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Ask HN: Safest route for a career in Blockchain
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7 points
by abhisharm
3126 days ago
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Hi HN, I write this at what I see as a pivotal moment in my life. I'm graduating with a degree in CS this year and really want to find a gig in the blockchain space. The irreverence towards established practices and institutions, along with the fact that there is apt room for new ideas has really drawn me towards it. I'm working on projects in solidity and working on some blog posts based on the higher level concepts behind blockchain technology, to prepare to apply to companies in the next few months. However, given that this is blockchain there are quite a few "underlying protocols" that different companies work with. For example, some companies work solely on the ethereum technology stack, others work with both bitcoin and ethereum, while exchanges deal with many different protocols. It seems to me that in this highly political and sometimes controversial space, where I decide to work could be viewed as a political decision. For example, if I decide to work for an ethereum startup, it could turn out that some other coin becomes the dominant programmable blockchain, and
I'm left with irrelevant skills. As someone trying to position themselves long term to work in this space, which route would you recommend so that I pick up blockchain-related skills that would be of use with many or any of the underlying protocols that will be around in, say, five years? |
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The overwhelming majority of jobs at cryptocurrency companies do not touch the underlying protocols, for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of engineers at Bank of America don't touch SWIFT every day. BoA still needs front end, back end, DevOps, mobile development, etc etc etc. (They likely have more of any one of those jobs than the entire cryptocurrency industry has engineers total.)
More broadly: seek to be defined less by the technologies you've worked with and more what you can bring to the table in terms of business value. In the future world where some programmable blockchain is as reasonable a target for programs as X86 is, the skill worth selling is not "I am capable of writing executable code" but "I am capable of writing the right executable code to unlock tremendous value for your particular business."
If you consider your career in this fashion, you will take on less idiosyncratic technical risk. I will be polite with regards to this statement in consideration that you are a real, early-career engineer: the amount of idiosyncratic technical risk one would take if one defined oneself strictly as a blockchain protocol expert is considerable.