Peering Inside: The Second Life year in review (part 3)

by Tateru Nino on Jun 23rd 2008 10:30AM

Jobs and related employment

Do you work in Second Life? Is your job related to it, or were you recruited through the virtual world? There's certainly been quite a bit on offer through the last twelve months in the way of job opportunities, and with the exception of the occasional cutback at a metaverse developer, it looks like the next twelve months will continue to grow the overall accessibility of jobs through Second Life.

Metaverse developers were doing fairly well early on.
TMP held one of several job fairs, as did Cisco Systems and Working Worlds. The Canadian Police and Ontario Public Service also drew on Second Life for recruiting.
Manpower Recruiting launched their virtual branch, so did an Australasian recruitment firm, Sapphire Technologies. Linden Lab and NCSoft tried to recruit the British in the traditional manner: pouring booze into them. Linden Lab also held a hiring party at GDC, and yet another at Barcamp Brighton, and also tried to recruit top-class network engineers from all over as well as web-development and operations staff.
Omnicom purchased a chunk of developer Millions of Us.
Electric Sheep shucked one third of their staff. They've also got a bit of tax drama going with the IRS, as to whether their contractors are, well, contractors or not.

[Read on]: Drama!

Reader Comments (2)

For myself, in the last 12 months, I've gone from a resident who works as a hostess at a mall for a small number of Lindens to a professional content creator (or "solution provider" in LL terminology).

Smaller MDCs and individuals seem to have survived better this year, from what I can tell, but this is not without some exceptions.

Overall, I've noticed fewer and fewer commercial builds and significantly reduced presence of the bigger MDC companies... but I do have to wonder whether this has more to do with the sheer number of builds there *are* (making it difficult to cover all of them) or whether there are simply just fewer companies investing in SL.

I have noticed an increase in educational builds - as was discussed last week at the latest Metanomics session - these in particular are interesting to me because the make better use of the medium and challenge developers to keep things interesting and entertaining, while remaining informative to the lay person.

As for the future? I would be interested to see how multiple grids will be affected by this change in MDCs, in the light that folks are punching wormholes between worlds, so to speak. Can MDCs still be dominated by larger companies? or is the ocean just too big to be dominated by one fish? One should keep in mind that the reduced cost of islands in SL as well as the significantly lower cost of islands on alternative grids will have a big impact on costs and what MDCs can feasibly charge (IE: Less).