Toby Macfarlane - Mortimer Spinks - Ethereum London

thank you I definitely will not be one of the hyper-technical speakers tonight the title recruitment consultant might have alluded to that I thought I'd give you a brief intro into how I got into the space and then market trends as we see them interestingly enough although the numbers may be decreasing here we're certainly not seeing a fall-off in jobs in the blockchain space relative to the price of crypto currencies I first found out about blockchain and crypto currencies in October 2016 I went to a meet-up hosted by a gentleman called David Siegel and he was the founder is the founder of a company called pillar project at the time there was probably 30 of us in the room and I was the only person that wasn't a developer totally blew my mind an hour and a half of how blockchain could change the world going into lots of different industries I couldn't follow most of it and then at the end he gave some non-financial advice but mentioned etherium and crypto currencies and if you were interested not a bad time to learn about the ecosystem and speculate I thought about quitting my job I went home looked at the price it was about $4 at the time didn't like the fact I had to put in my passport photo and personal details so turn that down wasn't really sure got in a little bit later and if anything that I do say tonight sounds like financial advice my personal strategy has been to buy high and sell low so please ignore anything that sounds remotely financial but in doing so I was attending more and more meetups I went to a really good one my company called Gollum G&T met a few people at the space there and for the first six months of 2017 it was still really really new or it certainly felt like that from a recruitment point of view everybody was sort of a dev or inventor or interested in this based on a technical point not very many people speculating around the currency so I started working with clients in the space and as that grew it became very apparent that something that is still lacking is regulation although I haven't had a chance to read it I've seen today that the Treasury report has come out I'll be hosting one of these tomorrow and that's probably what we will be talking about crypto and compliance breakfast is a monthly meetup for see little people and senior people in the blockchain space to gather together and talk about when they think FCA regulation is going in this country where they see market trends going and trying to tackle some of the issues that are arise from stalling of business in this space when I first started doing it I really thought that in two hours we would get some people in a room and we would hatch out all the problems of regulation that hasn't happened it's now been running for six or seven months the FCA still haven't done it the Treasury haven't done it and there are a lot of interesting companies working in that space I actually went to a meet-up where Simon Taylor of 11 FS was speaking last week and it has become quite clear that what people are hoping for from a related point of view is sort of market led regulation so not people that have very little information and knowledge of the space but being led by what's actually happening a little bit like the FX industry but to bring that into sort of global consensus when states in America still have different regulatory rules is certainly a big challenge so that's a little bit about me I'm certainly not going to talk about the ins and outs of solidity or smart contracts or blockchain but what I can tell you is how we see the industry moving so the RNA is also not lost on me that I'm a tech recruiter that clearly can't use PowerPoint or really sort of get the quality of an image up but as the price of cryptocurrencies has fallen away since December of last year we haven't seen at all really a decrease in jobs in the London market there were a couple of clients that we had that maybe half what they were doing and there has definitely been a release of certain contractors recently but in general the job market in London for blockchain developers is if it's still really buoyant one of the issues that we are seeing is there are some companies and everything is a market we tell our clients and we tell our candidates that all the time is there are some companies out there who can massively inflate what blockchain developers can get paid rightly so if the money is there you should go and get it so a lot of this is actually focused on companies that maybe are not able to pay the very top whack for developers and for us that's more about identifying talent rather than looking for skills and experience at this stage actually it would be good to know who here happens to be a blockchain developer or a software developer or is interested in getting to that space brilliant so that's that's sort of exactly what I was looking for I think a year ago that would have been most the hands up in the room and who here is actually interested in hiring developers or is looking to grow in the blockchain sector outside of development and is everybody else just really interested in in cryptocurrency prices nobody's interested in those okay no answer I was expecting so identifying talent is really important if you cannot be paying the very top back salary wise to highlight this we had a client that we were or that we are setting up a minused mini service provider agreement with so we will do all of their technical recruitment and sit on site and a couple of the founding members that we were so we've engaged with said oh it's easy you just go to a couple of meetups hit up meetup you get loads of blockchain developers they'll be falling over themselves to come work for you not quite so some of you may actually have received a small message from me before or meetup a fear in London was definitely one of the pages we targeted 114 pages every single person on those pays its messaged 23 replies only four were developers if this had been a year ago those numbers would be totally different so finding out an attracting talent has definitely changed over the past few months what you're looking for is not so different for identifying talent at any stage in software development so because blockchain technology is still so new research and development self-starter research is absolutely imperative and what you're doing the space is still evolving and so is the technology and some of the tokens that are out now and the technology behind them could be totally different in 12 months time maybe even six strong knowledge of objects Orion programming development and best practices that links nicely with testing now I must admit most of the clients that we work with are working with solidity in aetherium smart contracts so this is slightly more focused on on that than anything else but in general we blockchain if there if there is a bug in your in your system if there is a in your chain that could end up costing you a phenomenal amount of money knowing what testing best practices are TDD in LP development in general being somebody that believes in if I can't test it should I build it those are some of the qualities that we think are particularly important if you would like to be a lock chain developer functional programming skills algorithms and mathematical background are also a massive advantage things like their work near second formal proofs are particularly well linked to functional programming from my understanding crypto cryptography is also particularly important what we have tend to find is that if you really really do want to make a move into this space you are doing a lot of extra research so you don't need to have experience of working with Merkel trees or you don't need to have experience of understanding elliptic curve pairings but you do need to be somebody who has done enough research to confidently talk about it and show it something that you can pick up as opposed to being somebody who has already done these things and it is going to cost you a lot of money if you're looking to hire getting rolled as a blockchain developer be realistic if you have spent six months on your own back working with solidity putting stuff on github doing code samples that's a fantastic thing to be doing that is gonna make a massive difference but it doesn't necessarily mean that you should be able to charge 30 40 50 thousand pounds above what you're earning now a lot of the companies in this space are still startups although they may have raised an incredible amount of money in a cos if they've left that money and say aetherium and tokens they may not have the same funding as they do now it's not all about Lambos and getting to the moon so depending on the reason you want to get in there and you want to do blockchain and you want to further advance the space you need to be able to court talk confidently about the reasons you want to move into this job and something that we have seen or certainly I think we see is that as the price of Kryptos has come down more and more use cases have come to the forefront so things like supply chain intellectual property protection there's some very interesting things about HR third-party legal entities being removed from fairly large scale deals and blockchain being used in that aspect is it's definitely something we're starting to come to the forefront as opposed to just investing ism as a tangible asset yet networking I think that's obvious you wouldn't be here if you if you didn't think that was important the space is still really really friendly I think so certainly the breakfast that we hold everybody is very keen to share opinions everybody struggling through with the same issues together nobody really holds back and I think the more you go to these things the more that you are likely to be put in contact with a recommendation or a relevant party identifying the right opportunities for your development with companies that match the purpose that attracts you to blockchain again have a reason that you're interested in why this company is using blockchain yes if it is for token or currency that is a valid reason to be doing it but it's good to know exactly what it is about blockchain and the transformative powers of this technology that attracts you to the space that's it from me I hope you've got something insightful thank you very much for listening and I am certainly open to any questions just nothing to get yes the Heron tower Liverpool Street the Heron tower or now the Salesforce tower by Liverpool Street Station you come say hi after this so I think the talking are you placing contractors for a but both okay and can you give us an idea you know we didn't talk price as long as we're talking about tokens but can you give us an idea what sort of salary ranges are you seeing on me yeah and their rates yes so there are higher I know there are companies that pay higher but with our particular clients if you're looking at a senior developer that doesn't necessarily mean you need to have a lot of experience in blockchain but that would be up to about 90,000 pounds if you are a smart contract developer or solidity and you have experience as a senior dev so you've been doing it for a year or so commercially you'd be looking at about 110 with that particular client base at the moment most of our clients have gone through the contractor phase and are really looking for permanent now it's increasingly or or maybe not but it's always been a space where remote talent because it's so difficult to hire talent companies are increasingly open to remote working equally there are massive support cybersecurity issues with that I think there are some very good examples of issues that have been surrounding that particularly with exchanges they rate wise you can be looking anywhere between 600 and 800 if your senior obviously everything else works backwards from there cool and then there's normal one more question yes what sort of split are you seen between sort of tick versus the city so Enterprise aetherium Alliance and basement banks all that kind of stuff versus tech startups very good question this is that would be more on sort of what I see as opposed to what I do so the company I work for we specializes and startups and SMEs where Tek is a core value of your business what I am saying is definitely particularly things back to the fact that there are more jobs even with the tokens going down or the value of tokens going down but a lot of large corporations iBM has been in blockchain for a long time but banks and big institutions Facebook Amazon and now looking at how they can tokenize their customer base by which I mean there was a study by Harvard Business School last year and that on small businesses that revealed that if you had a 5% increase in customer loyalty it could lead to an up to 70% increase in profitability and there definitely looks like there is a move to try and attract customer loyalty through a token scheme obviously at these massive enterprise businesses as well if you can reduce how much it cost you to do financial transactions everyone will be interested in in saving thanks kisses hi so I'm a developer yeah sort of a junior mid-level still quite new and when I look at the websites for blockchain jobs often it feels like they're very kind of senior level engineers wanted like do you have any advice for people that like a junior level and you feel that there's any recruitment opportunities for us or like what would be your perspective on that um yes the helps or how junior are we talking like do you have commercial experience yeah like about a year yeah right so not just in blockchain but unfortunately in software development as a whole it is harder for juniors although everyone is crying out for talent in general lots of companies have a policy of just choosing to hire people that have two or three years commercial experience and calling them in junior I've on a personal note I've just been promoted and talking to clients about that it for the whole tech ecosystem it's going to cost you a lot more contractor rates go up the lack of talent means everybody's rates go up if you are going to be that short-sighted it is going to become more expensive now I'm training a team of five graduates I do kind of understand how difficult that can be from a junior point of view pretty much all companies this is my clients included that have their specs on their website look for seniors it's never a bad idea to put yourself in there we do have some clients that are looking for four juniors but it's the same sort of thing I was going back to so if you really fundamentally know your basic principles and best practices now opie if you can prove that you are a keen advocate not necessarily of TDD but you understand its principles keen advocate of testing you've done some stuff in your own time there will be opportunities out there just have to hunt a little bit harder and if it's a start-up the they may be looking for a trade-off in terms of you're gonna get in all this experience with with blockchain but we may not be increasing your salary now that's not always gonna be the case but there might be some sort of trade-off with that but there should be opportunities for juniors yeah thank you in in in wheat area we see the highest demand for it's our script developers for JavaScript yeah I mean you're you're in luck everywhere everywhere needs front-end developers at the moment he's talking about in the blockchain space the years and the smart yes the smart contracts and blockchain space so any company that has based its offering on etherium innocent little things to Liberty was taken a lot of the basics from from JavaScript if you have good fundamental understanding of JavaScript principles and ideally some node you would be moving in the right direction definitely a really strong understanding of testing so looking at truffle for testing solidity and seeing how it compares to a selenium or cucumber would be a good place to start the amount of resources are for developers just even in terms of medium is really powerful but that would be a first opening point if you wanted to go in a different route and work for a company like an exchange where they're currently not they don't have a token offering but they're obviously in that space there are quite a few exchanges that use node as the backend technology and everybody's using react at the moment with the front-end so that might be a sort of secondary step to get to where you want to go if you can't get to blockchain development now okay from early on placing the other person job to consider primarily developers strategic do you mean like CTO and within tech and software engineering on yep so myself personally I now do executive search because my client base or a lot of my client base are in this space I still dip into developers but it's usually senior architects CTOs software engineering managers that kind of stuff the CTO is this space we do a couple of things on retainer for yeah so we cover pretty much everything in tech and interesting because the space is so small when I started doing this and I hadn't been doing the job for that long recruitment to not bore you the skillset is pretty much the same a lot of it is asking open questions and if you can do a little bit of research on your subject area for example compliance and AML and kyc I'm willing to bet you can ask the right questions to identify who might be good so for a couple of my clients in the space we feel chief compliance officers had a customer service because they're working with us exclusively and it was fairly easy to do but in general yeah tech Thanks another it's how long does it take to place a contractor as opposed to a permanent so ladydi JavaScript developer this period of time this period of the year well two questions hiring trends that we're seeing in general now or the people I'm talking to December November is never generally that good and I don't think it's a really a trade secret that with brexit decision coming just around the corner a lot of our clients want to get their hiring done before november so we're expecting it to be a little bit quiet for the beginning of next year obviously there's a lot that can change with the brick city landscape but that's how it's looking right now it really depends on notice periods so I I don't think so if you need a contractor and it's a senior contractor that should still be a very quick hire you should be looking to find somebody within two to three weeks ideally because the market is so small that search will be a lot longer in London if they need to be on-site here if it's a global search for remote developers that's a very different different question but notice periods are still between four weeks and six months the time to hire for poem tends to take a little bit longer and the process is a little bit more drawn out unfortunately and uestions I have a question yeah have you noticed that they're hiring trenders specifically with developers only have you seen other kind of demanding roles pop up because of blockchain technology in general from my main focus is tech so that's you know that's where my eye has been I've seen a lot more people wanting to get into the space and as such there are a lot more advisory roles particularly at the larger enterprise companies IBM have been working with a blockchain for a fair time the banks are now increasingly bringing people into things like Barclays Rhys there's actually a lot of blockchain based startups in there Lloyd's have got an incubator and Innovation Lab these areas are starting to bring in a lot of people so with that there's fin tech market is focusing on blockchain there are legal well in fact one of the companies that we as a company are associated with their lawyers are now specialized or some of their legal team are specializing in ICO launch legal wranglings which is sort of slightly ironic considering what they're doing and what they might be doing but most of our focus is on on tech but certainly people wanting to get into the space just in general we get an incredible amount of calls and emails asking us do we do they do this site of recruitment unfortunately we don't that people definitely want to get into the space all right have a big hand applause thank you [Applause]