How To Get Your First Job In Crypto

Don't ask permission, just ask forgiveness. Credit: Drake

If my Twitter feed has any basis in reality, it seems that the recent slump in token prices has done nothing to slow down the mass exodus of now ex-FAANG engineers pouring into web3. For a recent coding bootcamp graduate such as myself, this is both good news and bad news - likely good news for my bags and for the usability of crypto as a whole in the coming years, bad news if I'm hoping to land a job in crypto by traditional means. Next to 100 guys with computer science degrees and years of experience working at the world's most competitive companies, my few months coding experience is considerably less impressive.

That said, it seems to me that in web3 this traditional approach of waiting for a job to be formally advertised, submitting a CV where you use the word 'passionate' at least twice, going through an interview process and etc etc is largely being shunned. Instead, most teams are hiring from within their community. This resonates a lot with me because, with my own background in online poker, I came to understand that the best way to find people for jobs is to simply wait and let them self-select. Those who really want to play poker (or contribute code to a crypto project, or basically anything else), aren't those who'll write walls of text about how well-suited they are to the job, but those who just show up every day and do the job.

If you’re looking for a job in web3, a tip would be to just start doing that job 👩‍💻 Credit Eda (🎈, 🎈) (@edatweets_) February 15, 2022

To flesh out the Drake quote with which I started this post - asking permission to do something has absolutely no upside if you truly want to do the thing - the best that can happen is that you're given permission to do the thing (which you had implicitly anyway), the worst is obviously that you're expressly forbidden.

While the recent Wormhole hack illustrated the dangers of developing via public GitHub repositories, the upside to this open-source philosophy from the point of view of builders is that anyone in the world has access to the code. In a lot of cases, this means you can run your own copy of the code locally, report or fix bugs, and offer improvements via pull requests. Even if you're not a programmer, you can still contribute to projects with media - one of the things DAOs are constantly looking for is content explaining how their product works or walkthroughs of how to use it. This is something that literally anyone can do, and while it may or may not be that type of work you want to do long term, it is absolutely something that will get your name out there and get you noticed by those projects you're interested in.

One of my favourite concepts from Twitter savant Jack Butcher is that of the permission-less apprenticeship. While I haven't taken this particular course of his (but have taken a few others, all of which were excellent), I'm going to risk summarising the crux of the idea here - if you wait for an opportunity to come to you, you'll wait forever. No one needs to give you permission to go out and do the thing you've been dreaming of doing. If you want to run a Twitter account promoting a crypto project, just create the account and start doing it of your own accord. ChainlinkGod (with 134k followers) is an excellent example of this idea in action. Don't wait for your favourite project to tell you what they need - use your brain and think of something that would help them yourself. Maybe they'd like a Twitter/Discord bot to post when someone uses their product, maybe they need someone to make an ELI5 of their new feature, maybe they're looking to translate an asset into X language.. the list is endless. If it turns out they don't like what you've done, no problem - apologise, ask what you could have done better and if there's anything else you could do to help the project along. Even if you try and fail, you've demonstrated authentic interest in the project and you've put yourself on the radar - no small feat given the frantic pace of development in the space.

Personally, at the time of writing I am still looking for my first paid job in crypto. But I believe I'm well on my way. After seeing that they were looking for market makers on Twitter, I jumped in and ran a simple market making bot written by the guys at ZigZag Exchange. Seeing that there was no way to track my total balance over time, I hacked together ZkScanalyzer, a simple React app that sums the token balances of an account. After seeing how long it takes to add trading pairs to the bot one by one, I wrote some scripts to help streamline that process. Then came something of a breakthrough..

Honestly, while I was delighted to have been given a job to do by an actual team member, however small, I was mad at myself for not thinking of this myself. I'd actually put in a few days work at the start of the year trying to automate Discord posts based on blockchain activity for another project I'm interested in, only to be beaten to it by another community member (who, incidentally, now appears to be formally working for that protocol... notice a pattern?).

But anyway, I got to work, and a few iterations later I'd created ZkWhaleWatcher, which listens to a websocket and pings a webhook on Discord when trades greater than $X take place on ZigZag exchange. A great example of another key Jack Butcher idea, selling your sawdust.

While nothing is live yet, it now looks as though this app is going to be used by the project in two ways - firstly as intended, to post to a Discord channel when big trades go through, and secondly in a way I never imagined - as a widget on the landing page showing the most recent trades in real time to would-be users.

While it's not yet translated into cold hard crypto, the work I've done so far has helped me in two ways.

1. It's given me the confidence to know I can contribute meaningfully to cutting-edge crypto projects, despite my lacklustre skills/lack of experience.
2. It's helped me get off the mark building a network of like minded crypto builders.

I think it's a common thought for those who want to help build the next financial system, that in order to contribute you need to be a shadowy super-coder with 200IQ and years of experience writing exotic languages. This is just plain wrong. I hope this article has demonstrated that, in my case with nothing more than some basic JavaScript skills and some persistence, perhaps in your case just some video editing skills AND SOME PERSISTENCE, you too can get involved. Make the leap from lurking to contributing and start providing value (the precursor to realising value) to the projects you're interested in.

That's it for today, keep building and GL out there!