There are a few other articles /videos that claim to explain how to get a job as a blockchain developer. However, none of these resources were created by people who actually got a job of blockchain developer. Getting a job is hard, and generic advice won’t help you much. What you really need is someone who can give you precise advice that has worked in REAL LIFE. And that only come from personal experience.
In this article I will tell you the REAL STORY of how I got 2 job as a blockchain developers in less than 1 month each time. And bonus, these 2 positions were remote.
Back in the middle of 2016, I was a fullstack developer working as a freelancer for various startups. Life was good, but, one day, I found this weird thing called “Ethereum” on a Hackernews link. “Unstoppable applications”, “decentralized digital money”, “censorship-resistant”, “web 3.0”. It definitely piqued my curiosity. I became hooked right away. So for the next 6 month
In early 2017, I realized that in order to progress in my blockchain journey I needed to find a job as a blockchain developer. So I started to go to all meetups about blockchain in my city. One of the meetups I went to was about Ethereum. At the end of the presentation, someone came to talk to me. He was the co-founder of a blockchain project who had just started to do an ICO. At that time, we were in the middle of the ICO era, and it was very easy to raise insane amounts of money. The conversation went like this:
“Him: Are you a developer?” “Me: yes” “Him: Cool, I need a developer. Are you available for a new project about blockchain?” “Me: yes” “Him: Do you know C++?” “Me: no” “Him: That’s fine. Can you come to my office tomorrow to meet with my partner?” “Me: ok”
That was the end of the interview process. The next day, I went to meet with his partner and got hired right away. 50 USD an hour. They accepted my rate right away, no negotiation. For western consultants, it might not seem like much, but for me who live in Asia, that was just amazing.
The job was super exciting too. It was about forking a coin in C++. I don’t know how I managed to do it, but I did it. By the way, C++ is really hard, and there is no package manager like npm to save your ass and use someone else code when you don’t know how to do something. The only thing you can do is copy paste code from other C++ project. Oh yeah there is this thing called boost that is the closest to re-usable code in the C++ world. But don’t get me started with this, that’s a real nightmare.
I did this for the several month, and then my task ended. I had a lot of fun, but I became also a bit scared to continue working on blockchain: all that C++ work was really hard. I did some research, and I realized that the kind of low-level / infrastructure work I had done was actually not that common in Blockchain projects. With blockchain projects like Ethereum, most developers were now developing applications (Dapps) on TOP of blockchains, but not the blockchain technologies themselves. After I understood this, I focused my attention on Ethereum, Dapps and Solidity.
That’s when I started my youtube channel on Ethereum Dapps, EatTheBlocks. I didn’t know much about Ethereum by then, But I figured out that if I could go out there and teach publicly what I just learned, it would be a great marketing tool for my job search.
After I had a videos uploaded, I restarted to go to blockchain meetups often, and I also updated my profile on LinkedIn with exotic keywords like “Ethereum”, “Dapp” and “Solidity”. My LinkedIn “Seo” went to the roof: my search appearances went from barely 100 searches per week to more than 1500. That was in December 2017, at the peak of the blockchain bubble. I was receiving several messages per day on LinkedIn for recruiters and blockchain entrepreneurs.
One of these messages was from Lendingblock, a project for building a decentralized lending platform. We setup a skype call, and after I went to London to meet the 2 cofounders. The meeting was fruitful, and the project looked interesting. A couple of days later, they sent me a job offer, with a decent bonus (in tokens).
At the same time, I also received several offers from other blockchain companies. Most of these offers were coming from more established companies, and they seem less open to remote work. I thought that since Lendingblock was less established, they would probably be more flexible for remote work. So I suggested the following arrangement;
“How about I come work on-site the first 2 month, then we continue remote?”
This would help build trust at the beginning, and still leave me the freedom to work remotely after. They accepted. And that’s I worked for about a year on a great blockchain project, with a great team, and great salary.
What did I learn from all my experiences?
- Real-life events are probably your best bet to get hired (meetups, conferences…)
- Have some “assets” to prove your skills: Github projects, blog posts or youtube videos. Out of all of these, blog posts are the most time efficient, and Github projects are the most convincing. Youtube videos are good too, but it just takes so long
- Keep your online profiles (LinkedIn, etc…) up-to-date with relevant keywords / experiences
- Being at the right time / right place is important. I got these 2 blockchain jobs relatively easily in part because of opportunistic timing.
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