New Year's Day 2024 is the 386th day of senior robot R&D engineer Li Xiang's income interruption. In the months since he left his job search, he has become increasingly hopeless and hopeless about recovering the wages owed by his former employer.
In 2023, when robot entrepreneurship is surging, this graduate student who graduated from the Key Laboratory of Robotics of Harbin Institute of Technology for 7 years has successively experienced workplace dramas such as salary arrears, financing failures, colleagues turning against each other, and "optimization". In the end, he chose to leave Shenzhen, which has a strong atmosphere of robot entrepreneurship, and embarked on the entrepreneurial road of self-study and self-research.
Under the superposition of factors such as the improvement of industrial intelligence, the intensification of aging and the non-contact demand of the epidemic, the robot industry has expanded rapidly in the past four years. According to Shangpu Consulting Group's "2022 Robot Industry Development Report", China has become the world's largest robot market and the fastest growing emerging market. In 2022, China's robot market will reach US$17.4 billion, with a five-year average annual growth rate of 22%.
Under the surface of the dividend period, the expansion of the industry and the bumpy experience of individual practitioners are often intertwined - especially in the robot industry.
The advanced manufacturing boom continues, while the Internet enters a cold winter. After a comparison, it seems that it is a good way for job seekers to join the robot industry with both technological and physical attributes, but the reality is that the practitioners in it have encountered countless workplace difficulties.
After getting the "ticket to the future", practitioners are trying to re-see the coordinates of the ship "robot" in the commercial sea, as well as their professional positioning. So, what does a real robotics industry look like?
Find a reliable company 01To put it simply, the biggest attraction of the robotics industry to current job seekers is opportunity and money.Multidisciplinary experience vsBusiness Sense 02
Whole machine product manager: a kind of "corner overtaking" imagination 03
The demand for students in industries that are strongly related to the robotics industry has increased significantly, and the salary level is also rising. Combined with the industry distribution data of new positions for fresh graduates in the past three years of Liepin and BOSS Zhipin, the industries involved include medical technology, machinery manufacturing, electronic communications, semiconductors, automobiles, etc. In 2022, the average recruitment salary for positions related to intelligent manufacturing on the whole platform has beenUp to 11,505 yuan per month, artificial intelligence positions under the subdivision of this field, are to:16028 yuan monthAt the top of the list.
The thirst for talent masks the turmoil in the industry. Since the beginning of this year, many robot segments have encountered business difficulties: Johnson & Johnson, Intuitive Surgery, TINAVI, MicroPort Medical and other companies have collectively shrunk their medical robot business; Catering robot Pudu announced that it will reduce the team of 3,000 people to 500 people; In the cleaning robot track, the retail sales of sweeping robots in the first half of 2022 have fallen by 283%, down 0. year-on-year again in the first half of 202360% (Aowei cloud network data).
Headhunter Zhang Bin recalled the sharp decline in the robot industry, and there is still some "residual hatred". "I started promoting people in June 2022, and by August, the performance of candidates had reached more than 2 million; In September, there were more than 50 positions to follow; But in October, the project began to shrink, and the client only wanted one, not only were the new candidates laid off, but my entry commission has not been paid until now. ”
The company's commercial landing ability is an important indicator to judge whether a robot company is reliable.
Ma Chuang is a veteran engaged in robot research and development for 16 years, and became a technical director in 2014. He told the workplace bonus: "The service and collaborative robot tracks, at home and abroad, almost start at the same starting line, compared to imagination, R & D and design capabilities. If the technical ability is similar, then choose to work in a company with strong business landing ability, even if it is a low-end technical position, the stability is better than the high-end technical position of some start-up companies. ”
The accumulation time and personnel scale of the company's R&D experience is another screening method of "hugging the thighs". After a round of research through school recruitment information, internal employees, peer consultation and other channels, headhunter Zhang Bin found a treasure company with 30 years of R&D experience, a scale of more than 4,000 people, and a business concentrated in Europe and the United States. "Other companies are laying off employees, and this company has a dozen people every month. ”
The background of the founder's team is also an important condition for judging the company's prospects. Professor Wang Tianmiao, honorary director of the Beihang Robotics Research Institute and dean of the Zhongguancun Zhiyou Research Institute, has summarized the characteristics of the robot founder team based on his own observations:
1.Scientists + students + **CEO partners start a joint business, and it may take 8 years for the company to get on the right track;In fact, the slow transformation of commercial value is partly due to the manufacturing attributes of the robot industry; If you want to polish excellent hardware products, it always takes time to upgrade technology and iterate products based on customer feedback.2.Full-time graduate doctoral students + partners can learn and grow in practice, and the time to blossom and bear fruit may be shortened to 5 years;
3.Scientists start a business, and the business value conversion time is the longest, which can take up to 10 years.
Under the ups and downs of the industry, the requirements and treatment of hardware positions in the upstream and downstream links have also seen a watershed.
"Now, all companies that involve the integration of non-standard automated production lines with robots are very volatile. The most lacking manpower is still hardware and PLC direction. ”Huang Sheng has 12 years of experience in mechanical design, and can come to such a conclusion by relying on information integration. He made a station b account, which recorded the real experience of him and his practitioners in the robot industry in Shenzhen. And the trend he said has actually taken shape since two years ago: according to Liepin data, the top three job postings in the robot track in 2022 are hardware, artificial intelligence and back-end development, and hardware jobs account for nearly half.
Compared to other positions,Practical positions are very friendly to the background of job seekers。"Mechanical and hardware robot positions do not value academic qualifications, but eat experience. Many people are like me, who have started to work hard after graduating from junior college, and they can also survive to become managers and directors if they persist. ”
However, according to Huang Sheng's observation, in positions with high tolerance for entry, there are fewer career development paths, and the direction of transformation is limited - such as hardware work for the integration of downstream applications of robots. In a core industrial city like Shenzhen, the monthly salary for this type of position starts at about 10,000 yuan, and can roughly rise to more than 20,000 yuan after working overtime for several years.
Before you can get a satisfactory salary, you must prove that you can pass all the technologies such as forward hardware design, PLC programming, network communication, host computer development, back-end development, C, C++, etc. "While the need for comprehensive technical competence is a distinctive feature of this industry, it also means that trial and error costs are huge for newcomers. "It's going to take at least three years to figure out whether you're a piece of material or not. ”
Hardware talents in the R&D of midstream robots are in short supply.
Headhunter Zhang Bin revealedJob seekers from school, with 2 or 4 years of experience, have companies in the market that offer 500,000 to 700,000 yuan；Hardware Engineer for Non-Key SchoolsIf you have more than 10 years of work experience, some people can get 10,000 yuan, but the accompanying additional conditions are not low: Master's degree starts; Experience with complete projects; Familiar with application scenarios; Cutting-edge industry background; Multidisciplinary Theory + Practical Experience; Minimum of 5 years of experience.
Of all the above conditions, only"Multidisciplinary experience".This one is the hardest to satisfy, for example:
1.The person in charge of production and research must not only have solid professional knowledge, but also have rich management experience, innovation ability and leadership ability;Although the high-end robot positions represented by hardware are strictly required, the portrait of commercial talents does not seem to have formed a standard answer.2.Scientist-type talents such as integrated perception experts are required to have theoretical foundation and work experience in mechanical, electronic, computer science and other disciplines;
3.In the context of domestic robots going overseas, sales personnel need to have an international vision, overseas market development experience, professional knowledge, and cross-cultural background communication skills, and their competency conditions are comparable to those of technical positions.
Li Hong is 23 years old this year, with a bachelor's degree in business administration, and he is now a new adventurer on the robot track.
My younger brother is a robotics maniac, and when he first approached me for an underwater robot venture, I didn't say yes immediately, but spent a month conducting industry research. After analyzing all the domestic underwater robot companies and market prospects, Li Hong wrote a plan book for business models, promotion strategies, positioning products, planned funds, etc., and left a WeChat message for his junior brother: "Let's rectify." ”
Li Hong's business sense is trained from his entrepreneurial experience in the non-robotics field during his college years
I've been in business since my sophomore year. At that time, an e-commerce company was using a back-end system provided by a third party, which was very costly; So I made their own system for them for 200,000 yuan. Although he is a liberal arts student, with his studious and brain-active, Li Hong looked for tutorials through different channels, paid for learning, and finally successfully delivered the project.
Its studious spirit has evolved into the concept of "technological autonomy" in the robotics company. Li Hong's robot business has many R&D and production links, and controlling costs is the premise of profitability, and the team's method is simple and effective: learn first and then use. "Algorithms are also welded, and hardware is also compiled.
With the employment model of one specialty and multiple functions, coupled with the stable supply channels, Li Hong's products are more cost-effective than other products on the market. In the early days of the business, its team members achieved an annual income of one million - and at this time, there was still a year before Li Hong graduated from graduate school.
For Huang Sheng, who has been in the industry for 15 years, the development of domestic industrial robots has made him disheartened. "I have gone from mechanical design to algorithm to production, the cost of precision devices can't go down, the profit can't go up, and I can't see the possibility of surpassing the four families. ”
But hope lies in other segments of robotics. According to data from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the market size of the three major robot categories of industrial robots, service robots, and special robots in China in 2021 will be 44.6 billion yuan, 30.2 billion yuan, and 9.1 billion yuan respectively, accounting for %.
According to the data of the High-tech Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) and the Chinese Institute of Electronics, China's service robots and special robots will lead the world with a compound growth rate of more than 27% and 28% respectively in the next few years, and the market size is close to that of industrial robots.
Service robots and special robot startups are growing rapidly, and business imagination has become a common concern factor for the market, capital, and job seekers.
The popular humanoid robot expedition A1 in 2023 is from Zhiyuan Robot, and its leading product technology CTO is Zhihuijun, the top 100 UP master of Station B. Half a year after announcing his entry into the robot industry, the company's products have attracted the attention of the industry, capital and young people by virtue of their characteristics such as grabbing objects, communicating with people, and resisting beatings.
For robotics startups, the importance of business imagination accounts for almost 80% of the work done to outline the initial form of the product.
Yang Jianbo graduated from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and when he was in his first year of graduate school, he and several classmates made a "cell robot" - the robot can build a variety of different models through the combination and reconstruction of modules, and compress the programming and splicing time to two minutes.
In 2014, they followed the idea of cell robots and established a consumer robot company in Beijing, Ke Technology. It is the first company in the world to bring modular robots into the home. Its products are composed of multiple independent cell modules, which can be composed of different shapes, such as remote control cars, drones and pet robots, etc., and the products can also be controlled through the APP.
Imagination is the selling point for product development, and for the practical experience of customers, it can be the source of product enjoyment. Through the editor provided by the technology, consumers can "create" the robot's personality, temperament, skills, and customize movements and expressions. In order to realize the fun of robot DIY, Ke Technology has designed more than 700 emotions, more than 1,000 different actions, 11 interactive games and tool applications to meet tens of thousands of different combinations. After the product was introduced to the market, it was well received for its novel gameplay.
For the average practitioner, the role of the product manager may be the most able to directly participate in the business imagination as a non-purely technical person.
Product manager position, responsible for linking business and technology in most robotics startups, and comprehensively tracking the implementation of projects. Practitioners need to have a holistic perspective. "In the robot industry, there are three kinds of product managers: the whole machine, hardware and software, and the product manager who has the highest requirements and the most money is the one who makes the most money. Headhunter Zhang Bin said.
An excellent product manager can earn a salary that exceeds that of a technical person in charge at the same level, or even a department head.
Previously, a product manager of Ecovacs polished a product, which was very popular in the market. In Ecovacs, hisThe annual salary is more than 400,000；After jumping ship and leaving, the new owner offered a direct priceMore than 1.5 million。According to BOSS direct recruitment data, Ecovacs' current product manager position is indeed availableMore than 35k monthly salary
The market smell of the popular product manager is very sensitive, and he will track the information, technical routes, and trends of competing products for a long time. "Zhang Bin's talent standard seems to return to the familiar and common side of the workplace: the legend of getting rich and the bubble crisis may be manifested in the sky above the red ocean or the blue ocean at the same time; But after the wave retreated, it always seemed that there was always a group of people with similar merits.
In order to protect the privacy of the interviewees, Li Xiang, Ma Chuang, Zhang Bin, Huang Sheng, and Li Hong are pseudonyms in the article).
Written by|Xiaowei
Edit|Chen Tong
Typography|Cheng Danni