Web3 Talent Market Cycle Insights: Career Transition Journey from Traditional Finance to Decentralized Future

Market Reflections at Night: When Wall Street Meets Web3

It reminds me of Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis—the same confusion, different opportunities. That year, I had just left Morgan Stanley and still vividly remember the scene of Lehman Brothers employees carrying boxes out of the building. Today, while analyzing Director of Investment recruitment data on MyJob.one, I notice history is replaying itself in a different form—only this time, the protagonists have shifted from traditional investment banks to decentralized exchanges.

Essentially, the structural changes in the current Web3 talent market bear an astonishing resemblance to the pattern during the rise of FinTech in 2012. Cloud System Administrator recruitment demand has grown by 370%, which brings to mind Wall Street's frenzied pursuit of Hadoop experts back then. But this cycle is evolving much faster—the digital transformation that took traditional finance a decade is now being achieved by the Web3 ecosystem in just two years.

Positioning in Cycles and Value Dips

2023 Q3 Talent Market Thermometer

Strategically speaking, the current market is in the middle phase of talent value restructuring during a bear market:

• Audio Designer recruitment has decreased by 42% month-on-month, but the salaries of native metaverse content creators have逆势上涨逆势 risen by 18%
• Host recruitment is concentrated on DAO community operations, with median hourly rates falling 65% compared to the summit season
• Campaign Manager recruitment shows polarization: Web2 background requirements have decreased, while chain data analysis skills have become a new benchmark

This reminds me of the situation during the Bitcoin winter in 2015—those teams focused on building the underlying protocols later became the biggest winners in the bull market cycle. Currently, data from MyJob.one's backend shows that developers with dual-stack Solidity and Rust skills have a job retention rate of 89%, significantly higher than the market average.

The Evolution Trajectory of Institutional Talent

Last week, when interviewing a candidate for Sales Executive recruitment who had switched from Goldman Sachs to Web3, he mentioned an interesting phenomenon: traditional financial CRM methodologies are completely ineffective in the on-chain world. This realization made me understand that true value transformation isn't about skill transfer, but cognitive restructuring.

Reviewing the past three market cycles, successful financial professionals typically possess three characteristics:

1. Transforming risk management instincts into smart contract audit capabilities
2. Migrating asset pricing experience to Tokenomics design
3. Restructuring institutional sales networks into community governance systems

Bubble Detector: Risk Signals in Overheated Fields

The frequent appearance of "APY Optimization Specialists" in Director of Investment recruitment job descriptions raises my caution. This resembles the "Token Economy Designers" during the 2017 ICO frenzy—both are dangerous signals attempting to solve product-market fit issues through financial engineering.

Based on historical experience, caution is needed when the following phenomena occur:

• Host recruitment starts requiring "GMV Growth Hackers" instead of community building capabilities
• Campaign Manager recruitment allocates 80% of the budget to airdrops rather than user education
• Sales Executive recruitment KPIs are entirely tied to short-term transaction volume

The Long-Termist's Career Roadmap

Yesterday, a candidate for Cloud System Administrator recruitment asked me: "Is it too late to switch to Web3 infrastructure now?" This reminds me of a similar question asked in 2014 about Bitcoin development. From a strategic perspective, Web3's technology stack iteration has only entered the midfield:

The supply-demand ratio for ZK-proof engineers remains at 1:7, while the hourly rates for decentralized storage architects have exceeded $300/hr. These figures indicate that talent gaps in the protocol layer will continue to expand. In MyJob.one's latest salary report, job offers for Cloud System Administrator recruitment with true expertise in distributed system deep optimization have increased by 210% year-on-year.

Midnight Career Advice: Three Counter-Cyclical Investment Directions

Three o'clock in the morning is when thinking is clearest. Based on 12 years of cross-cycle observation, I recommend focusing on these underappreciated fields:

1. Audio Designer recruitment's new frontier: 3D sound design in the spatial computing era
2. Host recruitment's value reversion: Conflict mediators in DAO governance
3. Director of Investment recruitment's paradigm shift: DeFi derivatives settlement mechanism design

Remember during the 2018 bear market, we helped a virtually unknown ZK research team recruit core engineers. Five years later, they became the cornerstone of a protocol valued at $3 billion. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.