stands)
One of the ways web2 solved this was through coding bootcamps to try bridge devs into a slightly-past-junior state with practical skills
These have started to pop up in web3 too, with the Macro Engineering Fellowship being the most promising I’ve seen so far (indeed it seems like 1-2 of their alumni have been hired into teams like Synthetix, but it’s still very early days and absolute numbers are understandably low)
2. Let’s face it, we have an image problem folks
Scammers and shillers have given crypto a bad name
Developers are one of those rare groups of people that have some room to pick & choose what they wanna work on and what industry they wanna contribute to. Everyone needs software and it’s hard to build
What’s driving them to work in web3 at the moment? 🤔
FAANG is still a more desirable destination for aspirational devs shooting for the top in pure career terms
Coinbase stock price got absolutely pummelled into the ground this year it’s not exactly a fashionable employer to brag about to your Bumble date (spoiler alert, they don’t care anyway, please god stop talking about work and ask them about their hobbies)
For some reason I glanced at a Ruby on Rails LinkedIn group the other day and in their group rules Rule #4 was literally: “Rule 4: No blockchain posts. It will be deleted and you will be permanently banned”
There were only 5 rules
A group of tens of thousands of developers literally dedicated 25% of their group constitution to keeping us out 😂
Oh and while we’re at it, gamers hate us too
The endless spammers copy/pasting derivative NFT pump-n-dump projects have poisoned our image, mentioning NFTs to a gamer goes about as well as telling someone you enjoy the taste of human hair
The worst part is we don’t even look bad because of the hackers who are pulling off intricate novel attacks on decentralised systems (making web3 antifragile in the process). Ironically these guys probably make the industry more appealing to devs cos there are problems to solve and bad guys to stop. At least these bad guys are smart in the supervillain sense
Nope, annoyingly it was the waves of low-effort chancers shilling NFT projects that look like clipart, yield farms named after root vegetables and breathlessly telling us ‘$LINK is gonna 100x in the next 6 months 🤯’’ that made us look like the creepy guy breathing heavily in the corner of the software developer nightclub
Say ‘crypto’ to most people, even technically inclined ones - and the sentiment probably skews quite negative. A quick tour of HackerNews shows they are very negative towards blockchain-related topics
A wiser man than me who also doesn’t have a needy wonderful girlfriend soaking up all his spare time could probably grab a dataset of Twitter/HackerNews mentions and do some sentiment analysis to quantify this
3. web3 Innovation is Haaaard Man
It’s the morning after for web3 builders 🥴
We have woken up on a stranger’s sofa with a banging headache, surrounded by empty tequila bottles covered in stickers from failed algorithmic stablecoin projects
We groggily sit up and mutter into our hands “what was an Ohm-fork and why the hell did I put my life savings into one?”
The point is we’re well past the extended 2021 bull-run euphoria where we all just thought we’d make web3 versions of every single successful web2 service and conga-dance our way out of A16Z’s offices with $100m cheques
A healthy critical mass of people have now drank the decentralisation koolaid, but finding real use cases for this permissionless infrastructure is now the hard part. The really really hard part
There simply aren’t that many builders creating projects that solve real problems that can hire devs
Do a cmd-f for ‘Solidity’ in the latest Who’s Hiring post on Hacker News, there’s literally like 2 hits (believe it or not that’s not over-exaggeration, I actually did this lol)
This is 10000% not a dig. If you are building something novel with web3 you are an absolute gigabrain believe me. But relative to other industries a dev could join, there simply aren’t that many opportunities to find work and that is a gosh darn hard flywheel to start
When I was a lowly software engineer intern trying to avoid starving to death or (more importantly) dropping tables on prod - the absolute wizard engineer I sat next to in our office told me his first dev job was in an agency and it was the perfect place to start cos he got to quickly work on loads of different projects and be involved actually shipping 4-5 projects in his first year or so of coding
We don’t really have those sort of opportunities in web3… yet
The Good News
It’s early days for web3 and these things are a flywheel. Flywheels are notoriously hard to start, but the momentum is unstoppable once they get going
What we do have going for us is a relatively small group of absolutely gigabrain people who have dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to spinning up this decentralised industry for the good of human civilisation
I no longer see it as a coincidence that all the smartest people I know have gone into web3 when I go check up on what they’re up to
And luckily, the permissionless nature of web3 means devs that have got what it takes are empowered to join those ranks of builders
If you’re interested in joining the mission, I write about the state of the web3 industry & the developer experience. My rule is I only put out writing when I have something to say, so believe me your inbox is safe from meaningless fluff posts 🤝