📊 The State of web3 Careers 2023

Hi and welcome to this new edition of Work3!

This week, I am publishing the results of a survey specifically focused on web3/crypto careers. I published the questions mainly on Discord servers and also found (thanks to my friend Kairos!) another super interesting document that captured salary information which can help complete the picture.

Small disclaimer: I’m sure it won’t be able to provide a super-accurate view, given the state of flux of this industry and the difficulty in obtaining data, but I hope it can have some interesting insights and be the basis of further research and discussion. I consider this a living document so please help improve this by providing feedback, data and anything else by replying to this email.

💼 Roles: A new way to build Products?

I’ve recently seen a really good post by Greg Isenberg titled ‘How to Build a Company in 2023’, which clearly outlines the interplay between trust and value-creation that leads up towards building a product. What I think is interesting, is that it takes the startup mantra of ‘knowing your audience’ much further, making them effectively part of the ideation process and also avoiding the ‘build it and they will come’ trap that many have fallen into.

Now, this topic deserves a lot more attention - but it connects well into the first topic for web3 careers: what are the most popular roles?

Again - difficult to know 100% if this reflects an accurate view of the market, but it makes sense for me that:

Community - This is the #1 step in web3 for a couple of reasons. First, given the infancy of the space, many people develop their passion on these topics by joining/creating DAOs, communities and generally speaking hanging out with others interested in the same things. So managing these communities, is a first basic starting ground for many.

Secondly, reconnecting to the points above, community is the foundational layer of web3 projects:

• Finding Talent - Teams build up through interactions, collaborations and networking. No recruitment, at least in the initial stages.

• Finding Ideas - By being ‘embedded entrepreneurs’, founders are able to live and breathe and discuss the problems that need to be solved. Also consider that unlike other industries, the space is so new that this is the only possible way to do research.

• Finding Funding - (sorry, thought it was a funny combination) We all know by this stage that web3/crypto projects are often community funded through ICOs, Tokens, NFTs, etc. So building a community is the only way that you can secure funding at this level.

• Finding Governance - Last, but not least, if you think about DAOs as a building block of web3 projects, then you need the community to govern and manage the products and projects. This is probably one of the biggest differences with web2, but also one of the main challenges that these projects face.

So it’s clear how it could be realistic that Web3 Community Manager roles would be so frequent in the survey.

🎓 Education: Do it Yourself

Now I really wanted to post the chart here too, but it was helpful to save up some space, given that:

100% of respondents claimed to be Self-taught

It’s not so surprising after all, if you think how early things are, and that the only courses and education out there is pretty basic.

Currently, the only ‘Education’ options you can find are:

• Curricula, Courses, & Communities - most done by web3 communities, institutional/academic resources are scarce or more focused on Blockchain and NFTs specifically

• Learning by Doing & Contributing - still web3 native, but with the scope to make learning practical and enable monetization

📅 Years of Experience: Maybe more like ‘Months’

Also this chart was very uninteresting - probably a bad question. Mostly spread out between 0-1 and a few years experience. I think this is where the distinction between Web3 and Crypto comes handy:

Web3 - Broader umbrella for the third generation of the World Wide Web that utilizes decentralized technologies, such as blockchain and peer-to-peer networks and includes any product, community, or project.

Crypto - Mostly DeFi (Decentralized Finance) projects that include digital or virtual currencies that use cryptography for secure financial transactions and operates on a distributed ledger, such as a blockchain.

🍃 Confusion: Biggest Challenge in switching to web3

• Didn’t know where to start - Almost 60% of respondents. Not for the faint-hearted, this resembles the ‘big bang’ kind of moment that we are photographing. So much is in its infancy, so little resources (as we said above) equals a lot of confusion and non-linear paths. You can easily get lost down the rabbit-hole or drown in drinking from the firehose of information (tweets, chats, etc) that is spilling out of this space. A good tip, is to narrow down and focus on one thing and move quickly to the next one only after you’ve actually understood it.

• Keeping up with the pace of change - Not very different from the points above, as dealing with confusion and keeping up with how fast things change requires a lot of time, attention, and resilience. You need to be passionate, and knee-deep or it will be hard to make it through in this stage.

🎯What do you like most about web3?

Not necessarily a clear winner here, but:

Disruption of old business models and building completely new technologies make up almost 50% and clearly say how much a strong mission is a key desire for people who want to work in this space. Could be tied with age too (which we don’t have here, but from other research and common sense we know is on the lower ranges) and with the social dynamic of self-built communities that come together to share their problems and passions.

Runners up are People and Communication (again, community?) and things like Flexibility, Meritocracy and Opportunity to Earn.

😒 What do you like the least?

Quick one here: Chaos is #1 problem so it comes up strong in this question too.

More interesting, is #2 with ‘Too Much Speculation’ which brings us back to the distinction with Crypto. People building web3 are not happy about the wave of speculation and bad reputation that this has brought over (in general, and even more with the fall of FTX) because they have a different goal in mind.

🗞How do you keep updated on web3?

Unsurprising to those who live this space, for sure.

But for those who don’t: Twitter is the main platform where web3 discussion takes place, followed by Discord that hosts a lot of the communities and DAOs. Would be interesting to have a break down of the Other category; any suggestions?

🤝 How many Discords/Communities are you part of?

Now this is crazy (?) and connects well with the question on education and main problems in working in this space.

Almost 60% of respondents say they are part of more than 20 Discords/Communities at the same time.

Considering how much is going on in these communities, it’s almost impossible (unless you make it your full-time job) to be on top of everything for so many.

That said, each community is broken down into sub-channels (projects, sub-communities or working groups) and of course being part of a community doesn’t mean everyone is contributing to all 20.

⏳ How much time do you invest on a daily basis in web3?

This question can help improve the insight from the previous one:

• 50% spend 4+ hours a day in web3 - probably earning some income from it or building a project

• 30% spend 1-2 hours a day - probably discovering the space and figuring out how to navigate it

🔍 Top Projects you follow

A portion of the projects shows an eclectic mix of local DAOs (i.e. ATX, Austin-focused DAO) and industry specific (BioHacking, Bankless) as well as role-specific (Jump is a marketer-focused DAO).

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💸 Have you bought NFTs/Participated in DAO Governance?

‘Duh. Buying NFTs or Community Tokens (not speculating or trading) is a way to learn how the space works.

Probably should have separated the question, because it’s interesting to understand how many have actually participated in community governance through the use of tokens.

❌ Biggest Problem with DAOs

Last, but not least - with a clear winner:

Coordination/Collaboration - is the main problem with DAOs. Lots of people, many that come and go, and ever-changing dynamics. Solving this is the key to unlocking their full potential and moving towards more mass adoption. I think this is closely tied with Governance.

Compensation - Comes up close, with some tools already trying to solve this (Coordinape is a good one) but still difficult to tackle - and many instances where people contribute but don’t get any time of remuneration, or it’s token-based and therefore hypothetical only for a long time.

Credentialing and Tooling are runners-up, with the first requiring new solutions to validate experience and skills (I wrote an article on Employee Recognition on the Blockchain which touches upon this), and the second one which is more broad and is needs to catch up with the fast-pace of change.

💰 Web3 Salary Data: It’s a mess

As I mentioned at the beginning, I found this open source salary survey for web3, which you can check out here. Other than the data, it’s a great example of how this space embodies transparency and community at all levels, seeing how it can be put out in the open for anyone to contribute to, and use for articles like these.

Now I had thought to try and make some overall averages and statistics, but if you have a look at the data, you will see how that would have been really difficult. Namely:

• Compensation can be in Fiat Currency (USD) or Stablecoin (USDC), Company Tokens or full-on Cryptocurrencies

• Some people mention being ‘Rugpulled’ i.e. scammed and therefore having lost their compensation in fraud

• A good 30-40% mention feeling ‘Underpaid’ - probably due to the amount of hours or burnout/stress that is often resulting in working in this space

Doing apples-to-apples is very difficult, and I predict (or suggest) there should be ways to do some kind of scoring / indexing of things like risk and web2-like metrics that can get this space to comparable Total Compensations - especially looking forward to the stage where more people will look to move from one to another.

A lot covered, but a lot still missing - what would you be interested in double-clicking on, or is there anything you don’t agree with?

Let me know in the comments! 👇