Silicon Valley and big tech firms are increasingly having trouble keeping talented and high-profile individuals from leaving their organizations. It’s now evident that Web3 and the wider crypto- and blockchains space is becoming increasingly interesting for talents to join. It wasn’t long ago that landing employment at one of the big tech companies was a dream come true for many, and it may still be, but now there’s an attractive alternative career path in the crypto space.

There are numerous examples to support the case: Novi, Meta’s (Facebook) wallet project lost their CMO to the payment tech company Circle in January; Amazon’s GM of AWS Edge Service jumped to the role of CTO at the exchange Gemini; and both the former CFO of Lyft and Uber’s ex-director of corporate development headed over to NFT marketplace <a href="https://cryptoslate.com/products/opensea/">OpenSea </a>. Also, former head of Gaming at YouTube, <a href="https://twitter.com/Fwiz">Ryan Wyatt </a>, left the tech giant to become CEO of <a href="https://cryptoslate.com/news/polygon/">Polygon </a>Studios.

The list of transfers is becoming long

Given that big tech companies aren’t exactly poor – on the contrary, these are one of the wealthiest enterprises in the world – there surely must be more than mere money that lures talents into crypto.

Sriram Krishnan used to work for Twitter leading core consumer product teams, now at tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a16z for short. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1488590116016693251">tweet </a>from the beginning of February, Krishnan points to protocol design, tokenomics, wallet sign-in, governance mechanisms, and nuances of building on-chain as “fresh” aspects of the technology that makes crypto an attractive space. “This freshness [Krishnan’s emphasis] and frontier-feeling energize builders. It follows that smart and ambitious people want to go where growth/the zeitgeist is headed,”

The freshness and frontier-feeling energizes builders

Another example of a high-profile person leaving big tech for crypto is John deVadoss, former Managing Director (MD) at Microsoft, where he spent about 16 years of his career in a variety of roles, for example General Manager (GM) overseeing the developer platform Microsoft.NET, and most recently building Microsoft Digital from zero to half a billion dollars of business worldwide.

16 years at Microsoft to the first polyglot blockchain platform in the industry

One of the recruitments that raised some eyebrows recently was Evan Cheng, who left a top job as Director of R&D at Novi, the Diem/Libra wallet app, to found <a href="https://mystenlabs.com/">Mysten Labs </a>. Cheng has a long history in big tech, including ten years as Senior Manager, Low-Level Tools at Apple, and almost three years as Director of Engineering, Programming Languages & Runtimes at Facebook, now Meta. “If we solve these kinds of problems we can get more and more builders into this space. We want to build applications that don’t need to make sacrifices to the limitations of the blockchain infrastructure.”

From Apple and Facebook to Mysten Labs

“The economic incentive model here is very different. We are building infrastructure that will immediately have value, which is very different from any other space. That’s one of the magic that makes people come here. The technology aspect of building this is crazy, it’s a great environment for experiments.”

“The economic incentive model here is very different”

“We’re looking for people with transferable skills; they don’t have to be crypto natives, or understand the whole picture, because crypto is highly multidisciplinary. Building applications in crypto is about a combination of distributed system design, algorithm design, data structure design, and it’s also cryptography and security practices. There are few people who can know the full spectrum of these things,” Cheng says.

“It really, really changes how you can build products, and if you think about that the asset is in the hand of the keyholder, which could be the person himself, or a trusted third party, then you change the concept of ownership itself, of who owns the product and eliminating the middleman, changing the cost of everything in our daily lives,”

“I’ve built a lot of technologies, but there’s nothing quite like this”

Big Tech companies, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, are seeing an increasing number of their best talents and high profile employees moving into crypto, blockchains and web3.

HowTo

Why Big Tech is losing talent to crypto, web3 projects

As the field of HR and people operations looks ahead to 2022 we do so with a clearer focus on the changes we face and our role in driving this continued evolution in the world of work. We’ve grown more comfortable with the ambiguity that permeates the pandemic and understand the need for agile approaches that can adapt to our new constantly evolving world of work.
The field of HR is a spectrum with some still operating in legacy environments that are largely transactional and others with more progressive and proactive practices.

The Outlook For 2022

When the pandemic swept the globe in March of 2020 the world of work went remote overnight, porting their office-based communications and collaboration systems to digital ones. It wasn’t pretty, but we figured it out. 2021 brought hope of a “return to workplace” as vaccines rolled out and visions of pre-pandemic offices seemed to be on the horizon. Then new variants emerged and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/06/omicron-return-to-office/">postponed</a> those plans sending us back into cycles of uncertainty.

Hybrid Work Version 2

As we move into 2022, the companies that successfully navigate this new work landscape will be much more intentional about re-engineering their HR operating systems and structures to be more cloud-based. We’ll get better at moving away from synchronous work and be more intentional in re-orienting to asynchronous as a default operating model. We’ll use tools like Loom to send video messages that describe in 5 minutes what usually takes a 30-minute meeting. When we have meetings they’ll be thoughtfully structured, with agendas, pre-read materials sent in advance.

Better Meetings

HR used to follow a one-size-fits-all approach. Not anymore. Over the last two years, we’ve done a lot of listening to our employees to better understand how they’re doing, what they need, and more. This awareness has refocused the field of HR toward employee experience and is allowing us to co-create programs with employees—not just for them.

Flexible HR

The past decade has seen our approach broaden beyond “diversity” to include equity, inclusion, belonging, and access. Following George Floyd’s murder, Tech giants committed $3.8 billion dollars toward racial equity initiatives. But has this had a meaningful impact on driving change?The field of HR still has a lot of work to do in uprooting the systems of inequity that permeate our companies—from pay equity to board representation.

Equity and Inclusion

The shift to remote and hybrid work is also impacting our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Removing geographic constraints opens the talent pool and creates more <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90525652/can-remote-work-live-up-to-its-potential-to-change-workplace-diversity">access</a> to talent and that’s having a <a href="https://digiday.com/media/why-publishers-say-opening-up-remote-hiring-has-grown-and-greatly-improved-the-applicant-pool/">positive impact</a> on hiring. As more companies embrace remote constructs, HR teams must be more mindful and intentional about maintaining <a href="https://hbr.org/2021/10/dont-let-hybrid-work-set-back-your-dei-efforts">equity</a> within these new distributed teams.

Remote Work And Diversity

We’ve spilled plenty of ink covering the Great Resignation and have felt the pain of the spiking attrition within our companies. Underneath the tumult what’s really happening is a “great migration” as industry analyst and writer Josh Bersin effectively frames it.The current job market is white-hot. Recruiter jobs postings are outpacing software engineers, as companies battle for an edge in this hyper-competitive hiring market.

Talent Mobility

Today, 45% of full-time U.S. employees are working <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/355907/remote-work-persisting-trending-permanent.aspx">partly or fully</a> remotely. While that number may drop as more companies implement return to workplace plans in 2022, it will remain a significant portion of our workforce. The percentage of employers offering remote or hybrid work significantly reduces the hiring friction. The ease of virtual interviews and hiring will continue to fuel talent migration in 2022. To offset this, companies must prioritize career growth, flexibility, learning & development, and total rewards programs that attract and retain talent.

New Ways To Hire Talent

Facebook made waves earlier this year when they changed their name to Meta, a nod to their plans to invest in expanding into the metaverse. While virtual reality isn’t new, the barriers of access (mostly hardware) continue to lower, opening up more use cases for HR and people operations.As companies who’ve migrated to remote and hybrid struggle to fill the void of watercooler moments and live meetings, the metaverse will help bridge that analog-digital divide.

The Metaverse

The metaverse is often bundled with the nascent world of <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90696192/what-is-web3">web3</a>. While we won’t see widespread implications for HR yet, we should be paying attention as this develops. Collectively, web3 includes a mix of technology, open standards, cryptocurrency, blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi) communities, and a new creator economy.

Web 3.0

In terms of HR implications, the shared ownership and transparency of DAOs(Data Access Objects) could have broader implications including narrowing the pay gap. Crypto is already in play for some companies including Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, and others who offer employees cryptocurrencies as an option for wages or bonuses. HR needs to navigate the legal and tax complexities when offering crypto as wages, including a mix of state and federal guidelines.

The Pay Structure

The pandemic has upended many of the long-held industrial era constructs of work itself. The when, where, and how work happens has evolved beyond those limited legacy views of 9-5’s in the office. Sure, there will always be traditionalists who want to return to a pre-pandemic era of work that no longer exists. They will be at the companies struggling to attract and retain talent in 2022 and beyond.

Old Ways Getting Dismantled

The great reset requires HR to examine our practices, shed the ones that no longer serve our companies and employees, and build anew for some of the new constructs of work detailed above. It requires a shift away from prescribed playbooks of HR programs and a willingness to pilot and adopt new practices. It will be centered on employee experience and co-created with our employees. The days of HR being a back-office function are over. Our generational opportunity to redefine work itself is directly in front of us.

The Great Reset

The only certainty is uncertainty, writes HR expert Lars Schmidt. But one thing is clear: The days of HR being a back-office function are over.


Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

#hrtrends

IDEAS ABOUT #hrtrends

Why Big Tech is losing talent to crypto, web3 projects

7 ways HR will look different in 2022

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

#hrtrends

IDEAS ABOUT #hrtrends

Why Big Tech is losing talent to crypto, web3 projects

7 ways HR will look different in 2022

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career