RFC: Opportunities team for apprentice/juniors

General RFCs
#1

Summary

Small team to handle finding and maintaining relationships with companies offering apprentice and junior opportunities, or bounties targeted towards early career stage developers.

What the idea is

A small team to focus on seeking opportunities and building relationships with companies to be able to funnel developer jobs and bounties to our members.

Why the idea is important

Looking at the current state of web3 its quite discouraging, that without year/s of production experience, companies rarely consider hiring entry level developers. This makes the job search process extremely difficult.

A lot of eager learners, who are looking to grow the ecosystem, are losing energy, passion, creativity, and hope due to the stresses of trying to find their break into the industry that doesn’t seem to cater for the entry level/junior developer.

How will this be executed

An internal team will be formed to handle all of:

  • Finding, building and maintaining relationships with members and companies interested.
  • Setting and enforcing expectations for all parties involved.
  • Ensuring relationships are centered around transparency, fairness, and all involved parties expectations are met.
  • Tracking progress of members progress in this initiative.
  • Ensuring our members receive fair compensation for their work.
  • Ensure our members are getting the mentorship needed.

Additional notes

% of these opportunities should go to the treasury.

Currently 2 suggestions have been made that would help this team a lot.

  1. Seek bounties based on technical difficulty. (Easy, Intermediate, Hard etc) and pitch those bounties to members to be worked on either as team or individually.

  2. Partner with the D_D/Pallet job board to offer discounts to companies who want to post apprentice/junior positions.

Accountability and positive results with these two approaches will allow us to continue to be presented with these opportunities for our members.

19 Likes
#2

Thanks for doing this @pbillingsby.eth. Let me know if I can help in any way

3 Likes
#3

Maybe you could also do mentorship programs for companies looking to train younger talent that they could then hire full-time later

4 Likes
#4

:owl: I think the intentions of the idea are great - to be able to ensure good conditions for our devs, if that’s a reasonable translation of your proposal.

What would worry me though is the actual ‘relationship building’ and with which type of companies? Are we to make an approval list of companies we would or wouldn’t engage with?

It could end up being a case of ‘look after our own’ [devs] working conditions and ignore practices these potential ‘companies’/partners are involved in. Maybe their human rights records, environmental or other issues aren’t so great when we examine what their business involves. Do we vet these companies? How do we make these decisions?

What implications could this have within our DAO, where we end up having to make actual ‘political’ decisions that could split the DAO in the long run?
Sorry I don’t have anything to offer in place of this right now. I thought it better to get that off my chest at this stage.

Once again, the intentions are amazing, as is the thought out approach strategy! :smiley:

My 2 gwei :seedling:

2 Likes
#5

I’m all in favour. Personally, I have a stable web2 job and would look to do job share or equivalent in a web3 field. Even job shadowing. That may be another RFC, and totally unrelated.

1 Like
#6

This is a great idea.

I love item number 2, offering discounts to companies that are using the D_D/Pallet job board. One tweak I would make is that 90% of the “bounties” MUST be novice to intermediate level. Otherwise, the “bounties” could be abused by companies seeking quick and possibly cheap alternatives to using full time devs - which is not what we want.

The remaining 10% of bounties should be considered more advanced, but they would need to be evaluated and approved by D_D. We should only approve those that are worth engaging the D_D community and add move value to its members than the solution does to the company.

This should not be treated as an outsourcing solution for companies. It should be focused on getting junior devs into jobs.

3 Likes
#7

@josevelez.eth This is a good point about the abuse of bounties so there would have a to be a thorough vetting process involved with the bounties. I believe that we could control the quality of the bounties being presented quite easily with the reputable companies we already deal with.

and yes, this idea is leaning heavily towards benefiting our members with the opportunities they need in their early career stages.

2 Likes
#8

Nasar reached out to me about creating something similar. I am in the process of writing the proposal for it. It would be interesting to see how we could work together on this. This is a serious issue in the Web3 space and it’s causing a lot of talent to be missed.

3 Likes
#9

I think shadowing someone would be really interesting here, I am a junior engineer and its hard to get into the door due to the lack of experience

Open source via bounties is an excellent choice, since most companies look at open source contributions

Excellent work being done here to support junior members!

1 Like