Breaking into Blockchain: Technical Internships and Jobs

Transcript

awesome doing well it's pretty early here so i have my coffee perfect perfect ah thank you all for having me uh as as you can see my talk is titled breaking into blockchain i'm really excited to be here uh thank you so much for having me and a quick introduction i'm uh king seong-chen the ceo of tech intern uh and again really excited to be here and to share

some of uh what i've learned working on this company with you um as a quick show of hands i'd love to know kind of what your backgrounds are um raise your hand if you're currently in college and looking to work in the blockchain space not so many raise your hand if you're not in college but not working in blockchain yet but looking to do so oh cool awesome and then finally uh raise your hand if you're already in the industry uh working at a company or running a blockchain company oh awesome yeah we got a great mix here so i'm going to give a quick overview of

my talk i'm first going to give some background on tekken's turn next i'm going to talk about some resources on how to start learning and uh being prepared to enter the industry i'm going to focus mostly on technical roles but we'll touch a bit on others after i'm going to talk about uh the companies in the space as well as the types of roles you can expect that are hiring and then i'm going to talk about the hiring process and making your case finally uh some resume building tips and some examples and we'll quickly cap it off with a quick q a and this should only take about 20 minutes and without further ado i'll get right

into it so quick background on tech intern i o it's a company that i started that connects startups and tech companies with developers from top colleges so we work with all types of tech companies but we do have a big focus on blockchain companies um just because a lot of them are hiring and connected to a lot of them and we've worked with a lot of really smart uh students and developers to get their first blockchain uh job so we do both uh contracting and internships and uh notice that with a lot of like smaller startups contracting works really well for them uh and that's because you know startups want to be flexible

uh they want to have developers available on a more flexible basis and so connected a lot of students while they're in school uh to work like part-time for these blockchain startups we've also um dealt with like more niche languages for example uh helping space smash hire a goaling developer and your protocol hire arrest developer so to start off with resources now uh most blockchain companies are looking for uh developers with some experience already so it's really important that uh you are both a learning and uh doing in your spare time

so the first things uh if you're not very um if you're pretty new to blockchain don't have a lot of development skills is to look at the free resources make sure you're interested in the industry and interest in developing of course everyone knows about crypto zombies um there's eatspring ethereum.org this is really to try your hand at development and see if you like working in solidity or some of the other popular languages next we have the paid online courses these are like longer courses where you'll learn more of the basics of development so there's block geeks coursera and other

kind of online learning resources as well as consensus academy and lastly there are the more extensive boot camps most of these are online right now so chain slot shot and the consensus academy boot camp but i do remember some of them have had in-person kind of sessions i remember consensus had one in dubai where you would even fly there and work on some real blockchain projects uh there as well and finally it's really important that you're doing things as well so hackathons are super important i know there's one that eats cc uh there's also e global which hosts a lot of hackathons in various

countries around the world as well as it's important to do bounties uh with git coin and other platforms as well and lastly and probably the most important thing is to just like join projects uh to get started there uh most projects have like a disorder a telegram you could just join um see if there are any uh development uh projects in the works and you can often like contribute because a lot of these are open source projects you can just start um uh like talking to the founders talking to the team and seeing if they're things you're working on all right and now we get into some of the interesting companies and roles are

available uh you can see most of them on the page and i'll kind of dive into some of the ones that are a bit more interesting or um some more uh parts that i could talk about so the first one is like the nft and social depths these are quite interesting because they're the most consumer facing types of companies and roles that's where you'll have like a lot of design front end maybe some project management as well as community roles and that's because these projects really want to engage uh people outside the crypto space as well so a lot of um like celebrities a lot of um like regular people are really

interested in like nfts and social desks and this is where you can really apply design and community uh skills next we have d5 decentralized finance um this is where you have automated market makers insurance lending so this is where uh a lot of smart contract skills uh will be really important there are a lot of companies hiring for specifically uh things like slitty and rust so these are really good languages to learn if you want to work in this industry next we have kind of the more lower level infrastructure companies staking mining and oracles and others and again this is where there's a lot of

needs in back end so smart contract languages as well as just like general back-end skills next i want to talk about uh security companies so specifically uh security auditing so this is something that's like critical need all across the space i'm sure you know but um like a lot of security auditing companies are like uh fully in demand right now some like aren't even available until like october november that's just because there's a huge critical lack of security otters in the space and although there's a very high um you know requirements to get into the space because hey this is like

extremely critical and you need to have like a lot of knowledge before you can be trusted to do security audits it is possible to like get into the space um so i actually have a friend um samsung who is relatively young and i knew him when he was still like in school just doing uh regular security jobs and what he did is he just started looking into smart contracts looking for bugs doing bounties and then he really built a name for himself and he started with like a internship at uh trail of bits and then like now i think he's a research partner at paradigm so even as a student it is possible though

difficult to like break into the space and it's really important that you have a good interest in um like smart contracts security auditing ctfs in particular because it is possible for you to like enter the space and get a really high salary uh role and of course there are like the hardware companies so wallets um a lot of blockchain uh 18 bitcoin 8 and other crypto atm companies coming up i'm seeing a lot of them uh and some that we're working with as well as well as like miners themselves and then um there's blockchains themselves so this is where you work on protocol design and um

uh really low low level um like protocol work that's where uh there's a lot of functional languages uh like rust as well as just a lot of demand as all the different blockchain protocols all new developers and finally another interesting group is vcs median hedge funds i'm seeing a lot of them hire for like research positions as well as uh quant positions and this is another really interesting area where you can work at a vc or hedge fund and lastly like a bit uh less related to development but there are a lot of

crypto companies looking for uh community management uh and marketing slash means so really growing the crypto community to include more people um managing the discord uh this is sometimes a support role where you're just like answering questions but sometimes also a growth role where you're really thinking of ways to increase the community try to get more people into the blockchain space now quickly the general hiring process so this is briefly and generally how companies will look at um hiring of course like the best way to get into a specific company

is to really like just join their community join their discord see what they need help with um and then start contributing but it's hard to do that with like every company of course so generally the process will be to like submit your resume somewhere um you could do that on tech and turn io to like get your first internship or contract job or um directly to the company themselves uh in the first pass uh your resume will be really important because they'll be looking for like general skills um their initial impression and um make sure you have like some uh blockchain experience whether it's on your own or at a previous company uh and that's when the second pass they'll uh really be looking for

like the application of your skills uh your portfolio your github making sure like you've done development work and also that it's created some business route value so you're not just doing like stock um projects that you found on the internet you're not just following guides but you're actually building things on your own and then like interacting with users like showing that like you've achieved some markers of success and then finally we'll have the interviews um this is where you know they'll contact you to do like coding tests show that you need to show that you do have these skills and also look for like a culture fit um maybe ask some questions around

your interest in crypto uh most of these companies really care that like you yourself are personally interested in crypto so um knowing that like you uh interact with projects in your free time that uh you um you know have uh cryptocurrency and you've used it in dapps you've used different uh wallets and that you have some thoughts on like usability and how to like improve blockchain as a whole and of course uh it's important that you make your case uh so um one really useful thing is to focus on business values so in addition to the things you've developed how it's actually been um used to solve a specific problem

at the end of the day all these companies are like businesses and so they do care about like how um the things you're doing will impact the bottom line so that's either with like the number of users that you can reach and how like it helps them specifically and this is where on your resume and when you're talking you can talk about like your measured success and how like the things you're working on has led to like results and the actions that like um have directly impacted customers so as a bad example you just say oh you create an app using these technologies to do this specific thing but a better example would be like helping like a specific amount of users

like 52 crypto users find the most undervalued like 23 dollars to plan by creating a decentralized sales dashboard with um uh these technologies so really highlighting um the specific things that you've done uh and you've achieved by building um by developing the things you've worked on so with your resume uh it's important to list like what you actually did again why it's important to the goals of uh whatever project or business you're working on and how the value provided previously will impact the role you're currently applying to

so it's really great if you worked on something similar in the past but if not like how the skills you learn would translate to the role you're currently applying to so some more examples um uh if you've built something and launched it like that's a great thing to mention uh especially if that leads to more more users that you can then talk about how they interacted with the tools you've built of course like percentages are great if you improve like performance if you like uh led the growth of um the app by whatever percent um and also um really driving home that hey you've

built uh you've built a lot of things in the past you have that development knowledge but also you know how to translate that into business success and that's it um now i'd love to open up for a q a if anyone has any questions and in addition uh feel free to like join our discord contact me or even add me on linkedin yeah definitely so uh we mostly

work with interns and uh contractors and so that salary range has ranged from like 20 to uh like 50 dollars per hour but i think for um newgrad um uh entry-level um development rules uh that can that will generally be higher like i've seen um for like even like uh new graduates like 100 to um like 200 000 a year and then if you're like skilled in specific things like the salary will be much higher so like a lot of people are looking for like um uh like senior solidity developers um senior russ developers

that salary range can be like much higher um and then also uh like one area in particular security auditing firms if you um have a lot of experience with um security specifically and you understand deeply um like that can be like 400 500k um or even more so i think generally like people are hiring for developers at a level that is um the same or higher than the general tech industry and then you have specific skills like the salary levels are even higher awesome

awesome thank you all so much and thank you for uh having me and i'm excited to connect with any of you online as well you