Why is the blockchain so hot?

Why is the blockchain so hot?

At the beginning of February this year, Weibo's account "Sina Finance" posted such a post: A young man in Hangzhou has been online dating for more than 1 month, and no girl has paid attention to him. Later, he labeled himself as a "blockchain engineer" and received more than 200 private letters within a few days.

As the hottest industry at present, the news of recruiting blockchain talents with a million-year salary has made 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. In 2008, the founder of Bitcoin who called himself "Satoshi Nakamoto" put forward the concept of "blockchain". By 20 15, bitcoin, the underlying technology, has become the new favorite of the global financial and technology industries, and the demand for related talents has also soared.

Bloomberg quoted the data of professional social networking site LinkedIn as saying that in 20 17 years, the recruitment information related to blockchain, cryptocurrency and bitcoin increased by at least four times; On CoinDesk, one of the largest employment websites in the United States, there are 18 of the most popular jobs related to cryptocurrency. According to the data of this website, the number of blockchain technical posts released by the United States in 20 17 increased by 207% compared with 20 16, and increased by 63 1% compared with 20 15. On the mainstream Internet recruitment app in China, there are also thousands of blockchain industry recruitment information.

Corresponding to the rapidly expanding scale is a serious shortage of professionals. Since the blockchain has just been "fired" for two or three years, schools and educational institutions have not kept up, and there are few related courses; In addition, blockchain is an interdisciplinary industry, and knowledge and experience are equally important, which poses a greater challenge to personnel training.

There are two main types of companies eager for blockchain talents: powerful established technology companies and ambitious start-ups. Bloomberg quoted Griffith Hill, the chief recruiter of a blockchain talent team, as saying that the technical software industry and the financial services industry are the two areas where the number of blockchain jobs is the largest on LinkedIn.

Almost all Internet companies are recruiting blockchain front-end architects and blockchain development engineers, including Yi Bei, ESPN and Uber in the United States, Tencent, Xiaomi, Xunlei, Lenovo and JD.com ... 20 17 Fintech100 Company's report released in March 20 18 shows that on 20/Kloc,

Traditional enterprises are also vigorously recruiting blockchain talents to improve efficiency or better serve customers. CoinDesk data shows that large consulting companies such as Deloitte and IBM are the largest employers in the industry, and Deloitte employs more than 800 people in the blockchain field. IBM is also actively looking for relevant talents. In 20 17, the company's employees in the blockchain field increased from 400 to 1600, and more than 400 blockchain projects were carried out. There are also 150 jobs related to blockchain.

The geographical distribution of blockchain work is closely related to the economic level. 20 18 February, Forbes magazine website announced the 15 largest blockchain employment cities in the United States, ranking first in New York, with a job gap of1316; Followed by San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and so on. Outside the United States, there are 423 vacancies in London, 357 in Singapore, 97 in Toronto 149 and Sydney. In China, according to the statistical data of Tiger Sniff.com from 2065438 to February 2008, "Beishangguangshen" occupied more than 80% of the domestic blockchain-related positions, among which Beijing ranked first with 44.2%.

The threshold for core positions is high.

Blockchain talents are not necessarily "code farmers". Among the 800 new blockchain talents recruited by Deloitte, half are developers or architects, and the other half are business analysts, strategic and technical consultants and accountants. Specifically, the recruitment of the blockchain industry mainly includes technology, projects, operations and logistics.

Of course, technical jobs are most urgently needed. According to the statistics of Tiger Sniff.com in February 2065438+2008, the R&D position is as high as 49.34%, followed by operations, marketing and researchers. Technicians should be able to build applications on the core platform, and it would be great if they could independently develop encrypted digital currency platforms (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum). To this end, they need to master at least one or more languages such as C, C++, C#, Java and Go, deeply understand the underlying technology of blockchain, understand various mainstream algorithms, and understand economic principles and monetary theory. If you want to do blockchain development, the threshold is not low.

In contrast, the other three types of talents have lower thresholds and do not need too many industry backgrounds. They only need to have a clear understanding of blockchain knowledge on the basis of their own majors. If you know some financial knowledge, you will conduct data analysis, which is even more icing on the cake. From an academic point of view, a master's degree is a necessary stepping stone.

For the blockchain industry, compound talents are undoubtedly the most popular. Therefore, people who master C++ and Go, and who are proficient in cryptography and distributed computing are the most popular at present. Most companies will let people with different specialties form teams to make up for their own shortcomings and gradually learn and grow in the process of project implementation.

The blockchain industry has developed extremely rapidly. To keep up with the development of blockchain, we must have strong curiosity and the ability to learn quickly. Therefore, youth is the biggest bargaining chip. 1 to 3 years of talents in the industry is the most sought-after at present, because this time can allow a person to accumulate enough experience in the development of blockchain, and it will not be so expensive that employers will be discouraged.

Of course, top talents are always scarce. People who can independently develop cryptocurrency platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are sought after all over the world. Some people think that this kind of "big cow" will not exceed 2000 people, and some even think that it will not exceed 200 people. The difficulty of this kind of work is equivalent to writing code from scratch and creating an operating system that can keep pace with Android or iOS. What most technicians can do is only equivalent to developing an App on the operating system.

Some people earn millions a year, while others are at the bottom.

Can blockchain practitioners really earn millions a year? Judging from the data of mainstream recruitment websites, it is true. For example, Suning.cn offered a monthly salary of 50,000 to 65,438+10,000 for "Advanced Development of Blockchain", and Keda also offered a monthly salary of 85,000 to 65,438+10,000 for "Blockchain R&D Director". The monthly salary of "blockchain technology expert" in Ali Health is1.5,000 to 30,000 yuan, and the position of "blockchain technology evaluation" in China ICT Institute is1.0,000 to 20,000 yuan.

It can be seen that the salary of the blockchain industry is also polarized, and there is a big difference. The annual salary of core technicians generally starts from 6.5438+0.5 million yuan, and senior "big cows" can really earn more than one million yuan a year, and also enjoy equity or option rewards; The income of products, media or executives is not much different from other industries. According to Bloomberg News, the salary level of marketing posts is at the bottom of the whole blockchain industry, with an average annual salary of only $63,000, which is 60,000 to 6,543.38+0.2 million RMB in China.

According to the statistics of tiger sniffing. Com, posts with salary of120,000/year account for 18.6% of the whole R&D posts, posts with salary of180,000-240,000/year account for 36.2%, and the remaining 47.8% are distributed in different salary ranges. There are also great differences in salaries between regions. The average annual income of blockchain practitioners in Shanghai and Beijing is about 200,000 yuan, and that in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Fujian is about 6.5438+0.6 million yuan.

Be careful in the face of the wind

At present, the explosive growth of the blockchain industry is mainly due to the intensive influx of capital, which inevitably reminds people of the Internet bubble from 1998 to 2000: after the capital carnival, most companies finally left. The main growth of blockchain jobs comes from startups that have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. These companies are inevitably mixed, and many of them use information asymmetry and over-packaging "empty gloves and white wolves".

According to the scientific and economic media "Titanium Media", there are many recruitment routines for domestic blockchain companies. Many enterprises use "financial freedom" to attract job seekers, promise to give employees option rewards after financing is in place, and even let employees join as "partners". However, the actual situation is not necessarily the case-there is no salary for the first three months, the actual office area is only 15 square meters, and the team has only two or three people, without any system norms and constraints. As for the work content, it is "planning two or three product promotion plans every day". "Product" is actually a "digital currency" created by the company, which aims to attract retail investors and institutions to subscribe as much as possible, and then "circle" capital institutions to invest when the number of buyers reaches a certain level, which is quite deceptive.

"Titanium Media" said that there are countless blockchain enterprises that have settled in incubators in various places, most of which have not yet obtained financing, and some even lack the corresponding capital flow support; Employees tend to focus on fresh graduates and juniors, and only talk about "ideals" without talking about money; Some companies "cheated money and ran away". "These blockchain companies look beautiful, but they may actually be poor enough to wait for white paper to cut leeks." In the face of "the company's CEO and partners personally lead the team, the team is top-notch, the atmosphere is good, the users are over 100 million, the funds are sufficient, the development space is unlimited, the option incentive, five insurances and one gold, and no punching ...", job seekers should remain cautious and calm.

The current "high salary" image of blockchain is caused by the explosive growth of the industry and the shortage of talents to some extent. In the context of the overall economic slowdown, it is understandable to seize the rare development opportunities and pursue higher salaries, but the risk of plunging into emerging fields that most people are not familiar with cannot be ignored. When the industry is further developed and matured, the relevant personnel training mechanism will be gradually improved, and more professionals will enter the market in the future. If you don't pay attention to improving your own strength and blindly follow the trend, then "annual salary of one million" may be just a myth under the bubble after all.