Hiring Web3 Developers
Hiring good people for Web3 is hard—really hard. If we ever have more resources, it might make more sense to bring in new people and train them from scratch. That’s how tough the talent market is right now.
I thought about looking for developers in Vietnam. I’d heard through the grapevine that there’s a big Web3 scene over there. But when I actually checked, the number of experienced smart contract developers wasn’t as high as expected. Surprisingly, though, regular frontend and backend developers were easy to find and cheap—like a few hundred to a thousand bucks a month for people with real experience.
In Taiwan, I was worried that people would laugh at my job posts for offering too little. But it turns out the salary range there is roughly $2K to $5K USD, which is pretty reasonable. The issue is that there are only about ten job-related posts total on that job board. Not much supply, not much demand.
Both in Vietnam and Taiwan, there’s an added headache: you need to have a registered company just to post jobs. Maybe that’s because of the wave of scams coming out of Southeast Asia. Either way, it adds friction.
After going through all this, I have to say—Wellfound is a breath of fresh air. It’s one of the few places that actually has a structured job board for Web3. Besides Wellfound and some job boards designed for the Web3 space, there’s barely any other organized hiring channel for smart contract developers.
To give a sense of scale: on CakeResume (Taiwan’s local job site), there are maybe ten smart contract listings. On Indeed, for the entire U.S., the number isn’t that much better. If you add up all the job posts from the Web3-specific forums and channels, you get maybe 300–400 dev-related roles, total.
In the end, China seems to be the major hub with real volume. There are hundreds of smart contract roles just within China alone. That’s more than what you get from the rest of the world combined. The catch? They’re strict about verification. You need a registered company before you can even post a job. And we don’t have that.
