How Hard is it to become a Smart Contract Developer?

TL;DR — It is not that hard to become a half decent smart contract developer.

There is an extreme amount of excitement around blockchain projects for investing, innovation, and development. The amount of capital flowing into the space, mostly through ICOs, has put blockchain and smart contract developers on a pedestal. If that much money is flowing towards it, it must be extremely hard to develop blockchain applications.

I am here to tell you that this is not the case! I went from having no coding experience in March 2017, to becoming a smart contract developer and completing my first decentralized application (dApp) 6 months later.

The amount of money and excitement in the space is driving up the demand for Smart Contract developers. Because of this they can demand very high salaries. It is easy to pay a developer a high salary when there is so much money flowing towards ICO’s. This ICO raised $35 million dollars in a 30 seconds, and this year ICO fundraising has surpassed early stage VC funding.

I am going to explain how smart contract development isn’t that much harder than learning to code other languages, and that there are major benefits to committing yourself to learning how to develop on the blockchain.

A few Caveats Before we Begin

I want to make a few distinctions though. I am talking about smart contract development only, with a focus on Ethereum and Solidity. I am not talking about building out entire blockchains from scratch. To build out a brand new blockchain like the developers of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero or Zcash did is wayyyyy more difficult that building a dApp on Ethereum. All of the code and the architecture built out for those are built out by expert programmers, cryptographers, and computer scientists.

I also want to make a distinction between being a good smart contract developer and a beginner smart contract developer. I am not saying you can become a good smart contract developer from scratch in 7 months. But the skills are in such high demand that even a beginner smart contract developer can earn a very high salary.