A recent report from staffing site Hired.com showed blockchain engineering as the software role with the strongest growth in demand at 517% year on year. Security engineering came second, up 132%.
The company provided salaries for five locations, and blockchain engineering was in the top three bracket for all of them. In Paris, blockchain engineers take the number one pay slot with an average salary of €58,000 ($67,000). The role ranked second in London (£69,000/$89,000) and New York ($137,000) and third in Toronto (CAD 107,000 / $79,000) and San Fransisco ($155,000).
So a company could hire 2.5 blockchain engineers in Paris for the price of one developer in San Francisco. The salary figures are averages, so it’s conceivable that some locations could bias towards more senior roles.
When it comes to key skills, some of the most in-demand languages are also relevant for enterprise blockchain developers. Go, the language used in Hyperledger Fabric ranked as the most popular request by employers. But it’s only used by 7% of developers that registered on Hired.com. R3’s Corda leverages the Kotlin language which ranked as number five in demand.
The survey asked candidates what technology they’re most interested in learning. Blockchain came in at number three, but far behind the leading skill machine learning.
As an insight into the psyche of many developers, the top motivation in the next ten years was to “continue building cool things” (36%). The ongoing perception that enterprise blockchain is less cool than working on public blockchain projects is not helpful for the industry.
The second motivation was the desire to become a technology leader such as a CTO (23%) and third was the ambition to become an entrepreneur.
It won’t come as news to anyone who has run a software project, a developer’s pet peeve is unrealistic deadlines (38%).
