A brand-new “State of Salaries” report from Hired shows blockchain engineers are now making the kind of money you associate with high-powered salespeople or highly specialized artificial intelligence programmers.
The recruiting platform has further inspected various engineering jobs with a salary range from around $150,000 to $175,000, noting that although not all of them are tarred with the blockchain label, some specify blockchain in the job posting as a desirable skill.
CNBC has followed suit Oct. 21, reporting the financial prowess of these very much in demand types of data scientists who may work on anything from mining assistance to blockchain in the cloud initiatives where partnering stakeholders seek to marry the transparency and efficiency of blockchain with the versatility of cloud platforms.
Of course, salaries go up with demand – but the underlying reality is that the demand is driven by growth and expansion. A recent Quora post talks about how to really fully realize the blockchain ambitions of big companies from Amazon to IBM, the workforce will need an army of blockchain specialists – sooner rather than later.
“Blockchain is a foundational technology that is going to impact a wide variety of industries,” wrote Abhishek Singh, a Program Director in Blockchain Semantics, back in March. “However, none of these will be doable over the long term if the demand for Skilled engineers is not met. We continue to speak to a lot of recruiters who find it tough to recruit Blockchain talent. There simply is too little compared to the demand.”
Do we have the STEM power in our schools to turn out this kind of talent?
With this in mind, there’s one more reason to be bullish about the cryptocurrency sector. We know that there are people on “both sides of the coin” – no pun intended – some predicting a meteoric rise, while others predict a resounding crash. But you can’t discount the market demand for these engineers; in some senses, these job markets don’t lie.
You can look at the short-term news such as individual projects combining private sector innovation with government investment – or you can look at the general shift in the job market. Either way, there’s evidence to suggest that blockchain sectors are now growing at a pre-astounding rate. Whether they will continue to do so will have an impact on the markets – but the hiring indicators often lead the stock numbers, so rather than trying to day trade on something like Litecoin or Bitcoin or Ripple, it might make more sense to diversify the portfolio and take a long position.
