The demand for smart contract developers couldn’t be higher and unfortunately the amount of talents that are available couldn’t be lower, amid a bull market for decentralized finance that has teams creating new products at a breakneck pace.
The shallow hiring pool have been criticized by team members from multiple projects and which they have taken to twitter to display their grievance. Also, Yearn.finance and SushiSwap that are representatives from high profile mainstays. Token allocations and generous salaries that were given to the members and yet the complaint came. There are not enough developers to go around despite the carrots projects offer.
In the absence of established developers, multiple projects have instead taken to nurturing new ones with an unusual, but in many ways ideal, recruitment tool: hackathons.
Last weekend, multiservice venture capital outfit Delphi Digital and IDEO CoLab co-sponsored a weekend hackathon. Designed specifically to incubate promising young teams, successful projects from the hackathon were then invited to an 11-week mentor ship program with the possibility of a full seed investment at the end.
“We found early on that hackathon style events are better at identifying talent than they are at surfacing investable ideas,” said Delphi’s José Macedo. “That’s mostly because getting to an investable idea in a few days is really hard, but it’s also because we’re simulating what it’s like to work with folks and see things like their bias to action and how they work with others. People stand out pretty quickly based on their actual behaviors which allows us to identify and work with talent based on merit.”