BLOCKCHAIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM: HOW TO HANDPICK AN EFFICIENT CREW
By: Aleksey Zavgorodniy
Tags: Blockchain Development, Software, Blockchain, Software Development, Blockchain Technology

Blockchain-based solutions are one of the most fruitful software development niches at the moment. The noticeable thing is, everything related to the creation of decentralized networks is relevantly new to developers, so not everyone is able to show their best in the work on such projects just yet.

In particular, you might have come across a deficiency of potential employees in this field. In the decentralization aspect, a developer is required to build software with the increased security demands — something many aren’t used to do. On the other hand, sufficient expertise is well paid for. Let’s figure out in which directions to look, searching for specialists that will do an integral work on your decentralized project.

What You Need to Know Before the Start

The blockchain development can be subdivided into two general types for different business demands and capabilities: ‘coins’ — for businesses that need a system that would securely accumulate investments for the development of projects; and ‘security’ — for establishments that require secure data storage, transfer, and other manipulative means.

The first type implies the creation of solutions similar in nature to the Initial Coin Offer (ICO). Basically, the created platform generates tokens (the value of which is assigned by developers) that can be sold or charged to investors to then be used for the acquisition of products or services of the invested project. The blockchain technology is required here to transfer the investor cryptocurrency to the company account and, then, transfer exchanged tokens back to investor accounts.

As for the second type, in this case, blockchain is used for the safe data transfer (particular use cases of this type of blockchain are supply chain solutions as well as many private business implementations).

Based on these input data here’s what you have to expect from the future candidate:

Confident expert knowledge of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies: Ethereum, HyperLedger, Hashgraph and others;

Programming skills in languages involved in blockchain APIs — Python, Java, Golang, C, C++, C#, Ruby, PHP, and Node;

Understanding of mobile development tech like Kotlin for Java;

Experience of working with Solidity and Clojure;

An out-of-the-box way of thinking for understanding blockchain logic.

Now let’s get down to describing what techniques to use and advices to follow to pick up an effective blockchain development team.

Tips on How to Handpick an Effective Crew

Be Creative About Your Job Offer

Developers with really impressive CVs and solid experience in developing blockchain for business get dozens of work offers a week. You will have to stand out among other employers and convince your potential recruits to choose YOU. A position description plays a very important role here. Be creative, try to interest, intrigue people with your words. Don’t just describe standard working conditions, no matter how beneficial they are.

Alternatively, you can find blockchain team working as registered IT company — they are usually well-prepared and are ready to take on the job of any complexity.

Opt For Active Search

It wouldn’t be enough to just post a job offer on the online advertisement board and wait for a moment candidates come snowballing you with their CV’s. Conduct an active search for developers currently looking for a job. The most productive way to find fitting employees, as practice shows, is a search by word of mouth — live recommendations and contact usually provide more chances to find a qualified expert. Or, as we’ve already mentioned, you can save your time and effort and turn to a blockchain company.

Pay Attention To Experience

An experience of work with the technologies, your project is going to be based on, is the best advantage a candidate for your developer position can have. Nevertheless, if you’re planning on working with a team of freelancers, it would also be crucial paying attention to such qualities as a sense of duty, responsibility, and integrity (even if you get a support of a service similar to escrow, you can never be sure that a member of your remote team won’t delay their work as they see fit).

In turn, you can get a 100% guarantee of developer competence only if you decide to hire blockchain team from a specialized IT company — members of which are thoroughly selected and checked by all needed criteria when initially employed.

Ask For Feedback

Considering a candidate, make sure to find out about their previous working position and professional experience or a portfolio if we’re talking about hiring an IT company. With this information, you’ll be able to indicate how well they performed in the past and why they left their previous positions (or were fired) at all.

Go Offline

Meetups, conventions, and other themed live gatherings and events are a great place to extend your target audience. Interested TAs are frequently looking for developers and new like-minded professional contacts. Blockchain community is pretty social and one shouldn’t miss out on what’s going on in the real world in the aspect of blockchain topic to really stay up to things. Plus, it’s a great user acquisition source, as we’ve already mentioned. Make sure to try and visit themed events where potential customers can conveniently be found as much as possible.

Choose The Right One

The demand for blockchain developers is quite high on the market. We’d recommend paying most attention to those candidates that:

understand what blockchain is in essence and know about different ways of implementing it;

are ready to self-learn;

know about the practical ways to use blockchain-based solutions;

stay in tune with the latest IT trends and, particularly, know which technologies are most popular and advanced for the creation of blockchain-based solutions;

possess at least basic practical skills in the field of decentralized networks development;

know how to optimize code and conduct refactoring;

are able to achieve an optimal level of user experience and clearly realize respective criteria;

are ready to work in a team;

are knowledgeable in the legal side of the implementation of blockchain-based products (in many countries, this question is regulated by the government; this is a widespread tendency, especially after the GDPR policies update).

Team for an ICO: best practices

An average volume of work related to the development of products based on blockchain and the launch of an ICO requires you to hire blockchain development team consisting of:

1 frontend developer

1–2 fullstack/blockchain developers

1 UX designer

1 QA tester

1 business analyst

1 marketing specialist

You can try to personally hire blockchain company with the help of dedicated online user feedback services providing a whole database of positively reviewed potential candidates to choose from.

Let’s also drop a few lines about methodologies and their implementation for blockchain projects development to help you better organize workflow within a team.

What methodology to choose and use for blockchain development

Many developers still prefer using an outdated Waterfall methodology in the construction of software. This approach is unlikely to bring you much good in the case of the blockchain-based software development. Even traditional Agile teams dedicate a few weeks to each development cycle isn’t always able to adapt their product to rapidly evolving blockchain technologies. You may see where the disadvantage is — Waterfall requires subsequent phases of requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, integration, and support to place.

Here’s where another, less traditional approach comes to the rescue. It’s called Lean and it implies the implementation of all processes by the build-measure-learn scheme. According to Lean, you improve things providing the long-term use for a customer and cut everything useful in the short-term perspective on each stage of development. This is a great way to increase your project profit, make it more competitive, and exclude any outdated technologies or approaches.

As for Agile, the incompatibility of this approach with blockchain is best described in this article.

The Bottom Line

Everything described above also reflects our own principles of selecting a blockchain team. We care for our customers and that’s why we strive to find the best professionals with the best service pricing for you. Do you want to become our partner as well? We’ll be pleased to make a new acquaintance and cooperate!