Getting into Blockchain — an Engineer’s Story
Speaking as an experienced engineer, we often understand that when new technologies emerge we need to adapt and change to remain both a top talent and in a professional area that is in demand. Changes in life are never simple, whether it is your diet, a new apartment, a relationship, or even just changing your job. Aside from the technicalities such as the job interviews, office changes, and new relationships, sometimes in tech it also involves a whole new subject matter to get proficient in. That can complicate the change even more.
2017 was definitely the year of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin specifically, peaking, for now, into the beginning of 2018. Sure, signs of a bubble are all around — even your barber is asking you for coin buying tips just because you’re in tech — but a bubble as such also presents opportunities, especially if you play your cards right.
It was also the year I decided it was time to make a change and quit my job. Making that decision is simple enough, following through is a whole other story. Despite being an engineer first, at the time I was a management member in a company with billings in the tens of millions.
But once you realize how systems are built and having experience with building systems end-to-end more specifically — from backend to data and network engineering, frontend and even native mobile ecosystem — there are few other places a guy like me wants to work in the tech world.
Introducing: Blockchain!
I only took notice of Bitcoin in 2013, following Mt.Gox everyday and learning how the network operates — the abstract is rather simple if you understand basic crypto terms such as hashing and asymmetric encryption It was fascinating to see that someone realized how to connect these implementations together to create a trusted system to trade in goods online and more specifically create a new economy.
I took a hard look at blockchain and cryptocurrencies. What is it to me? Why is this even important? I am not an expert into the blockchain or any of the underlying distributed computing elements around cryptocurrencies, in my case I am not even a hodler right now! Why should I go ahead and make the effort into going into yet another vertical, especially when we hear of all the scams, hacks and uncertainty around that field?
When we search for a new job, we are looking for opportunity. Today, this is where the opportunity reveals itself. During my search, I joked with a friend that blockchain is in such a demand that all I need to do is change my LinkedIn title to “Blockchain Y’all” and just get a plethora of job requests in the field. While in the end I didn’t actually take that approach, it did get me to give the field some thought.
Finding the right company for growing in the blockchain industry is the same as moving up the ladder in any industry. Who you are going to work with and and how they treat their employees is critical. As an engineer you invest your time to promote the company, its brand, and its vision. The posts by Michael Eisenberg about ad-tech and the opportunities for engineers there go into great detail showing how important it is to invest your time in the right place.
Navigating a nascent and unpredictable industry
Taking all of the above into consideration, and researching a bit into the blockchain/cryptocurrencies companies, it’s hard not to notice a currently mixed bag in the industry: One with a manifestation of scams, almost no regulation (as of the first quarter of 2018), and a lot of uncertainty. So, is it a good idea to go into blockchain right now? That question of course, cannot be answered without a time machine. For now, I’m taking the opportunity in the crypto ‘jungle’.
Do not be naïve: I have stumbled on awkward situations as in some interviews it was easy to spot what would seem to me as a scam, when the company structure is funny, or when you ask how many tokens you get as an employee the answer is ‘you should have bought some if you want tokens’ (yes, that is a true story).
To veterans, this whole scenario may resemble what happened in the 1990s, as the internet started, the level of uncertainty was high, and a lot of people made money off the fact it was hardly moderated and they could go about their shady business uninterrupted as the party responsible of moderation have no idea on how to comprehend what the internet is, in some areas, such as social networks, they are probably still debating it today. Yet many good things came out of the 90s: Google and Amazon for example. The goal now is to find the new Google, the new Amazon — this is the scale of what blockchain related companies can become with the opportunities they present.
You do not need to be a cryptocurrency expert or blockchain engineer to get a position in a blockchain related company.
Surprisingly, the barrier to getting interviews and landing a job was not as big as I expected. You do not need to be a cryptocurrency expert or blockchain engineer to get a position in a blockchain-related company. Think about when Amazon started building AWS, the first major public IaaS cloud service. They were looking for good engineers who understand how to build systems — this is very similar to what is now required in many of the different blockchain companies.
I landed here at Orbs, helping to build an infrastructure that will enable consumer-facing companies to create distributed apps and financial solutions over the blockchain, companies who might eventually monetize their data and product using the blockchain. What Orbs is doing can be compared to what Amazon did with AWS 10+ years ago. This challenge requires inventing new things to meet the requirements and scale of such mass-use apps to run and store their transaction data over the blockchain — transform products into distributed applications, just like less than a decade ago many transformed into cloud-based applications.
One thing that was different when interviewing at Orbs is that the skill set required was not platform/framework specific, meaning an expert in Kafka and Spark Streaming (i.e. highly scalable ingest pipeline) may suggest the engineer can comprehend complex systems, but can he actually write something that is not using these building blocks, something that does not exist yet? When looking at the blockchain as a framework or even blockchain as a service (BaaS), the required abilities from engineers are about creating systems. So, coming into such a company with knowledge in specific frameworks is not a requirement. Coming in with knowledge on how to build systems is.
Orbs is an open source company, with a transparent culture in regards of its engineering and business alignment, we recently released our position paper, written by the very researchers and leaders of our engineering team who will implement the actual Orbs blockchain, available on Github.
Moving Forward
Blockchain presents an amazing opportunity in 2018 to any engineer who understands system building blocks. It presents a real ‘full-stack’ challenge and can be very rewarding given the right company is eventually chosen to be your partner for the journey. We at Orbs also practice a culture of writing, and will continue to share thoughts in the future about how we onboard new engineers into an open source company and how we encourage a ‘healthy’ codebase in a product/infrastructure that will hold a substantial amount of responsibility in a very early stage to its inception.
Join the Orbs community:
- GitHub: https://github.com/orbs-network
- Telegram: https://t.me/orbs_network
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/orbs_network
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ORBS_Network/
- Read the Orbs white papers: https://www.orbs.com/white-papers
