Buidl Sustainably! Decentralised Workforce Intel Lenka Hudakova

hi everyone um welcome to the session beetle sustainably and uh let me just start by explaining what the problem is and why should you care um i'm going to talk about decentralized workforce intel and for the crypto and web3 space to actually make a big splash in the global scene we really need to attract a lot of talent we need to attract the right talent and we need to make them love their job so what i'll be talking about is one type of the talent or one group of the talent that will be developers i'll be sharing with you some insights that we have gained through the research we have had we have done over months at ses so let's get started before that maybe it makes sense to introduce myself so i'm not a developer myself i have a marketing background i'm interested in communications and culture and how this interacts in globalization had led me to discover open source and open innovation through that i discovered crypto got my uh job in crypto startup then got uh excited about ethereum and the vision it allows because of ethereum blockchain existed die stablecoin could be created on it so i have joined burning for creating real digital money that we could use i joined maker foundation i started as a community lead at the foundation then i managed events so i've been putting people on the stage instead of standing on it so i'm challenging myself and i have also challenged myself to actually after the the maker foundation fulfilled its vision i have challenged myself to contribute on the dow side so this is where we come to what i'm presenting here i'm representing a core unit which is a team that exists on the side of of the dao that has a specific mandate and a name so ses stands for sustainable ecosystem scaling and our mandate is all about growing the modes that maker foundation and the maker community has had in order for it to be sustainable long term and avoiding failures we are working hard on finding ways to effectively remove bottlenecks between the centralized workforce work and capital and the aspect of my contribution in the team is working on the research project on this decentralized workforce mode and as mentioned developers so i really hope that the findings from this result will be also relevant for you be that developers careers about the space already in the space wanting to help more or looking to attract more people inside so please let's be little interactive because we're in a night club and we had a lot of talks already i'm gonna read some statements and if you can associate yourself with it or if you know somebody who uh the description fits well please raise your hand we're gonna do a little hand raising so um someone let's say anna feels like she never gets to work with exciting technology exciting stuff do you know anyone who feels like the technology one works with is boring well i hope it's your friends and it's not you because we're the crypto conference uh second one uh is looking for a carrier in this space in web 3 but doesn't know where to start doesn't dare feels like has commitments that are hard to break or feels a bit anxious about this transition anyone has a friend like that yes thank you and uh there's someone that we just lost to another protocol that just overpaid him have you lost any death in your team no then it's good and somebody is taking a break be that due to stress extreme workload or just making enough money not to need a job anymore anyone knows anyone yes so um i'm going to talk about this specific aspect how to bring more talent how to make them love their job but i also want to tell you it's not just anecdotal experience we really did our research we have had months of different types of research methodologies designed around understanding the developer journey what brings them in why do they keep around why do they leave for another project we had a gonna call it a giant survey so we had over 500 developers from uh outside of crypto representing 20 in different industries and also uh developers inside of crypto uh from more than 140 projects telling us about their experiences and their journeys we have done the same with 42 teams inside of the crypto space where we were asking people who are specifically working with developer talent be that devrel specialists or hr people or tech leads and we've been asking them about the best way to attract onboard and retain talent and this diversity of the team spent through nine sectors we have of course asked subject matter experts that are very vocal in this in this area so we have also their experiences golden nuggets and insights and we wanted to back it by data as well so we're not only listening what people share with us what they have to say but we also check that it computes with the data we collect on these ecosystems and of course there is already some groundwork when it comes to research so we have of course heavily consulted the existing research and the people who were involved with it so if we want to address the flow of the talent into the space and optimize it we also need to understand how does how does the talent enter it so i have this crazy conspiracy scheme for you to show you and we can go through the two starting points which i believe are very influential so you have a number go up and then you have a number go down so if we start with the crypto price increase we experience that we in general have more developer talent joining in we also have a lot of capital flowing into the space and we suddenly are somehow interesting to traditional big tech web 2 and fangs so somehow we are attractive and they're flirting with the idea of implementing some of these elements this all leads to the value of the crypto and web3 space increase which furthermore lead to several things so for instance imagine your developer responsible for a protocol with a total value lock that is so crazy that you cannot sleep at night because you might be the single point responsible for pushing the right code without bugs or you just have so much demand that you just work over the weekends and it's very unsustainable so you eventually burn out there's also a lot of interest in the crypto when the prices go up so there's a lot of hype and a lot of distractions and this noise can also lead to further developer churn now let's uh start on the number go out but number go downside so when the crypto prices decrease we see that the developers who were uh interested in potentially make a career change to the crypto suddenly maybe kind of do not act on this intention and stay with their older jobs so uh we have a developer growth that slows down and of course when the when the number goes down suddenly we have a lot of negative narratives about crypto in general from the mainstream media from the big tech companies so what this leads to is for increased competition for the talent inside of the space and some devs um um are being pulled around from one uh team to another uh but it's it's becoming very unsustainable so you have these like hr practices practices inside where you have people like i pay this crazy amount of uh if or die or dollars for anyone who can get me this person for the team and also we're kind of like trying to poach talent from each other which is not really good practice if we want to grow as an ecosystem plus if we wave dollar bills in front of developers we might kind of kill the whole spark of the mission and vision that people should contribute to so there is a little order in here although it looks very messy now on the positive note we know that the supply side which we consider the developer talent here is has pretty good outlooks if we are curious to find out whether the crypto can cross the chasm we are well on the way the latest research by electric capital shows that we have over 18 000 developers that are actively contributing to the space and even if the prices have stopped increasing or like stagnate or decrease this growth should continue towards the end of 2023 if this price cycle is like the previous one we also know that talent is flowing in more developers have joined the space than ever in 2021 and with every single value increase of the industry we have talent flowing in and the third picture here is just the crazy vc evaluations for crypto as a whole in 2021 so supplied side outlooks are good but you cannot have growth without the headwinds and there are two types there are external ones which are mostly related to this price boom and bus bubbles and cycles you can see a price innovation cycle where the increase in price leads to increase interest and over some time new ideas are being brought up and realized into startups and projects which in the next cycle again feeds the price increase and yeah as mentioned developers should grow a number of developers joining the space should grow even if the price decreases and the second second headwind that is external is the negative narratives i mentioned so on the top you see a nft take of the signal founder that's a demonstration of its own what this person thinks about it and if you're a founder or a heavy influential figure in the traditional space you have a lot of followers and you inspire a lot of people so if you say something is not legit that doesn't inspire people to pursue that career there's also the famous page bitcoin obituaries uh bitcoin has died 444 times last time i checked um and also there's couple of scary things hanging about people's heads such as sec investigating the uni swap labs developers so there are a lot of headwinds and internally as mentioned we are fighting for these high context individuals among each other and we have very unsustainable approaches how to hire people so they're just like a couple of the screenshots that i came across that i found relevant everyone is hiring tell me who's not hiring the list is short i'll be hiring this is the this is the referral if we successfully hire these people and yeah i guess we run out of experience validated developers so we're just gonna go lower our standards um so those are the headwinds and now what we can actually do to address it if we really want uh exponential growth of the developer talent that has some sustainable approach in it i believe there are two main ways to do it if we want to change this so first we'll need to keep the technical interest in crypto alive and growing and align it with the values that the technology stands for and secondly we really need to focus on improving the onboarding so we need to double down on these efforts to grow and nurture the developer community so um you might have come across this article which basically says that talent is leaving silicon valley and large companies because they want to work work on the most exciting technology and the shiny new object for developers right now is crypto and web 3. so our gigantic survey confirms this these are the top three values that the survey participants shared with us be that interested in crypto or already participating in the industry so they believe that crypto and web 3 has a ability to reshape the world that this is a paradigm shift that they don't want to miss out on they also believe in importance of decentralization and how that impacts the society and they also find that ex the technology extremely fascinating so this is something we should elevate equally when we ask them to elaborate or like share more with us about what actually brought them to crypto so the number one answer was i want to be on the frontier of technology and this also is uh supported by the gigantic survey with it uh because the project's vision and mission is something that is very important and central for the talent when deciding where to join the impact they can do being part of this project or being part of this industry or in their personal role is important the organizational culture that web 3 and crypto enables is very core to the selling point of crypto and web3 and the freedom and autonomy they gain uh by making this transition to this role is very very significant so i think we should elevate that and one more thing that i really liked in this tweet by paul who is also a very important figure in building the developer community in the crypto is that he recommends people to have a goal because there's no single recipe for how to become a blockchain developer but if you think about what you wish that existed the motivation to learn to achieve that goal would be your driver so remember your why's and now to the second part yes and now to the second part so double down on growing the developer community when it comes to aspects of getting their interest and making them actually transition to crypto there are several aha moments we should seek to amplify there are several types of onboarding resources and information that we learned from the developers themselves that are missing so let's address those we also learned about the frictions there are when it comes to learning the technology so let's look at those and the grant survey uh confirms that that developers need to understand what are the real use cases that the technology can solve what are the problems they also need to get some sort of a social proof of people building in the space and getting a bit more exposed to the crypto working culture they also like should feel like this is like being at the internet era just in our time so excited as that and they should also feel like if they make this transition they'll be compensated well and then they will not be at risk of losing their jobs and the another stage of the journey is how do we actually keep them contribute and how do we make sure they don't leave us so the top four churn reasons where when asking the professionals in the teams managing developers were given as lack of project and individual clarity uh lack of projects success and traction and too many opportunities with other projects and some have claimed burnout and related issues from too much workload and then there are three other reasons that are stated as the reasons why people keep contributing and stick around so they should be elevated we should offer them an environment of innovation with opportunities to grow we should enable them to contribute to the community and grow the grow with the community and enable strong culture around that and the compensation of course below you can see from the grand survey that overall as it seems right now the crypto developers are for the most satisfied so that's a good sign so uh we need to have some sort of next steps or actions we can take and based on the different stage and based on your skills your abilities i invite you to take one or more of these specific suggestions that are backed by the research we have done that you can do to improve this space and grow it together with us sustainably and exponentially and what you just received from me was already quite information heavy but i promise you we have like a library you can get lost in so i didn't use a qr code i used the link so you need to type it yourself it's scs.maker.network x-ray which is the project we did and here you can find reports on the best practices when it comes to develop relations how to do it sustainably that explains the what is the problem and opportunity and how can you do that in a sustainable way and then we also did the grand journey which is about developer journey study grant survey and that answers the question why why do they get attracted why do they keep contributing we have a three specific profiles i think for you the most relevant are cryptocurrency developers which are outside of the space but interested and current crypto developers that are in and see everything that happens and share that insight so my name is lenka and i would not be able to share this with you without my colleagues so jordan and jack have a great amount of work that has been distilled here and if you have any questions i'm happy to chat with you or yeah or just write me or wave at me and let's talk i also should say that we have some beanies over there that are left over from the party and uh mano can you stand up if anyone wants to join maker just talk to him okay thank you [Applause]