Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Xu Shan
Edit | Yunpeng
With the opening of the stock price of the market capitalization giant Meta of more than 700 billion US dollars, the relevant regulatory policies of the "meta-universe" at home and abroad have been landed one after another, and the "meta-universe" has gradually weakened after nearly a year of being popular in the technology industry. But in contrast, many big manufacturers are working intensively to prepare their own VR teams, and a VR talent battle is not lively.
"All the big factories are laying out this (VR) direction, and now everyone is digging people." A source told Zhi Dong, "Sometimes we spend half a day digging up a technician from another company, and the other company backhands our employees, and the two sides exchange employees, so that the employees' salaries are increased by 30%. ”
According to the 2021 data of the US recruitment website Indeed, the salary of the "meta-universe" related positions has risen 10 times, and domestic and foreign VR manufacturers have begun to "roll" up in order to grab talents.
According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2021 alone, Meta poached nearly a hundred people from Microsoft's team. Interestingly, 18 of Meta's executives also left that year, and Apple poached Andrea Schubert and many other executives who had been responsible for ar business communications for six years.
In fact, not only is the foreign Meta and Microsoft and Apple fighting for VR talents, but also the domestic ByteDance, Tencent and other Internet giants have also joined in this robbery war. Through the survey of several large-scale recruitment software in China, we see that the salary of technical talents in the domestic VR industry is generally higher than the average level of other industries, and the annual salary of some positions is even as high as one million yuan.
Since most of the technicians in the VR industry have changed careers through other industries, this means that when they first step into the VR industry, they may receive millions of annual salaries.
▲Domestic well-known recruitment software related to VR job recruitment
According to the "Seeing is believing" report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2019, the demand for VR/AR talents in the mainland will reach 6.8226 million by 2030. How popular are VR talent now? Which VR talent is responsible for the VR project development of the tech giants? How do domestic and foreign governments and enterprises cultivate VR talents? After some investigation, we tried to find the answer from it.
First, the big factory frantically grabbed VR talents, vivo offered a million annual salaries
In order to recruit VR talents, major technology companies have given generous salaries, some companies have given millions of annual salaries, and some companies have doubled the original salaries of employees by 2-3 times.
As the big brother of the technology giants, Apple is frantically recruiting talents for its own VR headset that has not yet been launched. During 2020, Apple's VR technology talent recruitment information released on the official recruitment website remained on an average of two months, and Apple's demand for VR talents has risen sharply recently, with as many as 27 recruitment information related to the VR field in March alone.
Apple's official job site shows that Apple is recruiting 188 VR employees around the world, involving hardware design, marketing, software services and other positions.
▲ Apple's official website shows job recruitment related to VR
Different departments at Apple have different requirements for VR technicians. For example, to become a VR framework engineer at Apple, you need to have experience developing software frameworks and APIs, as well as a deep understanding of distributed systems and code across a single device. At the same time, good communication skills are also one of the abilities that Apple values.
Below some of the job postings, we can also get a glimpse of Apple's treatment of VR technicians, who not only have a basic annual salary of $107,500 (about 700,000 yuan), but also have the opportunity to enjoy a lot of bonuses and stock dividends.
▲ The VR job benefits displayed on Apple's official website
It can be seen that Apple is increasing its investment in human resources in the VR/AR field, which also reflects the popularity of talents in the VR/AR field.
Other big factories have also come up with ingenious tricks to recruit talents.
For example, Meta chose to "grasp both inside and outside", not only by actively encouraging employees to transfer to the Reality Labs department set up for metacosmity, but also absorbing talents from external sources, and setting a KPI of 10,000 jobs for the EU for five years to promote the development of its own "meta-universe".
What is more interesting is that Microsoft, compared to other companies to recruit talents, Microsoft is always "stolen", that is, by other companies crazy digging the wall.
As the saying goes, as long as the hoe is good, there is no wall foot that cannot be dug. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's AR team was poached by Meta in nearly a year, including former HoloLens demo team member Josh Miller and former HoloLens user feedback director Charlie Han.
"As with any new technology, once the giants are interested, they will get (talent) by paying huge salaries." Aaron Tilly, a wall Street Journal technology reporter, said, "Microsoft is very slow [progress] from the perspective of hardware layout. ”
At the same time, domestic manufacturers are also actively recruiting VR talents. Vivo recently released recruitment information, looking for people who can be responsible for XR (VR, AR, MR) chip technology planning, and offered millions of annual salaries.
▲Vivo job recruitment on XR chips
Tencent has also recently launched an XR business and begun to coordinate cross-departmental transfers internally. ByteDance also listed 299 job postings for Pico on its recruitment website.
▲ ByteDance's official website about Pico's job recruitment
Tan Yiguo, president of the Shenzhen Virtual Reality Industry Federation, said at a meeting to discuss the training and construction of virtual reality vocational skills in 2021: "The demand for talents in China's VR industry accounts for up to 18%, but the supply only accounts for 2% of the world, and it is expected that the gap of VR talents in the mainland will exceed 1 million, which is far from meeting the employment needs of industry enterprises for technical skills positions." ”
Overall, whether it is several domestic companies in the layout of the DEVELOPMENT OF THE VR industry, or foreign technology giants working hard for the "meta-universe" are actively preparing for technical talent reserves.
Second, deep pickpocketing the major technology giants VR executives come to the road! Meta loves "Microsoft" talent
Now, many technicians in the VR industry can find high-paying jobs, and some VR executives who have expertise in certain fields have won the "favor" of major technology giants.
In the survey, we found that the "preferences" of major manufacturers are different, for example, most of Meta's VR project executives have Microsoft work experience, and there are Zuckerberg's "teachers" Andrew Bosworth among VR project executives; Apple's VR team has both technical talents from Meta and Tomlinson Holman, winner of the Academy Award for Technical Achievement; domestic VR teams are mostly experts or researchers in a certain field.
1, Meta: dig and dig, dig and dig, specifically dig Microsoft talents
According to the organizational structure table of the foreign technology website The information, Meta's Reality Labs team has more than 12 leaders involved in VR projects.
Among them, Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Reality Labs, is the main person in charge of the division, mainly responsible for Meta's work on AR, VR and consumer hardware in areas such as Quest. According to foreign media Business Insider, citing sources familiar with the matter, Andrew Bosworth may serve as Meta's chief technology officer this year.
Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Reality Labs
It can be said that half of Meta's metaverse drama is sung by Andrew Bosworth. So where did this person in charge come from?
Andrew Bosworth, born into a farming family in Santa Clara County, graduated from Harvard University in 2004 and spent two years as a research and development staffer in Microsoft's Visio division. In 2006, he joined the Meta team and made contributions in social software, video calling, and other fields, and in 2017 created the company's VR team, the predecessor of the current Reality Labs division.
You may not know that Meta CEO Zuckerberg was once one of Andrew Bosworth's students.
In 2004, Andrew Bosworth was a senior in college and was an assistant professor in an artificial intelligence class, and Zuckerberg was one of his students.
"Frankly, he didn't take my classes very often because he was building Facebook." Andrew Bosworth recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Not only that, but Gabe Aul, vice president of product and engineering at Reality Labs, has been with Microsoft for 25 years and served as Vice President of Enterprise (CVP) for Windows and Devices Group (WDG) in Microsoft's Engineered Systems (1ES) team.
As the first person to solve the problem of microsoft product telemetry system crash, he also participated in the research and development of Windows 7 and Windows 8, and was responsible for the research and development of Windows 10.
In addition to Andrew Bosworth and Gabriel Orr, AR vice president Alex Himel is also one of The Right Men Meta poached from Microsoft. Alex Himmel studied computer science at Stanford University as an undergraduate, worked at Microsoft for 4 years, and joined Meta in 2009.
In addition, the Reality Labs team includes Carmine Arabia, who was in charge of the development of BlackBerry mobile phones, and many other executives to jointly promote the development of the meta-universe project.
2, Apple: buy buy buy, buy potential start-up team
Apple's VR/AR division is set under its hardware division, and there are currently 13 publicly disclosed executives.
Among them, the main person in charge of the project is Mike Rockwell, a former executive vice president of Dolby, who also provided consulting services to Meta. Apple originally introduced Rockwell to improve audio and display performance across Apple's full range of products, but he is now primarily responsible for managing the AR team.
▲Rockwell
Unlike Meta's crazy digging of Microsoft's wall, Apple mainly absorbs the outstanding talents of many start-up teams through "buying, buying, buying" acquisitions. For example, Peter Meier, director of algorithms, and his startup Metaio.
Peter Meier studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich and has won hundreds of patents in augmented reality, computer vision and machine learning before founding VR startup Metaio, which was acquired by Apple in 2015.
Not only that, but Selim Ben Himane, Apple's senior engineering manager for computer vision and machine learning, is also the talent apple has acquired in this acquisition.
Apple also absorbs technical talent from the film and television industry. Digital image maker Tomlinson Holman, for example, received the Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2001.
Apple's executive composition is more diverse, from senior software director of technology development group transferred from other positions, director of algorithms through acquisitions, and even an Oscar winner for technical achievement.
3, domestic BAT: all the big guys changed to specialize in VR
When we turn our attention from foreign VR talents to domestic, we can see that the domestic VR industry is also Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Baidu has a number of products such as Baidu Xilang in the VR direction, and Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, the main person in charge of the Xilang project, is one of the key figures in Baidu's VR/AR team.
Ma Jie, who was the general manager of R&D of domestic antivirus software Rising, during his work at Rising, he developed a large number of products from personal antivirus software to enterprise-level security hardware, and the products he participated in research and development covered hundreds of millions of individual users and tens of thousands of enterprise users. It is reported that at the peak of 2003, Rising had a market share of 60% in the domestic antivirus software market.
He then founded the first cloud security service brand in China, "Security Treasure", which was acquired by Baidu in 2015, and Ma Jie also joined Baidu.
Alibaba's VR project team belongs to its XR lab, and its main person in charge is Tan Ping, chief scientist of computer vision at Ali's artificial intelligence lab.
Tan Ping received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Now, Tan Ping's main direction is to focus on three-dimensional modeling and holographic technology research and development, hoping to establish a three-dimensional digital version of the real world and create a realistic virtual world.
Tan Ping, chief scientist of computer vision at Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Lab
Compared with Baidu and Ali, Tencent has no public information to indicate that it has a dedicated VR team or laboratory, and the recently formed XR team may reassemble a new batch of talents to promote Tencent's development in the VR industry.
Of course, when we mention domestic VR talents, we inevitably have to mention byteDance's Pico team.
Founded in 2015, its founder Zhou Hongwei graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology and has been rooted in Goertek Acoustics for nearly 10 years, when he was mainly in charge of the hardware research and development team in Qingdao. In 2012, after Zhou Hongwei was exposed to VR equipment, he believed that the industry had development potential and came up with the idea of entrepreneurship. Subsequently, he formed a VR technology research and development team and founded Pico in 2015. According to the 2020 Q2 global VR headset market share of international research agency IDC, Pico ranks third in the world.
At the end of August 2021, Pico was acquired by ByteDance, and Zhou Hongwei's whereabouts are unknown.
It can be seen that the main responsible persons of VR in China are basically quite successful in a certain field, and then transferred to the team dedicated to VR projects.
3. How to cultivate VR talents? Universities, enterprises, and governments are blessed by three parties
Judging from the promotion path of domestic and foreign technical talents, most of them are not specialized in the vr industry, but have had rich work experience in other fields before, and entered the VR field based on various coincidences.
In fact, although the VR track gradually heated up around 2016, virtual reality engineering technicians were officially included in the new career scope by the state in 2020.
In April 2020, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and other departments explicitly listed virtual reality engineering technicians as new occupations. The work of such personnel mainly involves virtual reality software product planning, virtual reality hardware system research and development and testing, research industry frameworks and standards, and providing related technical support and other services.
▲"Virtual reality engineering technicians" are included in the new profession
As of 2021, fourteen undergraduate colleges and universities across the country have opened VR technology majors, and major universities have gradually set up elective courses or forum lectures for VR.
For example, in July 2021, the Communication University of China and Lenovo VR education subsidiary Xixiang (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. jointly discussed how to cultivate VR film and television creative talents.
▲VR film and television creation and talent training seminar
At the meeting, Cui Yunpeng, director of the Department of Digital Media Art of the School of Animation and Digital Arts of China Transmission, believed that VR talents are actually a collection of various types of talents, such as VR shooting and production talents, industry management talents, and platform-based media talents. "This year, we separated the future image and VR creation and became the research direction of graduate students, and began to recruit students." Cui Yunpeng introduced that in the future, the goal of these students is not only to enter the field of VR production, but also to apply VR technology in education, media, medical and other industries.
Wen Junlei, executive dean of the Institute of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence Industry of Tsinghua University and executive vice president of the VR Research Institute of the Cloud Computing Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, feels that there is currently a large gap in domestic VR talents. "Including game companies, content production companies, simulation companies, etc. are required." For vr talent training, it needs to be completed through the integration of industry and education through school learning and internship.
This reflection coincides with the training methods of VR talents abroad.
Cogswell College in California opened the world's first VR and AR professional program in the summer of 2016, awarding VR/AR professional certificates to students who completed all six courses.
The six courses include "Perception of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality", "Cognition and Presence", "Human-Machine Interface and Interaction Design", two game design courses, and two other multidisciplinary collaborative project courses.
At the same time, the school also invited a number of front-line people in the VR industry as course consultants, Such as Curt Miyashiro, head of production and technology at JauntVR, and Fabien Bourdon, senior modeler of Citrix Systems.
Others focus more on students' hands-on skills. Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, offers the world's first VR/AR master's degree program. Students are required to complete core courses such as "Mobile VR Development", "VR/AR Interaction Design", and VR Content Development.
In the long run, with the domestic VR professional settings biased towards how to teach students to use VR technology, foreign VR majors are more inclined to teach students how to use VR technology in the VR industry, how to develop new technologies.
In the cultivation of VR talents, enterprises are also one of the indispensable forces. VR hardware manufacturer HTC has jointly built a VR talent training center with Donghua University and other universities to create a new generation of VR talent reserve army for itself.
The government is also actively absorbing VR technology bulls around the world, Jiangxi Nanchang Honggutan District integrated municipal policy related content, for VR/AR talents who have not enjoyed municipal policies, proposed to give the top talents who buy houses for the first time in accordance with the standard of 300 square meters of full housing subsidies, and give leading and key talents 50% of the housing subsidies, up to 2 million yuan and 1 million yuan respectively.
It is worth mentioning that the district-level policy of Honggutan also provides a bottom for the shortage of VR/AR talents: a one-time housing subsidy of 100,000 yuan is given to the shortage of talents.
On the one hand, universities, enterprises and the government are actively cultivating domestic VR technology talents to deliver fresh blood to enterprises in different fields. On the other hand, domestic and foreign manufacturers and government departments have given generous dividends to attract VR talents with rich experience.
Conclusion: To open up the integration of industry and education, China needs to accelerate the cultivation of talents in the VR industry
The main core driving force for the development of an industry is all kinds of talents, so VR companies at home and abroad are competing for VR talents with both strength and creativity.
From the perspective of VR project leaders at home and abroad, we can see some VR talents from colleges and universities, and we can also see some VR talents who have transferred from other industries, and different types of talents are shining in the VR industry.
At the same time, we also noticed that there is still a certain distance between the industry needs talent requirements in the VR industry and the talents cultivated in China, and organizations at all levels are actively breaking through barriers, hoping to cultivate more outstanding VR talents and promote the forward development of the VR industry.