Currently, when the job market mentions “contract development,” it generally refers to “EVM contract development on Ethereum.” However, in reality, Ethereum is not the only blockchain. There are potentially hundreds of blockchains, and Ethereum is not the only one with smart contracts. Solana has SVM, Polkadot uses Wasm, Cosmos achieves smart contract functionality through its parallel chains, and there are many other implementations.
So, do you see the issue? If a programmer claims to be a “contract developer,” they are confining themselves to a narrow direction. Solidity is a scripting language created by the Ethereum team, and “contract development” means entrusting your career to this immature scripting language. At the very least, we should be “programmers,” not just “Solidity programmers,” right?
A programmer can do some contract development work when needed, but a contract developer can only develop contracts. How high is the learning curve for Solidity itself? Generally, you can start writing in about half a week.
Then there’s DeFi development, as most people doing contract development are learning DeFi development. The problem here is that, whether it’s Centralized Finance or Decentralized Finance, the core is still “finance,” and “decentralized” is just an adjective modifying finance.
What is “finance”? It’s an entirely different field from being a “programmer.” The world’s elites are engaged in finance on Wall Street, so can a programmer, who has switched careers, truly grasp finance? Aren’t current DeFi projects all related to leverage, staking, and lending? Wasn’t Luna’s collapse caused by excessive leverage? How many capital firms were involved behind Luna? Can the average person fully understand the reasons behind Luna’s collapse? Probably not, and even professional financial analysts might struggle to get clear answers after long analysis.
In other words, professional finance experts are not necessarily programmers, and programmers are almost never professional finance experts. The financial industry is deep; it’s not something you can grasp just by learning to code and picking up Solidity, and certainly not something a programmer aspiring to DeFi can easily master.
Furthermore, even if a programmer understands DeFi, what can they do with that knowledge? They can end up working for the big capital players, implementing whatever business logic is assigned to them. Is there room for creativity? Are you going to design your own financial logic? That’s laughable. The ones who have control over vast amounts of capital are never programmers, and programmers never have control over vast amounts of capital.
What I mean is, if a programmer wants to understand finance deeply and express unique insights into the entire financial industry, it’s… almost impossible. It’s extremely difficult, and anyone capable of doing that won’t be a programmer. However, if you just want to understand a particular technical field and share some opinions, it’s still possible. At least you won’t need to own (or manage assets for others) a vast amount of capital.
What if a programmer who understands finance starts their own financial company? Are you sure?