Image source @ Visual China
Text | Intelligent Relativity, author | Blue moon
At the beginning of 2022, some Internet giants invariably kicked off the "prelude" of the New Year of the Tiger with the action of "laying off employees".
In the past month, iQiyi reported layoffs of 20% to 40%; Mushroom Street reported overall layoffs of 30%, including 60% in the technology department; and then Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Kuaishou and other Internet giants have fallen.
According to the Internet industry turnover survey released by Zhaopin a few days ago, the results show that 49.9% of the respondents said that their companies have laid off employees, and the proportion of respondents themselves experiencing layoffs in 2021 will reach 25.1%. Among the respondents of Internet companies with a scale of more than 10,000 people, more than 58% said that their companies have layoff plans; 50.3% of employees of medium- and large-scale Internet companies said that the proportion of layoffs in their own companies in the past year is much higher than that of enterprises of the same size in other industries.
In the context of the "chill" churning of the job market, there is another different voice.
36Kr reported that there are many companies on the market that are actively releasing meta-universe related talent recruitment, taking a recruitment platform as an example, using "meta-universe" as a keyword to search, more than 150 related positions, welfare benefits are quite generous, and the overall job market environment is in stark contrast, for Yunyun "hit workers", meta-universe will become the next employment "outlet"?
Under the "care" of the meta-universe, three types of enterprises began to join the "talent war"
Although a number of companies have issued recruitment rules related to the "metacosm", after a comparative analysis of these companies, intelligent relativity found that they can be roughly divided into three major factions from shallow to deep.
The first category is represented by enterprises such as Wondershare Technology, whose recruitment of talents is biased towards "content faction".
Metaverse content creation can be collectively referred to as the creator economy, using UGC authoring tools for open creation. The book "Metacosm" also mentioned: "In the metaverse era, creators are also consumers, they use artificial intelligence to create infinite digital assets, and then through blockchain technology and other confirmation of rights, forming a huge digital market." "In an era of metaversals that require a lot of content filling, the creator economy will be crucial.
With the theme of "Embracing metaversity and creating a prosperous future", Wondershare Technology recently recruited outstanding business partners from all over the world, recruited talents with entrepreneurial experience such as video creative software and AR/VR tracks, and empowered the meta-universe creator economy. This position provides a generous salary package and intra-entrepreneurship opportunities, and excellent candidates can directly assume the role of studio leader, responsible for team building and full operation of the studio, and incubate innovative products.
The second category is represented by enterprises such as NetEase, Tencent, and Jianxin Jinke, which are typical "technical schools". Among them, most of the positions recruited by Tencent are game art designers, including the design direction of 3D scenes, original character paintings, original scene paintings, 3D characters, etc., and are responsible for cooperating with other art positions, optimizing and improving the final performance effect of the game.
Jianxin Jinke, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Construction Bank Co., Ltd., engaged in the financial technology industry, is recruiting meta-universe financial engineers, requiring the bank to be responsible for exploring the financial scenarios of the meta-universe, key technologies, and applying for innovative topics.
From the recruitment rules of the "technical school", it can be seen that they pay more attention to the strength of talents in blockchain, games, XR, finance and other technologies closely related to the metacosm, in the words of NetEase CEO Ding Lei in the third quarter earnings conference call, it is to prepare in advance for the meta-universe related technologies and rules, so that the meta-universe will have the ability to quickly run away on the day when the meta-universe really comes.
The third category is the "product faction" represented by companies such as Meta and Google.
In the case of Meta, it has begun to use the Oculus Quest headset to try to build a series of metaverse platforms, such as Horizon Workrooms, which allows VR and non-VR users to meet and collaborate remotely in a virtual office, and Horizon Worlds, which is in beta testing.
Its recruitment focus is on Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland, the purpose is to recruit highly skilled engineers in the European Union countries, such companies are recruiting more talents for their meta-universe related products and services, so they are not limited to a certain technology.
(Intelligent Relativity Mapping)
In any industry, talent is an important element of the more the merrier, but why is the demand for meta-universe talents still tight in the cold environment of the job market?
The tide of unemployment is coming, but the metacosm is stimulating employment in reverse
The tide of unemployment is rolling in, but the metacosm still triggers many companies to run in, and can create multiple jobs, and even enterprises can divide into three major factions, which in the view of "Intelligent Relativity" has three reasons.
First of all, although the metaverse has not achieved a real sense of landing, as science fiction writer Chen Yufan said, it may be more because there is no company or technology that can cover all the things that the "metaverse" needs to achieve. This also means that the metaverse will involve a large number of technologies and infrastructure in the future, in order to seize the opportunity, in advance for the meta-universe landing to lay a "foundation", the company's demand for related talents will also increase.
Moreover, as a revolutionary interactive form of the next generation of the Internet, the metacosm also has certain requirements for the depth of technology.
Taking the most classic "metaverse" movie "Ready Player One" as an example, in the "oasis" created by Halliday, people can play, learn, dance immersively, and it can be said that everything can be done in the "oasis" except eating, sleeping and going to the toilet. In the words of the movie, it is - "Only you can't think of it, no oasis can't do it".
However, not to mention beyond, it will take years for us to reproduce the "oasis" in "Ready Player One", on the one hand, the current network and other infrastructure cannot support such a huge user volume, let alone smoothly complete other activities; on the other hand, the experience immersion brought by existing VR, AR and other technologies is still a distance from "immersive". This has led to the fact that enterprises not only need more meta-universe talents, but also need "high-precision" talents.
In addition to the breadth and depth can be seen from the breadth and depth of the market demand for meta-universe talents, with the meta-universe of this concept of science and technology more and more influential in the world, is bound to attract more technology giants to run into the market, to the current domestic A-share market as an example, has been born more than 80 meta-universe concept stocks.
Therefore, it is foreseeable that in the future, as more and more enterprises begin to lay out the meta-universe, the relevant talent gap will continue to expand, in order not to fall into a passive situation, the meta-universe talent grab war gradually begins to start on a global scale.
Rubbing hot spots VS seeking the overall situation, what is the talent employment guide in the meta-universe era?
According to the "Securities Daily" report, the current talent demand of the meta-universe is mainly the following five categories, the first is the underlying infrastructure class; the second is the equipment class; the third is the content class; the fourth is the AI class; and the fifth is other basic technologies to be determined, such as avatar creation, financial system, unified identity technology, etc.
The recruitment priorities of the major factions are inseparable from these categories, and the high degree of overlap also means that the future meta-universe "talent grab war" will become more and more intense, according to Bloomberg news, Meta has hired about 100 engineers in related fields from Apple in recent months, in order to avoid the flow of top talents to competitors, It is reported that Apple has set up special bonuses to some engineers to issue high special shares as rewards, worth from 50,000 to 180,000 US dollars, and the relevant stocks are collected in four years. To avoid engineers jumping ship to competitors such as Meta.
Under such a trend, how should the meta-universe talents with skills seize the new outlet of employment?
First of all, considering that some candidates are worried about the "survival" of the new project, it is necessary to choose companies like Meta, Apple, and Wondershare that have passed the test of the market as much as possible.
Meta's Oculus has become a ceiling-level presence in the VR industry in terms of product strength, financial resources, material resources, ecology and other aspects; similarly, Wondershare's well-known products include video creative software such as Wondershare Meow Shadow and Wondershare Recording, as well as Edraw Illustration, Ink Knife and other drawing creative software, which not only provide creators with a rich and continuous stream of materials and inspiration, but also successfully reduce the relevant creative threshold, optimize the user experience, and make a name for themselves in the global market. Only by choosing such a company can we give the meta-universe talents who are at the crossroads of choice a "sense of employment security".
Secondly, the recruitment treatment of meta-universe talents is very favorable, but it also needs to be vigilant.
To take a simple example, in the recruitment of meta-universe talents, some companies have both offered relatively favorable salaries and clear job profiles, such as Tencent, which has a monthly salary ranging from 12,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, Perfect World Technical Art (TA) positions with a maximum monthly salary of 65,000 yuan, and Wondershare Technology, which has an overall annual salary estimate of up to one million yuan and has the opportunity to enjoy equity incentives.
But at the same time, there is no shortage of enterprises that use high salaries to make "rafts", but in fact rub the heat.
A few days ago, "Dafu Technology Million Monthly Salary Recruitment Meta Universe Partner" rushed to the hot search, causing widespread concern. Although Dafu Technology soon revised the monthly salary of one million to an annual salary, and set the range of 50-1 million yuan / year, and from the perspective of recruitment rules, "with 3-4 years of work experience", "bachelor, master's and doctoral graduates", "can combine the company's product characteristics and technical advantages to formulate and complete the meta-universe technology line", "can lead the meta-universe technology team to carry out in-depth technology development and meta-universe related underlying technology, core applications, 3D engine optimization", etc., it seems that the company is "seriously" recruiting talents.
However, the company's cumulative non-attributable net loss in five years was as high as 1.424 billion yuan, and the dismal performance coupled with the hot concepts such as graphene, OLED, electronic cigarettes and industrial mother machines has long been "previously convicted". Therefore, in the view of "Intelligent Relativity", a series of actions of Dafu Technology on the recruitment of talents in the meta-universe cannot be temporarily rid of the suspicion of "rubbing heat". Therefore, the meta-universe talents who hold relevant skills can not only look at the salary when choosing offers, but also pay attention to the products and fundamentals of the company.
Finally, as a job seeker, in addition to pursuing "security" and "stability", we must also look at "growth space". Taking the "high-paying entrepreneurship" launched by Wondershare Technology as an example, relying on the company's mature matrix and platform organizational model of "large platform, medium product, small team", the business partners will obtain the company's all-round resource allocation to promote the incubation of excellent products.
For example, in October 2021, its external release of an online collaborative design product Pixso, is a microcosm of wondershare technology's internal incubation, not only won the favor of a large number of investors, valuation is also growing, in such a company, in order to allow more job seekers' creativity from the dream to the reality.
All in all, due to the limitations of technology and other fields, the meta-universe is still in the initial stage of development as a whole, and although the demand for talents is large, it has not really developed to the point of "robbery war" for the time being.
However, with the gradual release of the demand for "meta-universe talents" in the future, more companies like Wondershare Technology, Meta, Apple and Microsoft are needed in the market to provide more and more suitable platforms and opportunities for "meta-universe workers" who hold relevant skills.