Breaking Hiring misconceptions on Blockchain for Enterprise

With all of the rapid growth and investment being pushed into blockchain technology and not to mention the extreme media hype, a lot of companies are in a precarious position to move ahead and innovate. From large scale enterprise companies to small scale ones, everyone wants a share of the rapidly growing pie. What most of them are blissfully unaware about is what is what. In easy terms, most of them dont undestand what is it they are looking for.

A common misconception among companies hiring out people for experimentation in this space is not understanding what they want to do with this and just hiring because its the new buzz in town. Even if they are doing so, they should understand that this is a space that just opened up and they just cant hurry up and build a Enterprise level application in weeks like they do for web applications.

Hiring Managers should be in close touch with the Tech heads to understand what is their game plan in this space before going forward in hiring. The Tech heads should understand the basics before actually moving forward.

I have listed a few points for companies that are looking out for hiring talent in Blockchain space so that they get above the "hype" and understand some of the challenges before they step out in this space.

1. There is a huge difference between a blockchain developer and a smart contract developer. Smart contract developers leverage blockchain platforms to create applications on top of it. A smart contract only exists to provide logic for transactions. Here you will find absolutely zero code that refers to the storage, encryption of shared files, creating nodes, broadcasting a transaction, mining, consensus or disk usage rules. Most of the time the people hired also need to be full stack developers. Finding one with all the skillset as of now is like discovering oil in your backyard.

2. Smart Contracts cannot interact directly with the internet (as of now). We are dependent on Oracles for getting us the true data to feed in. In short, be realistic in your expectation on what the Smart Contract can do and what it cannot (currently).

3. When you deploy smart contracts to a live network, if there are bugs in your code you could lose a lot of people’s money. You need to think from the perspective of an attacker trying to hack your code, and build defenses and preventative measures in the contract. All this is not a easy job. You are going to have to pay a premium for the talent in this space. So dont crib when the talk of salary negotiations come up for the suitable candidate.

4. One of another hurdles is to make it easy for developers to built on top of Blockchain technology. We're talking about a nascent technology here and it may take over 2-3 years more until standardization is achieved. So companies should strap in for a long haul if they are investing in this space.

5. The balance to achieve between scalability, privacy, and P2P settlement (Decentralization) is still a work in progress. A lot of smart people are working on achieving it though. With Ethereum Sharding coming out in 2018 we can expect some of the scalability issues to be mitigated.

6. Never forget that you're paying a price today for grabbing the opprtunities of the future. The person you are hiring now; the team you are building now is the one which will get you the best results some years down the line. Support them with all the resources they need and there is a chance you will be at the forefront when the doors finally open up.

All the points are applicable for traditional software companies. Doesn't matter if they are IT service oriented or Product companies looking for exploring a new offering. It all comes down to this atleast for now until the space matures.