Day in the life at UMA | Ryan Wolhuter, frontend engineer
Starting a new job is tough. Typically, you have to meet a bunch of new people, learn several different tools and systems, and start working with an unfamiliar workflow and rhythm. That is true of any job in any industry, but onboarding to a crypto team that works entirely remote, across several time zones on a team of people living in a dozen different countries, can be uniquely intimidating.
I’ve recently learned, as a frontend engineer that recently joined UMA, that there is a right way to do this so that new recruits like me can fit in seamlessly while achieving productivity and comfort as quickly as possible.
Getting in the mix at UMA
I’ve been interested in crypto for about 10 years.
Before I joined UMA to focus on dapp excellence, my bread and butter focused on building web apps for web2 companies. More recently, I worked at an agency that serviced web3 protocols with their dApps, which afforded me plenty of experience looking under the hood of various projects and systems.
I was exposed to pretty much everything in web3 app user interfaces. What worked well, what didn’t — and earned a sense of where web3 UX needs to evolve and improve as the industry and market grows and matures.
There’s a problem in the blockchain universe
After working with various protocols, I frequently came up against one of the least understood and most critical problems facing blockchains today: how they access data. The problem is that smart contracts are isolated from the real world. Generally speaking, blockchains have no built-in way of ingesting data from outside the chain.
That’s a huge issue. Nothing interesting happens in an isolated system. For our smart contracts to do anything interesting, like responding to price fluctuations of assets or enacting the results of a DAO governance vote, they must be able to access this information somehow.
Of course, this is much easier said than done. And that’s what interested me in UMA.
UMA is an optimistic oracle (OO) that can record any knowable truth onto a blockchain. It tells smart contracts “things about the world” so contracts and markets asking for that data can be settled. It does this by leveraging the most powerful resource in the known universe: human minds. Through blockchain-based democratic voting and the application of Schelling point game theory, the OO can converge on true answers for even the most complex questions. Because the OO is “a human-powered truth machine”, it is flexible enough to handle ambiguity and expands the design space possible in web3.
I was excited by this technology in general, because I believe that crypto doesn’t have a future without off-chain data solutions that are flexible, reasonable and secure.
With this new career path discovered, my attention turned to getting comfortable and ramping up productivity with my new colleagues.
On treating and managing newbies in the right way
I’ve learned a few things in my first months at UMA about being a newbie — but perhaps most importantly, how remote, web3 teams should be treating the noobs to optimize good vibes and productivity.
UMA has a policy of not hiring assholes. I appreciate that.
A small, but growing team, UMA has team-members in roughly a dozen countries around the world, so we developed an interesting approach to onboarding — something that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I thought it was clever. As soon as I started, I was given a calendar with 1-on-1 meetings scheduled with several different people from a cross-section of the organization.
I was unsure. I felt that having so many conversations with strangers would be hard. I’m not that extroverted; I’m a bit shy. But they had a solution. Part of the intro process was to complete a virtual scavenger hunt. I was given a document with several questions related to team members. Questions like: “Who once raised 200 alpacas? And “who once spent two years producing a failed documentary about Sasquatch hunters?” It gave purpose to the meetings and provided conversation fodder.
Whenever I wasn’t sure what to say next, I just brought up my scavenger hunt document and we had a good laugh going over the questions I hadn’t yet answered. I feel like the people I met also learned a lot about their other teammates.
This process meant my first couple of weeks were hyper focused on meeting with various colleagues (online), just to get to know each other and to get a sense of the culture, the values and the personalities of the team.
Additionally, those early days and weeks focused on getting familiar with the tools and inner workings of the protocol. Onboarding in crypto and web3 has synchronization kinks that always, always, always emerge when connecting to a new ecosystem. It’s essential that your new team and employer understand that those hiccups happen, and that productivity will not ramp up until those connections are smoothed. Throughout the setup process I never felt rushed, which I think made everything go quicker. So far so good.
Protect the noobs from breaking stuff
It’s important to have a system of checks and balances in place so that new recruits can learn and play and tinker, without working in fear of breaking something important. I’ve had that feeling before and it creates an intense anxiety that can be paralyzing.
UMA has an extremely thorough and careful process for how code gets committed and essential items are on lockdown, so I felt I wouldn’t be able to break something that would be catastrophic for the protocol.
At UMA, we have many sets of eyes on everything and completely open, seamless communication. You cannot, accidentally, commit a line of code that hasn’t been reviewed and you can’t send something to production without many other people approving it.
Having all of those checks and balances in place made me feel secure and also spurred me to start producing with confidence, using the skills that they brought me in for.
Being a newbie in any job is a challenging time. That feeling can be multiplied in a remote-first, international crypto company, but it doesn’t have to be — and it feels like we’ve found the right recipe at UMA.
If you’re interested in joining us, you can find our current job postings here.
