LearnWeb3 🛠️ Building for the future in an uncertain market - Haardik Haardik

foreign [Music] hey everyone I'm glad there's actually a few people here right now my name is hardik I'm from learn web3 and today we're going to be talking about you know building for the future in an uncertain market so quick show of hands who here is a student right now at Waterloo or Laurier or anywhere okay I saw one two okay um who here is a software developer by trade one two three four five okay cool and how long have you been in the web 3 space roughly just raise your hand if it's like less than a year um okay okay one one two three years maybe two okay and more than three years Okay cool so you know this is going to be a little different it's also been a long time since I've done one of these IRL so it's nice to be back um there's going to be I'd prefer this to be more of a discussion than a lecture so if you guys want to be talking while I'm doing this I'd love to sort of engage with you but you know we'll go forward with it so as I said my name is hardik I legally have no first name so when I'm signing papers it just goes down it's hardly Karthik which is weird um I'm a Waterloo Alum I started the UW blockchain Club back in 20s what was it early 2018 I think um software developer by trade and currently co-founder at learn web3 so being at learn web3 you know there's some questions I get asked every day and I kind of wanted to take this opportunity to if some of you have these questions or similar along those lines I kind of just want to talk about that so you know one of the most common questions I get pretty much every single day is I'm just starting out how do I get a job in this space or if you're a student the second one's probably particularly relevant is every company wants years and years of experience and how do I deal with this as a new grad maybe if you're in the co-op program it's a little different but for most University students new grads don't usually have years of experience under them and do we need to grind lead code um that's that's very common and what chain what language what protocol what framework to use and also is crypto just dead do we just do AI now is open AI is going to take all of her jobs anyway and why are we doing this at all or you know do you want to learn front end the back end smart contracts and when airdrop we're not going to talk about the last one um so from these you know I want to kind of go over these but there's some facts but then there's also opinions and then there's things you can do so fact is the job market is right now there if you're on Waterloo works you know about this if you're if you've been grinding you know about this um some companies need lead code they will always need lead code is just how it is some don't a good amount of companies want past experience but if you're a new grad if you're learning if you're about to graduate soon there are things you can do to sort of get around that and ethereum and sort of evm-esque chains still remain the most popular to build on if this if that's the goal you're working towards crypto is not dead um yes I think but crypto is not dead um what you should learn is a bit of a tricky topic and I'd love to dive into that in a little bit and no air Rob questions that's the facts but then again we have some thoughts um being at learn web3 you know we've had students being hired at a lot of great well-known companies in this space some of them are here in this room right now uh we had people hired you know I'm not gonna list out all of these names but um I kind of know a thing or two about what can you do to sort of being a student being in a bear Market being in an absolutely terrible job market and sort of getting away with it and still being able to you know get a job or get funding if you're trying to do a startup or along those lines you get what I mean so let's just talk let's talk um if anybody at this point wants to ask me questions has a question has a problem they're struggling with or anything let me know more than happy to answer but let's just talk about the questions I started off with first so I think number one we want to talk about is AI gonna actually take your jobs and are you wasting your time learning how to code if you don't already do it professionally yeah it's not going to take your jobs and I think one of the reasons is you know actually this is something I hate and this is something I've been talking about a lot more recently publicly is a few years ago when sort of this term web3 came along you know Chris Dixon was like oh web3's read write down and um all these guys were talking about sort of you know he was gaining popularity it never equated to crypto it never equated to blockchains either um that's a weird issue that we've run into sort of sometime in between over the last few years where everybody is just like web3 means tokens web3 means scams web 3 means Pepe coins um there's nothing real in this space there's not a dunk on crypto um big crypto bro here but oh oh would this be extreme oh sorry about that um okay so yeah web3 was always sort of meant to be like the next Frontier of Technology you know it could have been uh it could have been crypto there's a I you know if you saw WWDC maybe probably Vision Pro is probably going to be very common in the next few years hopefully um that's one thing I want to clear up so if you're if you're in this space there's a lot of beginners who are just like oh did I make a mistake learning how to build on ethereum or learning how to build on XYZ chain um should I have just spent my time doing data science instead or should I just spend my time learning how to use tensorflow instead the answer is you don't have to choose there's no reason for you to pick one or the other if we're really working towards sort of what the next Frontier of the internet is a few years down the line 10 years 5-10 years down the line you're not gonna see apps in the mainstream were just like we do this in a decentralized way or we do this with a chat bot um there's going to be a combinations of all of those things and any sort of Dev who's been you know full-time software developing for 10 20 30 years now um if you know anybody like that when they started off Peck looked very different than what it looks like today a lot of the things we use today a lot of the things they even teach you in school today probably didn't used to exist back then that's going to change and this is just something I wanted to rant about I've been writing about this a lot recently um that's one of the things and okay what else lead code if there's a lot of Waterloo people here who probably have strong feelings about lead code one way or the other um I don't know if you've seen this problem come up if lead code is important or not but that's whatever I want to answer the second question with what to do about not having years of experience again if you're the target audience for this talk this might be relevant to you where you know you may have co-ops but internships are not the same thing and you may not have co-ops you may be in a non-core program how do you get hired in a job market that's terrible in a bear Market where tokens are all down to so this what I've seen here what I've seen students get the most value from when they're sort of on this journey to learn explore figure out what they want to do you know what kind of field they want to work in what job they want to get what helps them sort of the most is kind of just building in public not saying you have to be active on Twitter 24 7. there's absolutely no need to do that but you have to be building and you have to be building in a way where you can say that that was your experience if you copy a to-do list tutorial to learn react that's not going to land you a react job if you copy how to build a task tracker using node.js and express that's not going to get you a backend developer job what is going to get you those jobs is building something that you can't copy based on a tutorial is building something that is not so simple it could be a clone of something sure but it shouldn't be a copy based from a tutorial and hackathons like if Global you know and other types of hackathons are probably the best place to do that if you're a hacker here that's amazing I got my start in the web 3 space um eat Waterloo 2017 so this is great sort of being back here after some years but if you're here to hack if you're here to learn that and you're here to sort of you know get ready get a name out there build projects I think that is the key number one thing you can do apart from grinding lead code and going after Fang um if you're building projects and you're building stuff that's novel that's not a copy based from a tutorial and if you're building stuff hopefully that can get some users some actual users it's not a necessity but it's always a nice to have if you build a project that has like 50 users right 50 users better than zero do that and I promise you you get a few of those under your belt companies are going to stop complaining about you not having years of experience on your resume because when you have actual things you've built that have users um or just actual cool things you've built that are not copy pasted from tutorials that is a very high value signal I've been on kind of both sides you know I was a student at Waterloo doing the Waterloo Works grind applying to 200 jobs every semester um and being on the other side sort of done hiring for companies I work done hiring for learn web3 and there's a lot of times I hire new grads I've hired a bunch of new grads and the key thing is again have they had novel projects under their belt um yeah I think that's a key point I wanted to get across again this is meant to be a discussion so if any of you have any specific questions I can help answer that might be relevant I'd love to take on those now otherwise I can just continue on this list all right okay so what else what else do we got we got the lead code questionnaire it's okay it's kind of the same similar answer to that um oh the other thing I would say kind of pertaining to number one and number two both is being involved in a community helps a lot I'm not here to still learn that through by the way okay you'll go we'll go through this slide I will there's like one slide at the end where I'll give you the website link I'm not here to sill you of course I'm not here to sell you a boot camp or education is anyway free so I'm not here to sell you anything but realistically the most value I've seen um that's like the students I've seen who've gone from sort of not knowing anything about ethereum or not knowing anything about crypto and in less than a year getting like a great remote job traveling the world perhaps if they're in devrel or just working on cool protocol layer development stuff um which used to be a dream of mine when I was starting out um the biggest thing that separates them is also how active they were in the community there's a lot of people and this is unfortunately somewhat a toxic culture at Waterloo I have to say is people really tend to be in isolation a lot when they're learning when they're trying out new things obviously if you're not from Waterloo maybe don't recognize that problem but there's generally tends to be a little bit of competitiveness toxicity around that culture and I want you to forget that I want you to be collaborative I want you to talk to people around you because when imagine you were in a room right now imagine I'm not giving this talk we're just sitting around we're just chatting having coffee um and we're just talking about sort of what's going on in this space right what is cosmos doing is bear chain even real um I don't know we're just sitting around talking about that and we'll bring up things that the other person doesn't know about you know I'm gonna go out after this talk I'm gonna meet some of my friends who are going to teach me a thousand D5 things I have no idea about because that's not who I am I don't do deep IDs and all that um you meet somebody else they're going to tell you all the new advancements happening in nfts you meet somebody they're going to tell you why OB stack is better than arbit from stack or why arbitrim is better than op stack or why coinbase is building on optimism or what the hell is World coin and why are we all selling our eyes to Sam Altman whatever that reason is when you're around people you get to bounce off ideas you get to talk to people who are focused on things other than you and you will never be able to get that far by yourself web3 is or I should say crypto is such a small ecosystem relative to a lot of other technologies that are out there and even then it's almost impossible for you to stay up to date just by yourself so if you aren't doing this already and if you are kind of in your journey to you know learn more about this build more maybe get a job maybe build your own thing the number one highest value thing you can probably do is being part of the community and the number two would be building projects that you can put on a resume that hopefully have real users um yeah want to say that out um what else do you just move to AI now kind of touched on that not going to take your job use it to your advantage you know train chat GPT it's really simple to do train tap and chat GPT feed it as 100 page ethereum yellow paper and ask it all the questions you can so you can learn how ethereum actually works inside out you don't need to stay just on the conceptual level you don't need to be you need to be using it to your advantage a few years from now devs who are using chat dpd to 10x their productivity um they are the ones who are going to take their jobs it's not Taj GPT who's going to take her job as the people who can perform 10 times better in the same amount of time who are going to take your jobs so if you don't have an open AI account if you aren't paying for chat DPT right now or if you aren't paying for an API key right now come on guys okay it's put in 20 bucks put in 20 bucks and it's gonna be worth a month two months of whatever usage you can get out of open Ai and that'll be way more value than should I say that way more value than the 20K you're probably paying for a semester um over here um I have my thoughts on University education that's whatever maybe another time um yeah dude like I don't get you know there's another thing sorry I'm just going on a rant here but there's another thing seeing so many people come up to me they're like hey so I want to learn how this open AI thing works but it wants me to put in a credit card I'm a first year student I don't want to spend money on this stuff I'm like dude you just bought a five dollar coffee right five dollars will get you thousands of messages on Ted GPT 5000 like five dollars will get you so much value from open ai's API um you're gonna sink back to this time a few years from now and be like why did I not just do that this is if there was ever a time in history where you could look at it and be like this is going to change the future as we know it um I don't think there's been a clear time at least not in my lifetime there were probably times before I was born but in my lifetime I don't think anything as big as the air Revolution right now has happened and you shouldn't have to make a choice you shouldn't have to choose you shouldn't not be using it you should be using it to improve yourself as much as you can whether you're building in crypto whether you're not building in crypto if you're just here for the free t-shirts and food um if there's anything you want to take away from this take away the fact that don't be worried about spending five bucks and talking to people is talking to people will get you the most value in your career than ever before another thing to think about on that topic actually somebody said this to me the other day somebody was like you know oh XYZ person has so many connections you know he knows everyone um how do you compete with that if you want to build something how do you compete with somebody who already knows everybody they can just give them a phone call and be like hey use my thing or promote my thing on Twitter or whatever and how do you compete with that one thing I want you to think about on that note is if you're a university right now if you're in school right now and I'm assuming if you're at least the people who said they're developers you're either doing ECE or CS or something like that um your classmates you have hundreds of classmates hopefully you're friends with some of them those people five years from now 10 years from now 20 years from now will hold some very good positions at hopefully some very good companies and kids who are in school Ben will look at you and we'll be like this guy knows all the people from all these big companies how do we compete with them um so talk talk to people build in public build projects talk to people get the value out talk to AI um learn all of this what tane what language the protocol front end back in smart contracts do whatever do all if you can I think a lot of you are in the age group where you're probably still exploring uh you aren't 100 sure what you'd like to be doing a few years from now um if you're in that phase of life just do everything dude um it doesn't you have time you have time just explore everything do a little bit of everything that's why I think building projects is amazing and hackathons are amazing because you have to build out the whole thing um it can't be just oh I just wrote in Express API but I can't demo it because I don't have a website to show it off um you have to build out the whole thing do that um I think that's all the questions on my list at least and again this is all the Shilling I'm gonna do it's free we don't charge you check it out if you want to come meet me later if you want to this is my Twitter DM me if you want to I reply to every single one of my DMs um that's about it if you have any follow-up questions to that if you want to chat in front of everybody or just by myself later um come up or ask the question now and then we'll hand it off to where the next speaker is thank you