Earlier this year in February, the microblogging account "Sina Finance" posted a post: a Hangzhou boy in the dating online dating, more than a month no girl to take care of him, and then he added a "blockchain engineers "The first time I saw him, I was so happy to see him, and I was so happy to see him, and I was so happy to see him.
As the hottest industry nowadays, the news of recruiting blockchain talents with millions of annual salary is seen in the headlines from time to time, and the blockchain industry is becoming a new blue ocean in the job market.
Blockchain talents are in short supply
Blockchain technology is the product of Bitcoin. 2008, the self-proclaimed "Satoshi Nakamoto" Bitcoin founder put forward the concept of "blockchain", and by 2015, the underlying layer of Bitcoin technology has become a global financial and technology industry. By 2015, the underlying technology of Bitcoin has become the new favorite of the global financial and technology industries, and the demand for related talents has also soared.
Bloomberg, citing data from the professional social networking site "Linking", said that job postings related to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin increased at least fourfold in 2017, and that on CoinDesk, one of the largest job sites in the U.S., 15 out of 18 of the most popular jobs in the industry are related to cryptocurrencies. related. The site's data shows that blockchain technology jobs posted in the U.S. in 2017 increased 207 percent from the same period in 2016 and 631 percent from the same period in 2015. There are also thousands of job postings for the blockchain industry on China's mainstream internet job apps.
Corresponding to the rapidly expanding scale is a serious shortage of professional talents. Since blockchain has just been on fire for two or three years, schools and educational institutions have not yet caught up, and relevant courses are rare; plus blockchain is a cross-disciplinary industry, where knowledge and experience are important, which poses a greater challenge to talent training.
There are two main types of companies eager for blockchain talent: strong, established tech companies and ambitious startups. Griffith Hill, chief recruiter for a blockchain talent team, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that the technology software industry and the financial services industry are the two sectors with the largest number of blockchain jobs posted on Leadtek.
Almost every internet company is hiring blockchain front-end architects and blockchain development engineers, including eBay, ESPN and Uber in the US, and Tencent, Xiaomi, Xunlei, Lenovo, and Jingdong in China ...... According to a March 2018 release of the 2017 Fintech100 Inc. report, half of the world's top 10 blockchain recruiters in 2017 were Chinese companies, with Ant Financial Services, Zhong'an Technology and Fun Store rounding out the top three. Demand was strongest in three fields: internet finance, computer software, and business services, with the three totaling more than 50 percent of the total.
Traditional companies are also vigorously recruiting blockchain talent to improve their own efficiency or better serve their customers.Data from CoinDesk shows that large consulting firms like Deloitte and IBM are the industry's largest employers, with Deloitte having hired more than 800 people in the blockchain field.IBM is also actively seeking relevant talent, with the company's staff in the blockchain field in 2017 increased from 400 to 1,600, working on more than 400 blockchain projects, and still has more than 150 blockchain-related job openings.
The geographical distribution of blockchain jobs is closely related to the level of the economy. The U.S. Forbes magazine website announced the top 15 blockchain employment cities in the U.S. in February 2018, and New York was ranked first, with a job shortage of 1,316; followed by San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and so on. Outside the U.S., London has 423 vacancies, Singapore 357, Toronto 149, and Sydney 97. In China, according to TigerNet's February 2018 statistics, "North, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Guangzhou" accounted for more than 80% of blockchain-related jobs in China, of which Beijing ranked first with 44.2%.
High threshold for core positions
Blockchain talents are not necessarily "code farmers". Half of Deloitte's 800 new blockchain hires are developers or architects, and the other half are business analysts, strategy and technology consultants, and accountants. Specifically, the blockchain industry recruitment mainly includes technology, project, operation and logistics.
Of course, technical positions are the most urgently needed. According to the statistics of tiger.com in February 2018, the R&D positions are as high as 49.34%, followed by operations, marketing and sales, researchers and so on. Technicians need to be able to build applications on core platforms, and it would be great if they can also independently develop crypto-digital currency platforms (such as Bitcoin and Ether). To do this, they need to master at least one or more languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, Go, etc., have a deep understanding of the underlying technology of the blockchain, understand all kinds of mainstream **** knowledge algorithms, and also understand the principles of economics, monetary theory, etc. If you want to do blockchain development, the threshold is really not low.
In comparison, the threshold of the other three types of talent is a bit lower, and does not require too much industry background, only requires a clearer understanding of the blockchain knowledge on the basis of their own specialties. If you know some financial knowledge and can analyze data, it is even better. In terms of education, a master's degree is a necessary knock on the door.
For the blockchain industry, composite talents are undoubtedly the most popular. As such, people who have mastered C++ and Go and are proficient in cryptography and distributed computing are the most sought after at the moment. Most companies will let people with different specialties form teams to make up for their respective shortcomings, and gradually learn and grow during the project implementation process.
The blockchain industry is developing extremely rapidly, and it takes a very strong sense of curiosity and the ability to learn quickly to keep up with the pace of blockchain development, so being young is the biggest bargaining chip. People who have been in the industry for 1 to 3 years are the most sought-after at the moment, and that's because that period of time allows a person to gain enough experience in blockchain development without being so expensive that employers are turned off.
Of course, top talent will always be scarce. People who can independently develop cryptocurrency platforms like Bitcoin and Ether are sought after all over the world, and there are thought to be no more than 2,000 of them, or even 200. The difficulty of this work is comparable to writing code from scratch to create an operating system that is on par with Android or iOS. What most technicians can do is to develop an app on the operating system.
Some people make a million dollars a year, while others are paid at the bottom of the list
Can blockchain practitioners really make a "million dollars a year"? From the data of the mainstream recruitment websites, it is true. For example, Suning Ebay offered a monthly salary of 50,000 to 100,000 yuan for a senior blockchain developer, and Kodak offered a monthly salary of 85,000 to 100,000 yuan for a blockchain research and development director. However, Ali Health to "blockchain technology expert" monthly salary of 15,000 to 30,000 yuan, the China Information and Communication Technology Institute "blockchain technology evaluation" position of 10,000 to 20,000 yuan.
As you can see, salaries in the blockchain industry are also polarized, and the difference is huge. Core technical personnel generally start at 150,000 yuan a year, senior "bulls" can indeed be more than a million dollars a year, but also enjoy the equity or option incentives; product, media or administrative staff income and other industries are not very different, according to Bloomberg, marketing positions in the entire blockchain industry in the bottom of the pay level of the embarrassing position, an average of only $63,000 a year. The average annual salary is just $63,000, compared to RMB 60,000 to 120,000 in China.
According to HuffPost, jobs with a salary of $120,000/year accounted for about 18.6% of the total number of R&D jobs, those with a salary of $180,000 to $240,000/year accounted for about 36.2%, and the remaining 47.8% were spread over a range of different salary bands. Salaries also vary greatly between geographies, with blockchain practitioners in places like Shanghai and Beijing earning an average annual income of around 200,000 yuan, and around 160,000 yuan in places like Guangdong, Zhejiang and Fujian.
Caution in the face of windfall
The main reason for the current explosive growth of the blockchain industry is the intensive influx of capital, which is inevitably reminiscent of the Internet bubble of 1998 to 2000: after the capital frenzy, most of the companies ended up retiring in disgrace. The main growth in blockchain jobs has come from the mushrooming of startups, which are inevitably a mix of good and bad companies, including those that take advantage of asymmetric information and over-packaging to "make money out of nothing".
According to a report by the technology and economic media outlet Titanium Media, there are many recruitment schemes for domestic blockchain companies. Many companies use "financial freedom" to attract applicants, promising to give employees options after the financing is in place, and even letting employees join the company as "partners". But the actual situation may not be the case - 3 months before joining the payroll, the actual office area of only 15 square meters, the team only two or three people, and there is no system to regulate and constraints. As for the content of the work, it is "planning two to three products every day to promote the program", "product" is actually the company's own "digital currency", the purpose is to attract retail investors as much as possible, The purpose is to attract retail investors and institutions to subscribe, when buyers reach a certain number and then capital institutions "circle" in the investment, quite a scam.
"Titanium media" said, currently stationed in the incubator around the blockchain company countless, the vast majority of which have not received financing, and some even lack of corresponding capital flow support; employees are often fresh graduates and seniority is shallow, only to talk about "ideal" not to talk about money; some of the staff are often fresh graduates and seniority is shallow, only to talk about "ideal" not to talk about money; some of them have not been able to get the money. "do not talk about money; some companies "scammed the money and then ran away". "These blockchain companies look scenic, but in fact they may be poor and are waiting to cut leeks with white papers." In the face of the recruitment App on the screen full of "the company CEO and partners personally lead the team, the team is top, the atmosphere is good, the user is over 100 million, the funds are sufficient, the development space is unlimited, option incentives, five insurance and one gold, do not punch the card ...... and other propaganda words, job seekers should The company's business is a very important part of the company's success," he said.
The current blockchain "high salary" image, to a certain extent, is the explosive growth of the industry, the supply of talent is not enough to meet the demand. In the context of the overall economic slowdown, there is nothing wrong with seizing the rare development opportunities and pursuing higher salaries, but the risk of jumping headlong into an emerging field that most people are not familiar with cannot be ignored. When the industry further develops and matures, and the related talent training mechanism is gradually improved, there will be more professionals entering the field in the future. If you do not focus on improving their own strength, blindly follow the trend, then, "a million dollars a year" may be just a myth under the bubble after all.