Why I'm Hopeful for Web3's Futures - Lessons from 16,000+ Person Web3 Conference

Last week, I spent five days in Austin attending Consensus 2022, attending my first 'major' event since starting devMint School.

Quite a few things happened during that conference. Ethereum skated with $1,500/ETH, a local minimum and one of the lowest prices in ages. Bitcoin started tumbling and other ecosystem's started were impacted.

So what was the mood on the ground, with some of the people who were most invested all in one place?

Lesson 1: Everyone Went About Their Business

If you would have asked me how I thought everyone would react, I would say 'they would be worried, maybe even panic'd'. But honestly, it wasn't until my new friend pointed out that Ethereum was crashing that I knew anything was happening.

No one seemed to be too concerned. It's understandable, not because they don't care, but because this isn't the first time this has happened. For one engineer who has been involved since 2012, this is like the 4th major downturn they've been through.

Does it hurt? Of course. Is anyone seriously worried about the future of their prospects? If they were, they weren't acting like it.

On a personal level, I've made over a dozen prospective partners, from start-ups to established L1 protocols, that are just as gun-ho about hiring talent as they were during the bull market.

In short: keep calm and HODL.

Lesson 2: The Development Stack is Fracturing

This is still one I'm not 100% sure how to handle. When I started devMint, I very much decided I wanted to teach Solidity because, well, that's a major way you make smart contracts.

However, it's not the only game in town these days. The number of platforms hiring smart contract developers is growing, and they're not centralizing on a single technology stack.

If anything, the number of technologies is growing.

You could be a developer of any one of the following languages:

• Solidity
• Rust
• Go
• Javascript
• C#.net
• Cairo

And call yourself a 'blockchain developer' with your own ecosystem of tools.

This is, of course, nuts. If you wanted to become a Full Stack developer, you learn Javascript. If you want to be a devOps engineer, you learn Bash, JavaScript, or Python with Dockers/Kubernetes. If you want to be a Data Engineer, you learn SQL and Python, maybe R.

If you want to learn blockchain, the industry is giving you 10 options and not really signalling which one is best. This isn't even taking frameworks and 3rd party tools into consideration.

For developers and organizations, this is going to be messy. We're working at devMint to make sure our developers are prepared for work in the Web3 space. What EXACTLY that means is changing, but we're going to be ready for it.

Lesson #3: Current Web3 Engineers are Creating an Opening for New Talent

If you're a Web3 developer with five years of experience, you can demand $500,000/year and reasonably expect to be paid that. The reason for this is because cash flush L1s and established organizations (think Ethereum, Quantstamp and Chainlink) have the funds to pay it.

For everyone else, this is nuts. They don't have the capital to hire a run of the mill Web3 engineer for what they're offering a C-level executive. Most people within the Web3 who get paid these salaries seem to believe this is just how markets work.

I, on the other hand, believe that this is signaling the beginning for a new sort of development talent. One that is less involved in the low level details of the particular implementation and more involved with the development needs of their organization. Similar to the way we have application developers (which are prolific) vs system engineers/language engineers (which are less common).

Web3 Developer ≈ Application Developer

Blockchain Engineer ≈ System Engineer

If you're worried this means you're going to be paid, don't be. The average mid-level engineer is being paid anywhere from $125,000 to $285,000, plus stock and benefits.

If devMint is successful, it's in training talent for Web3 Development and learning to remove the 'blockchain engineering' part. How this happens is what we're figuring out. But I'm betting everything this is how the market is going to move.

Conclusion

Overall, the conference was a success. While we'll have to wait and see how the bear market shakes out, Everyone seems to be signaling that they're still going forward, albeit cautiously. And by the time things pick up again (TBD), the landscape will likely look very different from today.