Despite the year-long bear market that has seen the prices of major cryptocurrencies drop 70 to 80 percent, the demand for blockchain developers is still at an all-time high.
According to Mehul Patel, the CEO of San Francisco tech talent recruitment firm Hired, the demand for the blockchain has increased significantly in the past several months. The supply of software engineers is already low, and individuals that are well versed in the cryptocurrency sector are even more scarce.
“There’s a ton of demand for blockchain. Software engineers are in very short supply, but this is even more acute and that’s why salaries are even higher.”
Interview Requests Every Day
Speaking to CNBC, software engineer Dustin Welden, who currently works as an engineer for Globys, stated that immediately after he changed his job title from software engineer to principal blockchain engineer, he began to receive interview requests from both startups in the blockchain sector and major conglomerates on a daily basis.
Welden said:
“When my title became ‘principal blockchain engineer,’ it became relentless. I get interview requests every day on LinkedIn now.”
For large-scale conglomerates like IBM, Deloitte, and Microsoft, it is of utmost importance to form a competent team that is able to expose the conglomerate to the blockchain sector when the time is right.
To enter an emerging sector in a timely manner, corporations need to have individual talent in place to swiftly push the venture of the firm into the market.
Hired CEO Patel emphasized that the mindset of conglomerates to plan a long-term strategy to target the cryptocurrency sector has led to an increase in demand for distributed ledger technology engineers.
“There’s a mindset here of taking a long-term view of planning. If you’re going to build blockchain technology, you have to get that talent.”
Blockchain Engineers are Rare
The rise of the initial coin offering (ICO) market in 2017 has enabled individual developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain systems by securing capital from the public within a short period of time.
Crypto projects have been raising millions of dollars in the span of minutes from investors in the public cryptocurrency exchange market, regardless of regulatory hurdles implemented by leading markets such as the US and South Korea.
“I don’t know any good Ethereum developer that isn’t a millionaire — There’s a gold rush among developers to learn the coding language of money,” Aragon CEO Luis Cuende, who raised $29 million within 2 minutes to build an Ethereum-based governance system, said.
The massive amount of capital that is available to developers in the ICO market has encouraged developers to create their own blockchain systems and products, rather than being appointed as a full-time developer with a stable paycheck.
But, with the salary for blockchain engineers surpassing that of AI engineers and specialists at around $170,000 per year, in the months to come, tech recruitment firms expect an influx of distributed ledger technology engineers to join major conglomerates to streamline the process of commercializing the technology and decentralized systems.
Images from Shutterstock
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