New Devs Needed? Why We Need to Fix the Web3 Skills Gap! | Bianca Buzea | Erin Grasmick |

[Music] hello all right I think we can just get started um yes I'll crack right into it uh my name is Ry Le I'm part of par Technologies and I'm part of the solution engineering department and I am here to talk about the web 3 skills Gap and I here today with two really amazing panelists and I'll hand it straight over to First Bianca would you like to introduce yourself sure happy to uh good morning everyone hope you enjoyed the bill week so far my name is Bianca buza I'm lead devel at Chronicle the team behind the first Oracle on ethereum and also I'm the founder of uh Deval uni where we teach people how to get into developer relations stunning Aaron yeah so I'm Ain um I'm an engineer at parody Technologies um I also am doing some lecturing at the polon blockchain academy coming up soon um and I I like um being able to take very technical Concepts and being able to explain them to people not necessarily developers but I think it's very important for prospective developers to understand this stuff on a higher level stny thank you I think we'll start with an open question so like we're here to talk about the web three skills Gap so how big is it currently like on both your open opinions uh what are the current issues that we're facing with this right now I would say specifically if for looking at on boarding web to folks there is a skill Gap that uh we must uh tackle and it's not only most of the cases it's not only enough like to to have these people prepared for the specific uh thing that there might be uh working on let's say I don't know a smart contract engineer only about smart contracts but they need like a rather a broad understanding about the ecosystem and how all the pieces are coming up together so definitely there there is this uh skills that needs to be addressed I think there was a report from Electric Capital from 2023 that was saying that uh after one year around 50% of developers are dropping out so there is I would say definitely something we can do better as an ecosystem yeah I think um there's it's it's multi-layered right because uh there's a lot of uh blockchain protocols that are written in languages that that may not be as common to find Developers for you know like rust or hcal um and then there's also a lot of specialized languages like you know solidity and and there's a lot more languages that are cropping up now um as as the space matures and getting people up to speed on something that they might not um encounter in like a normal sort of software engineering course at all is uh I think it's it's hard to do no definitely I think something we were going to talk about actually was is the Polkka dot fellowship and specifically how we can retain developers and this goes for all protocols and ecosystems and trying to really ensure that we're compensating them well and I say bringing that pool of knowledgeable devs large increasing that size really so what would you have any thoughts on that yeah so the the Polkka do Fellowship um is a is a great example of a way to compensate developers who are in the ecosystem um and um help them upskill so um um for people who aren't familiar it's an onchain um organization a collective um of rust developers who are very familiar with the poked do protocol and these developers can move up different levels depending on their familiarity their contribution and they are um you know compensated on chain for their work and I think this is a really good way to do it because it's you know it's it's all it's all decentralized it's dist like it's really helping distribute the knowledge and anyone can come in and start and I think that's really important is that anyone from GitHub can just be like okay I want to potentially join the fellowship you know how do I get started and there's people that can also help you like there's a guide and um you can just um you can just work your way up like depending on how how much work that you want to do and I think that's a really good way to to get into protocol development yeah I think it's a it's a good opportunity especially in this decentralized as well that we're trying to push towards to try and compensate Dev fairly um bianc I actually want to talk about something similar so the devl uni um could you give us a bit of information and background about what it's trying to accomplish sure so basically back in 2023 I realized that while for developers there are a lot of avenues like for people to uh skill up uh there wasn't actually much for people who wanted to get into developer relations there was like no clear path no like boot camp no courses nothing like that over there and I was like okay I'm doing developer relations I have like a good network of people doing developer relations as well and we can actually address this Gap in skills and do something so so far we run uh six cohorts uh with uh the seventh upcoming uh very soon and yeah we we enable a lot of people to get from zero to one and get into developer relations and further support the ecosystem and on board a their turn more developers stunning um there's actually something quite similar I think maybe Erin you could talk about this which is the PBA um they're very very similar initiatives I would say and very both trying to Target those developers and upskill them and bring them into the web 3 world and I guess you don't really even have to be a developer there Founders tracks and all sorts of different things so could you give us a bit of background on that yeah I mean there's there's I I think again like there's there's multiple um components here like obviously we need to have people that are willing to get the skills as a developer and get into um blockchain development but then we also need people to reach out to those developers and um if if they're like very new new developers maybe they don't know how to get started or um you know they're budding developers and they just need help um or they you know like retaining those developers once they start is really really important so it's kind of like this whole pipeline right of of developer relations developers and like you know a circle um but the the PBA does help people um you know get completely off the ground with with protocol development and uh there's also you know space for teaching people how to write daps um um regulation concerns um Founders who may want to uh learn how to get started in the ecosystem so I think you need like a really sort of multi-facet of approach like you need to hit a lot of different types of personalities um because otherwise you know you can't just like spearhead one and have one because you can't have one with all without all the others that sounds good it kind of leaves me to think that if considering we have to have these sort of like you know de uni PBA are traditional colleges universities doing enough like that is an open question here are they providing students who have got these degrees fresh of University with with actual knowledge to get into like a blockchain or the ecosystem and actually start developing I think it it really depends on the universities and and colleges I can probably speak a bit about uh Europe and Germany since I'm I'm based there I know there are like several uh programs and universities who have been incorporating for a couple of years now already um information and course is about blockchain so I think that's definitely a good trajectory but I think uh what is happening and is more effective uh it's at the level of uh different uh clubs uh different University clubs and I've seen this quite a lot and quite uh in a global approach if you want where all these clubs are collaborating very closely uh with different uh protocols different hackaton and bringing uh new Talent yeah I mean my my University experience was was not um not Preparatory for my job at all and I think a lot of these sort of like especially in America these older colleges um universities that have more classical computer science educations like they may not even have much to do with software engineering as well because it's more of a you know a a conceptual degree um I mean obviously there's software engineering degrees as well and and electives and and things like that but um I I I do remember one time I BR I brought up IP PFS to one of my professors um as a possible research subject because this was you know back you know maybe 10 years ago or so um and he was like oh well no we should do something with like AWS lamb Lambda instead and you know he's like a distributed computing Professor so I thought he would find it interesting but I think there's a lot of um a lot of progress to be made in Academia to make um academics more um consider at least start starting to look at some of these new things as as something interesting that they can actually look into in research rather than just like oh well it's new so it's not been around for 50 years so we're not interested in it kind of thing how do we begin to do that I think there's a few initiatives that people are trying to do like for example the EA guys shout out to those guys um but they're trying to bridge that Gap by also working with higher education initiatives and same with like the Jam tour that's currently going on um do you want to talk about that a bit or yeah so the the Jam tour is is going around to different um universities throughout the world in Asia right now um and it's Gavin wood is speaking about the the the new jam protocol and and the gray paper and that's that's one way to get um students interested in in this sort of thing and but again I think there needs to be more focus on the acceptance of these protocols into actual the research world the academic world um we're seeing a bit more of it and I think that's good I think it just may take time but um definitely going around to different universities and uh just talking about your stuff getting getting people interested in it be because I think a lot of people just don't don't even know what's out there 100% bianc is devel uni working with any like third party programs or initiatives um with hiring education initiatives as well uh not specifically uh universities per se but again with different uh clubs from universities so far and protocols so yeah that that's been like the the two Avenues so far oh it sounds good do you think there's a fear from universities trying to adopt blockchain culture in a way I mean I think I think there's still a lot of PR to be done because people who may not know about the intricacies of it and what's actually happening here may have a bad perception of it or uh you know at at best neutral perception where they might not find it interesting they might not consider it a field that they can go into and I think getting people just that first step is possibly the most important because people may not even think about it something it's something that they could even do cuz you know people are like oh well I want to grow up and be a a s sofware engineer and and work on work at Amazon or whatever but there's there's other paths you can take that are very interesting fields and letting people know that as early as possible is probably the most important I would say but then obviously retaining developers as well like once they've taken that first step um we we need to be kind to them and we need to support them along the way bian do ja have any I think we're actually a bit uh more flexible as an ecosystem when it comes to like formal certifications and I think proof of work if you want like portfolios I'm referring to here are way more important in our industry and I've seen actually quite young talent that was able to advance their career and enter the ecosystem just by like building uh and showcasing basically uh what they're doing building in public and I've seen a couple of examples uh with when people quite young they were able to um get into the ecosystem so I think versus the traditional Web Two uh path we are a bit more flexible and we we value more uh the skills themselves than some sort of uh paper or name on a piece of paper no sounds good do you think it's uh possible to try and onboard the web to developers in any sense to try and Bridge them over how hard do you think it is to try and bring them into the web three worlds I don't think it's hard once they uh want act genuinely like they want to uh on board because I think we have like different mechanis we have like a lot of hackaton we have a lot of initiatives who support uh developers but again like uh as you were mentioning uh people need to be aware about those initiatives I remember back in the days uh when I was looking to on board myself but I mean Back Then There Were like as many as we have now but uh I think for someone who's outside ecosystem it might be a bit uh more challenging uh to discover those opportunities yeah I think people just need to be handheld a little bit at the beginning and it's hard to do this right because you don't want uh a protocol going to an institution or you know doing Outreach or whatever to look like a shill you want it to look legitimate like it's a legitimate you know route of you know legitimate career route which it is and I think like I said earlier like people just may have this wrong perception or whatever um but it's it's hard I think to make web two developers understand why going into web 3 may be interesting for them and the value proposition for them career-wise may not be evident or obvious um so I think and because it's it's easy to stay with what you know right it's like this very comfortable Paradigm so I would argue that in order to do this one of the best ways to do it is um you know developer relations and also having really good tooling that is very familiar to them that feels like web 2 tooling that they can pick up they can experiment with um they can just kind of take off you know because developers good developers all like learning on their own I think to some degree and uh if you have if you have interesting and engaging enough tooling that's easy to use that can really draw people in 100% I think that ties quite heavily into devx as well and ensuring just generally when a developer comes to the ecosystem the entire developer experience is as simple especially with the users well ux and devx go hand in hand what would you guys say about that specifically asking about how devx sorry ties into the whole situation with Dev and devx working together yeah so uh if you're if you're coming from the web to ecosystem I think there is a bit of accommodation let's say that you need to to get used to and you need to learn like okay what what I should do and to get over your fears I think especially for new people they are like okay if I'm doing this Ro wrong like it's all on me and a lot of the times this fear of something might be going wrong might hold them back so I think we can do better efforts into educating people on okay how to on board properly how how to do it how to test uh what mechanism are out there to kind of make sure that the step you're about to take uh won't have any bad consequences and I think all this can be solved with better education yeah yeah I think developer experience is kind of like user experience in in web 3 right it's it's hard it's hard and it's it's you know improving every year and I mean you know I've been in blockchain for a very long time now and you know in the past three two two three years like things have gotten much better um but we still have a long way to go to to Really make that development experience really good for people especially with so many different players in the industry and each one having their own separate tooling and each might work slightly differently each protocol having its own quirks or its you know account model or whatever you want to you know anything like it's it's it's like learning new paradigms a lot of the time and I mean this is why the evm is so huge right because it's everywhere and so people usually start with the evm um because it's ubiquitous at this point um but like with all of these you know new chains and new VMS and and stuff like that um I worry that the tooling may become more fragmented and as it as a result suffer and develop developer experience will then suffer um so it would be nice to see some standards across the industry in terms of tooling and like how to how to work with um work with developers especially like web 2 developers that are new to web 3 um but I know that's a very hard hard hard to ask I think we have time for me one last quick question so um in both your opinions what would be your both immediate next steps to try and curve that developer relations Gap well the web three skills Gap um I would say that we definitely need to get more of this stuff into curriculums and I mean in maybe a generic way um and make it interesting for people like make it obvious what is in it for them and not just about monetary there's a lot of very interesting research going on in in the web 3 and blockchain Fields and obviously cryptography um is a huge one um and there's all sorts of stuff happening all the time and I think it's about getting these people excited um getting them engaged in the first place and then having all of the stuff in place to keep them engaged and make sure they know what the path is because if the path is not clear they won't take it I would say probably better continua in between different initiatives like we have hackaton programs we have grants we have like different initiatives we've been discussing kind of having better shaping this journey of taking developer from zero to one and having a better continuation between all these initiatives to kind of retain the talent over time and to enable them to find uh the opportunity in the space amazing that's as a founder or joining up a protocol stunning thank you I think we've got to end it here but huge thank you to our panelists Erin and Bianca and thank you to the team for organizing uh yeah I think this is it thank you guys