Seizing the Web3 opportunity, Silicon Valley talents are busy

Image source @ Visual China

A few years ago, finding a job at a Big Silicon Valley company like Google and Meta was like standing at the top of the career pyramid. In the eyes of outsiders, gold, decent, Kochi... Many halos in one.

However, the current situation is beginning to change. While Silicon Valley's big players are still a lucrative, there's another area where work has become even more lucrative — Web 3.

Where there is Web 3, there is Web 2. In the Web 2 era, Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Meta are dazzling stars. But when they became giants, they firmly controlled the flow of information with a centralized model. Users have little privacy to speak of and suffer terribly.

Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and non-homogeneous tokens in Web 3 decentralize the flow of information and resources, giving users autonomy. More and more people believe that Web 3 represents the next direction of the Internet.

As Web 3 hits Web 2, this wave has begun to invade the job market, making employees in Silicon Valley big factories want to move.

A report by Business Insider shows that high-profile executives and developers are leaving established companies and moving to crypto, blockchain and other decentralized projects.

What was once a silicon valley Web 2 factory is fading its former glory. And the new darling Web 3, what attracts employees?

01 Jump from Web 2 to Web 3

Flowing from the Web 2 factory to the Web 3 company, this employee migration boom first began with executives.

In January, Ryan Wyatt, head of YouTube games, left to join Polygon Studios.

Polygon is a decentralized Ethereum extension platform, and Polygon Studios is its gaming and NFT divisions. The Polygon Studios ecosystem has many beloved games and NFT projects.

Also in January, Sheres Torres, former chief marketing officer of the Meta Digital Wallet Project, jumped to blockchain payments company Circle to take on the same role.

Sandy Carter, Amazon's vice president of cloud computing, has also left his old club to join cryptography company Unstoppable Domains.

And Google vice president Surojit Chatterjee left the company as early as 2020 to become the chief product officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

At Google, concerns about retaining employees from flowing to crypto companies have begun to breed, according to people familiar with the matter. This topic has become a topic of weekly discussion between CEO Sandal Pichai and his deputy.

In addition, executives of other Silicon Valley companies are also turning to Web 3. Lyft's former CFO and Uber's former director of corporate development joined NFT exchange OpenSea. Chris Lehane, Airbnb's former senior vice president of policy and communications, joined a crypto venture capital fund.

Many Web 3 companies, no matter how small, can attract many large factory employees.

For example, 80% of the 20-person team of blockchain technology company Mysten Labs comes from big companies such as Meta, Google, and Netflix. It is worth mentioning that the four founders of Mysten Labs are all from Meta, and the entire company is the same "big factory pedigree".

Of course, the most attractive to the employees of large factories is Coinbase. Its workforce almost tripled in one year to 3,730.

Coinbase said the product, engineering and design teams will hire more than 2,000 more employees this year to pursue growth opportunities in Web 3 and beyond.

Coinbase has its own set of requirements for candidates, such as prioritizing employees with clear communication, efficient execution, and continuous learning. In addition, they should be able to work "mission-centric".

Overall, in addition to executives, the number of Web 3-related employees is skyrocketing. Electric Capital reports that since last year, the number of developers in GitHub repositories associated with blockchain projects has increased by 100%.

The back wave of the Yangtze River pushes the front wave, and one wave is stronger than another wave. Web 3 really surpasses Web 2 in terms of employee attractiveness.

02 Reasons for the influx of Web 3: promising, higher pay

There is an old Chinese saying: Good birds choose trees to roost.

Everyone comes out to work, no matter which field they choose, in fact, the most important thing is nothing more than development prospects and salary and compensation.

In both respects, Web 3 companies have clear advantages over Web 2 companies.

First of all, today's younger generation likes to work in more cutting-edge and cooler areas. Especially for tech practitioners, they are problem solvers, looking forward to learning new things and not wanting to fall behind the trend.

Right now, Web 3 is still an emerging field, with new technologies and models emerging in an endless stream and employees having a lot to learn.

Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Payroll Software Company Deel, said: "People want to work on the most exciting and innovative technology areas, which are encryption and Web 3 right now. ”

Moreover, Web 3 is saddled with the mission of building and shaping the future of the internet as a whole, which adds more sense of professional honor to employees.

In addition, in terms of industry prospects, Web 3 also reveals a broader space than Web 2.

Web 2 has been developing for twenty years now, has entered a bottleneck period of slowing development, the internal volume is serious, and recently major factories have also laid off employees continuously. As the direction of the next generation of the Internet, Web3 is in the midst of rapid growth and is still promising.

The data shows that the daily active addresses of the Ethereum chain have increased from 200,000 in January 2020 to the latest 550,000. This means that more and more people are participating in the Web 3 economy.

In addition, according to Footprint Analytics, the total market capitalization of the global crypto market has doubled in the past year and currently exceeds $2 trillion. More and more money is flowing into the decentralized field.

Source: Footprint Analytics

In particular, it should be noted that compared with Web 2, Web 3 is no longer a single technology, but a field integrated by digital currency, blockchain, meta-universe and other technologies, which has a larger market capacity than Web 2 and has more space for employees to play.

Every tech worker dreams of changing the world with code.

However, while generating electricity for love and pursuing dreams, we must also consider the bread in our hands.

According to Levels.fyi, senior software engineers at all five FAANG companies (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) earn more than $300,000 a year.

It looks higher than many traditional industries, but Web 3 is even more generous.

According to the social forum Blind, Coinbase pays up to $900,000 a year for software engineers.

Coinbase offers executives higher incomes. Chatterjee left Google to join Coinbase in February 2020, and when Coinbase went public in April 2021, Chatterjee's stake soared to more than $600 million, just 14 months after he joined, and the rate of gold absorption was not too fast.

Compared to Coinbase, some smaller Web 3 companies are just as generous. Like Silo Finance, a blockchain finance company, senior engineers are paid $300,000 to $750,000.

Peter Levels, founder of Nomad List, tweeted: "Like it or not, the price (salary) of Web 3 can easily be 2 to 5 times that of Silicon Valley."

Web 3 can provide employees with good salaries, but also because of the surge in investment, there is more food and grass.

According to CB Insight, blockchain startups raised a record $25 billion in venture capital last year, more than eight times as many as the previous year.

Source: CB Insight

Compared with Web 2, the salary structure of Web 3 has a huge attraction - tokenization.

At some Web 3 companies, the incentives offered to executives and employees are tokens rather than equity.

Compared with equity, coin rights have higher liquidity, and employees do not have to wait for the company to be acquired or IPO before discounting, but can convert tokens into cash at any time and receive benefits in advance.

03 Reflect on yourself and follow the times

There are Web 2 manufacturers complaining, Web 3 companies have robbed their own employees.

In the author's opinion, this kind of complaining is powerless. Behind the migration of employees, two problems are reflected: they have gone wrong; the times have really changed.

In January, Glassdoor, the largest U.S. hiring and review site, released the nation's "2022 Best Employers List." Many of the silicon valley giants that were once ranked high have declined severely.

For example, Meta, which has been on the list for 12 consecutive years, has fallen from 11th last year to 47th this year, directly down 36 places. It was the lowest ranking in its history.

Many Meta employees have publicly complained that their company has implemented a "toxic corporate culture" during the epidemic and worked heavily overtime.

In addition, Zoom's ranking this year has also fallen sharply, from 22 places last year to 100 places this year. Some employees said that in a high-business and fast-paced work environment, the corporate culture has undergone a negative transformation.

Overtime is serious, but I don't see that the company's situation has improved, which is the most confusing for employees. Over the past six months, the stock prices of many technology companies in Silicon Valley have deteriorated.

Meta's stock price has fallen from a high of $380 last year to $184 now, down 52%. Even if the name is changed to Meta into the meta-universe, it will not help much to increase the stock price.

The big Silicon Valley companies complain that their employees flow to Web 3 companies, but they still have to find their own reasons.

Web 3 companies, on the other hand, attract employees and are driven by the times.

Looking back, from the rise of Web 1 in the late 20th century to the rolling arrival of Web 2, every wave has been accompanied by a wave of employee migration. The same is true of the rise of Web 3 this time.

The times are pushing employees to a newer and more valuable format.

Instead of complaining about the world, Web 2 companies should follow the times and start by changing themselves.

Like Shereice Torres, who left Meta to join Circle, it's not a young company, it was founded in 1997. However, its business updates are keeping pace with the times, and it is currently helping enterprises use stablecoins and public blockchains for payments and other operations.

In February, Google also said it was studying how to apply Web3 and blockchain networks to its own business.

There are talented people in the jiangshan generation, each leading the way for hundreds of years.

Give you a ticket to board the Web 3 and will you go with them?

Resources:

Web3 is attracting the attention of the world's top talent (CoinYuppie)

Crypto companies are tempting top talent away from Big Tech to build ‘Web3’（CNBC）

Big tech companies like Google, Facebook and others have jumped ship for Web 3 (cnBeta)

Why Big Tech is losing talent to crypto, web3 projects（CRYPTOSLATE）

While Silicon Valley giants are still hesitant, their employees are rushing to the encryption industry on a large scale（netfreeman）