Wanted managers. We will provide work

Due to the forced need to find a job, I now observe not only the RuNet as a whole, but also the labor market. So, having studied it for the last two months, I have to say the following: in the market, not just hunger, but real desert. There are many profitable companies that are trying to grow in breadth and upward, they have material resources for this, but they lack neither people nor time. And this is really scary.

Markets vector

“Scary” is not a figure of speech, it is a true description of the sensation arising. The market is growing (judging by statistics, triumphant reports and endless PR activity), but in reality there is much more noise than real growth. And in fact, it turns out that only two segments really grow:

• Providing access: these are endless battles of growing ethernet providers that work on what they got from home and local area networks they bought at reasonable prices, and the monopolized Stream-ADSL.
• Communities, and what is called grassroots, is the bottom level on which users self-organize. These are the very blogs, forums and the rest of the user-generated content, which is still in its infancy, and will really start exploding when in a year and a half the numbers in the FOM reports increase from 23% to 41% - there are more users, and federal news, Moscow online stores and gossip are absolutely not interested in them. The Urals, the Far East and the South are the main regions where the growth in activity over the year is 15-25%, against 7-10% in previous years. Moscow grew so much in 2004.

Here you can pause, and say that you can not read further - then the trends end, and the reasoning about the present begins.

But for this, you first need to tell how the market itself looks like.

* * *

These two areas - iron infrastructure (copper, glass) and users - and this is what turns out to be the “real sector of the economy” as applied to the Internet.

Do not forget that besides them there are:

• Media and media (main audience consumers and advertising platforms),
• service companies (also infrastructure: search, hosting, money, mail, communications),
• developers (those who create and maintain websites and information systems by request, and earn money with it),
• advertising marketers with optimizers (serving the need for websites to be known).

These are still evolving more evolutionarily - they take investments, buy each other, colonize ... Despite the absolute growth in numbers and budgets, qualitatively it looks more like stagnation - the new and revolutionary in RuNet do little. Enough to see the results of the year in any online review.

The market is no longer so much growing as it is bursting with an increasing number of users from within, and outside it is being pulled by money being thrown in: the surviving companies have become profitable, mastering all sorts of exciting business. Most of it is from the People Havat series (acquaintances, sms-mamba, yellow press and games), the rest is honest advertising and the development of new projects. A special genre takes place under the name "the development of investment budgets."

Somewhere nearby in the economic system of the Internet free communities live, independent and entering the economy more as a “medium for communication”. It is there that the expression “unleashed users” is found, to which friends and colleagues gradually explained that it is possible not only to read what a flock of journalists is writing, and not only to silently admire the works of designers, but to do the same thing themselves - to write, draw, sew, compose music. And people begin to not only consume, but also produce - because they just like it. However, this is a “society” that does not turn into a business in any way. The shadow side of the economy.

Business at this time to serve the growing consumer market lacks either hands or heads - those who can go to new companies or create their own. Those who are just learning have not yet had time to understand how the Internet works, and what business models should be in the conditions of simultaneous growth of the market, change of cultural generations both among users and among hired staff. There is no one to teach - teachers of journalism and marketing gurus lecture at random. Everything is changing at all.

The world explodes around

Lack of time - the most difficult. Companies do not have time to launch "new versions of themselves" (to put it simply - at the same time to develop developments on management and products). They do not have time to react to changes, although an understanding of the need for changes has reached the “dinosaurs”.

In the case of dinosaurs, this can be understood from the appearance in the mail.ru of the position of a brand manager (he, judging by the job description, is very different from the usual marketing manager who answers the question about what technology is “What?”) they say the constant purchases of startups by the RBC holding, and the activity of the media groups as a whole (the reorganization of websites, editorial boards, editorial policies - this is a partial disclosure of Vedomosti, and Expert 2.0, which opened the archive, and the overbought Rambler, and eccentric restart of Webplanets).

Empty huge internet

What is bad lack of time? People do not have time to learn. Changes happen faster than information about it comes to managers, developers, inventors, entrepreneurs. The market is growing faster than it has time to review business publications. While in some niches the pooling of resources into holdings begins (as it is now happening with access or in the media sphere), others are born from scratch and live on their own, often without knowing about each other (micromarkets, online communities, fan groups, library associations, educational resources; for example, do many of you know, beyond the narrow circle of enthusiasts, about the Chronicles , a grandiose-scale educational and ethnographic project?).

Due to the fact that the market is growing faster than companies manage to master it, users, especially those who have recently connected, appear as if in a vacuum - mass porno-spam for the brain in the form of a yellow press does not interest them, global communities do not benefit them. divorced from their realities. Thematic resources, even in popular segments, such as cars or sports, are developing very gradually - new names cannot be noticed unless a friend or acquaintance tells you about them. There is nowhere to go. Even search engines and directories do not help - people still do not know what they want, and how to formulate this desire correctly.

If you're lucky, one of your friends will drag such a new user to local or thematic forums, where they will continue to live, fully believing that there, outside, there is nothing but dozens of “ popular resources ” that are useless for the average person.

Regional void

Why do not develop regional resources? As a rule, due to the lack of everything - there is a lack of content, a slower pace of life, less pressure from the “empty market”, lack of understanding of the principles of web resources close to absolute, zero budgets. A vicious circle, as it seems at first glance. And no one comes from the outside - it’s uninteresting, and no one raises the inside - they ran around on small forum sites, or left to work in the regional center, if they knew.

Because of this, by the way, there is a high probability that the regional Internet will not start developing until it exceeds the threshold of 30-35% of active users, after which this critical mass will take for itself the creation of local resources: this is how it happens in Yekaterinburg, where local resources are created at such a high level that they become noticeable from Moscow (for example, the Business Quarter is often more interesting to read than the E-xecutive is closer to reality and more relevant).

The difference between presence and participation

With the presence of large web companies, everything is also not easy. “Google comes to Russia”, “Yandex and Rambler open development centers in St. Petersburg”, “Yandex will open a development center in Yekaterinburg” - this is all great. But in fact, it turns out that behind the press releases lies a small but important detail: opening their regional office, companies do not so much occupy the information market as they sell advertising or buy programmers there . With content and audience, it is still much more difficult - it is smaller, and therefore attractive for large players is minimal. The interests of users - those most actively connected - remain to be satisfied by local manufacturers.

The lack of time and people has a much smaller impact on those regional projects that are still being launched - the competition is not great, the quality requirements are much lower. Therefore, the resulting sites are hardly noticeable even at the all-Russian level (the all-Russian one is approximately the year 2003 when compared with Moscow: information that is outdated for six months, sluggish updates, a couple of topics over the past few months in the forum).

Medium-term future - we need steering

Oil money flow into the country does not cease. The economy of the middle class, in spite of everything, is developing and growing more confidently in society - people get used to quality service, and the areas where people would continue to grow hard are gradually coming to an end. It is necessary to improve interfaces, create convenient applications and new services. Fortunately, there is enough money for this.

But with the staff all the more difficult than with money. Who can - quietly travels to warm and cold countries (to Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Canada, to both Americas - to North and South). Learn and work. This makes the market very hard, because those who cannot leave, but can work, start to bathe themselves mercilessly - both by large companies and by startups.

Considering that recruiting the personnel reserve is extremely slow, and experience in project management and development of directions can only be achieved in battle, then the runet is faced with a paradox - underdevelopment and backwardness of projects prevents new managers from developing and learning, and new and existing companies need experienced personnel, as they lack managers, but not those who know Runet from 1996, and not those who are gray-bearded and wise over the years.

The most promising for a young specialist today is hiring a job as a manager or an assistant manager for a small project in one of the growing companies, developing there for a year and a half, gaining experience, then using this experience in his start-ups - which have very good chances the hungry market, where dinosaurs offer almost the same thing, and the “middle class website” does not exist.

Who exactly is needed? Looking for live and mobile, who heard about Netskape Communicator only from the Pope or accidentally saw him in the records of the history of the Internet. Those who are much more interested in Craigslist, eBay and Amazon empires. These are marketers who are not observing Pavlovsky and Parker, but how the three buttons of the runet turn into four, and, in the future, they will change in composition when Google moves in between, and the “service” and “media” buttons will walk in pairs. These are people who are well aware of the merits of the multi-million mass and the advantages of tiny niche solutions, with the very “long tail”.

The new manager must understand how social networks work, and why sharing information is a better strategy than selling content, should be aware of the advantages that flash mobs have, what is the power of collective filtering, and how the “collective intelligence” is limited. Without such a foundation, even knowledge of the existence of the terms “Web2.0” and “Social Networks” will be meaningless.

It remains to teach people to learn. And then help them learn how to work.

Original and part of comments: livejournal , urbansheep.ru