Web3 Leader Spotlight: Matthew Sevey
This week, we had the privilege of connecting with Matthew Sevey, the Founder of My Code Career. This platform offers coaching services tailored to software developers, guiding them in discovering their ideal next career move.
Matthew takes pride in helping software engineers land their dream jobs without begging for referrals and sending 1000s of applications.
Follow Matthew on X @matthewsevey
How has your career led you to be Director of Engineering at Celestia as well as Founder at My Code Career?
Both are results of my decision to make a career switch from Mechanical Engineering to Software Engineering.
When I made the switch I jumped right into the blockchain industry. Something I brought with me from my previous career was a passion for building and leading teams. This has been the driving force behind me going from my first software engineering role to Director of Engineering in just under 5 years.
As for My Code Career, this came from a lifelong passion for coaching. I’ve been in some sort of coaching role for close to 20 years. Making the switch into software engineering, and making that career change was something I really enjoyed. I also had the amazing opportunity of going from interviewing for roles, to building out my company’s hiring system within a few months of each other. This gave me a unique perspective that I wanted to share with others. Helping people define what they want in their career, and then giving them actionable steps to get there faster is incredibly rewarding.
As a leader at Celestia you must’ve made numerous hires - what do you look for in Engineering talent, particularly in relation to web3?
Something that is highly valued, particularly in web3, is passion. Almost every web3 company I’ve talked to or worked with, heavily weighs a candidate’s genuine interest in the company or project. Assuming a candidate has some bare minimum qualifications for the role, I’ve seen a number of examples of a more junior candidate being selected over a more senior candidate because of their passion and enthusiasm for the project. In the most extreme cases, I’ve seen someone take a rejection, basically ignore it, start contributing to the project’s open source repo, and then ultimately reverse the team’s decision and be given an offer.
In your experience coaching software developers at My Code Career, what is one common mistake you’ve observed among devs looking to make their next career move?
The number one mistake I see people making when looking for a new role is “being open for anything.” This is a great mindset in order to be grateful for what opportunities come your way, but it is a terrible strategy, because it is completely directionless. Software is everywhere, which means you can work in almost every industry, company type, or product type. Without clearly defining what you want, you get lost in the endless options, and continue to flip flop between directions and strategies. It is a little counter intuitive, but the more specific you get, the more you niche down in your career, the more opportunities you end up having.
What advice do you have for software developers looking to enhance their skills and stay relevant in a rapidly evolving tech landscape?
In a rapidly evolving industry, where there are always new technologies and trends emerging, it is important to define for yourself what you want your career to look like. This might be a less popular opinion, but it is possible to have a successful and fulfilling career without being on the leading edge of trends. There are lots of new technologies and projects that seem to come out weekly in the web3 space, but rarely are they completely novel inventions. Most new things are minor tweaks to something existing, or an application of something existing in a new way. As an example, distributed systems, a core piece of blockchains, have been around since the 1970s.
I say this to emphasize the importance of knowing what a successful career looks like for you, so that you can define for yourself what it looks like to stay relevant. To use my career as an example, I spend more time learning about career growth, personal development, and team development than I do new web3 projects. However if I was in a developer relations role, an adoption role, or trying to start a new web3 project, then being up to date on the latest in the web3 ecosystem would be much more important to the success of my career.
