With the closing of “Pomelo Cup” hackathon Shanghai Genesis competition, the activity initiated by teacher Gu Qianfeng has won a lot of praise and attracted more and more attention from media, technical talents and investors. It is reported that BC College from Tokyo decided to become the city partner of Tokyo Station after watching the whole race.

He spent a lot of time studying distributed commerce based on blockchain technology, and gave relevant training to enterprises. In the process of training, he found that many enterprises have requirements for blockchainization. Through blockchain, some enterprises can transform their business processes, some enterprises can change their financing methods, and some enterprises can improve their industry reputation through blockchain, but they do not know how to combine with blockchain.

Teacher Gu Qianfeng said that more and more friends and enterprises come to inquire about blockchain technology talents. In the process of communication, I found that because blockchain technology is too new and develops too fast, many enterprises only know that they need blockchain technical talents, but what kind of talents are needed? How to organize the team according to the actual needs of the project? But there is often a great mistake.

Today, blockchain technology related to the development of talent to say a simple classification, I hope to help.

1

Architect

Responsibilities: Responsible for making the technical route of the project, designing the system framework, core algorithm logic and coordinating the internal management of the technical team.

Position: Technical Director, technical Expert, CTO, etc.

This position requires a rich experience as a software engineer, familiar with the pros and cons of various blockchain architectures, decide which technical route to take according to the needs of the project, design the system framework, and be responsible for the internal management of the technical team.

Due to the particularity of the blockchain industry, architects also need to have a deep understanding of finance, economics, sociology and other aspects.

2

Software Engineer (Coding)

Responsibilities: Responsible for code production and maintenance.

Position: Senior software engineer, software engineer, etc.

In the blockchain industry, proficiency in development languages such as Go, C++, Java or Rust is required. The position requires rich programming experience to produce high performance, safe and reliable code.

In the blockchain industry, this position requires in-depth research on cryptography, consensus algorithms, information security, virtual machines, etc.

3

Product Manager (Product Manager/PM)

Responsibilities: Responsible for requirements analysis and project management.

Position: Product manager, project manager, etc.

This position belongs to management, but it is preferred to be technical born, have strong communication and language skills, and have a strong sensitivity to technical development trends.

In the blockchain industry, the position requires a strong understanding of blockchain technology and decentralized applications (DAPPS) in addition to the ability to be a product manager in the traditional Internet industry.

4

Front-end Engineer (Front-end)

Responsibilities: Responsible for the display of front-end web page or APP.

Position: Front-end architect, Javascript Engineer, H5 Engineer, visual Design, etc.

The requirements of this position are basically the same as those of front-end engineers in the traditional Internet industry.

At present, the scarcity of the above four types of talents is shown in the following table:

5

Blockchain classification and their respective talent needs

So, do all blockchain-related projects need to match the above four talents? And it isn’t.

Those related to blockchain projects fall into three categories:

1. Brand new public chain. (Not a public chain based on existing Ethereum, Bitcoin, EOS, etc.)

The development of this kind of underlying blockchain requires top talent, which is extremely scarce at present. Top architects and software engineers are the decisive factors in the success of such projects.

The reason why architects need to be proficient in finance, economics and sociology in addition to software engineering is that to design a brand new public chain, it is necessary to innovate and break through on the level of consensus algorithm. Such breakthroughs are not technological, but require financial and sociological innovations.

At the same time, the requirements for software engineers are very high, and a Go or C++ engineer with less than 2-3 years of experience is not qualified to develop such projects.

Such projects have low demand for front-end engineers and are limited to the development of blockchain browsers and some Demo applications based on the public chain.

2. Enterprise-level blockchain application, that is, building private chain or alliance chain for enterprises and realizing alliance chain business logic according to business requirements.

For example: agricultural products traceability project, one of the best solutions is alliance chain. This type of blockchain application can be deployed using IBM Hyperledger’s Fabric and Composer, the smart contract of the implementation layer can be written using Go language, and the client presentation can be realized using javascript.

For such applications, software engineers, product managers, and front-end engineers who are familiar with Go are required. No blockchain architect is required. In addition, the degree of Go language mastery is not very high, generally about 1 year of work experience is enough.

3. Develop applications on the existing public chain, namely, DAPP.

At the moment, ethereum-based DApps are the most popular. These applications typically require the product manager to sort out the requirements, then hand them over to Solidity software engineers to develop smart contracts and the front end engineers to implement. A large percentage of these teams are likely to be front end engineers.

Software engineers on such projects will need to be familiar with IPFS distributed storage development techniques, in addition to smart contract development with existing public links such as Solidity. Almost all dapps need IPFS distributed storage.

In addition to Ethereum, there are many public chains that are also favored by enterprises and developers, such as NEO and QTUM. However, DAPP development has certain universality. Generally, DApps developed based on Ethereum can be easily changed to dApps based on other basic chains.

It is important to note that there are many types of applications that appear to be blockchain-related but are not actually blockchain-related projects and do not require professional blockchain technical talent.

Such as:

1. Centralized exchange is a pure Internet application that does not require blockchain technology.

2. We only need to issue AN ERC20 token without any technical development, such as AISI community currency, which is very popular these days.

The technical team of blockchain project is introduced above. In addition to the technical team, a successful project team also needs a very strong operation team.

Author: Gu Qianfeng

Sorting: Ella