With an annual salary of 1 million yuan, or $145,200, and other perks, Baidu Map was deluged with 8,000 applicants for the position of map information collector.
Perks & Trade-Off
However, while the hefty pay and perks are attractive, the trade-off is also huge in terms of loneliness and being away from family and friends most of the time. Baidu, one of the largest internet companies in the world and China’s equivalent of Google, posted the job opening in early December and within two days got 8,000 applicants.
Since the job requires the Baidu employee to be on the road, mountain and sea, the map information collectors are given a sport utility vehicle, drone and other high-tech equipment to collect data as well as professional photography equipment. Besides being the job for adventurers, it is also a dream job with winter and summer vacations, insurance and allowance when in high-temperature zones, China Daily reported.
Beautiful Sceneries
Tang Qiying, a 21-year-old Baidu map information collector for more than one year, estimates he has traveled over 30,000 kilometers and visited five provinces in China in the last 12 months. He credits the job with his experiencing the most beautiful sceneries he has seen in his young life.
But there would also be arid times such as when all that Tang could see in a barely empty desert in Qinghai Province were a few antelopes. In the case of 24-year-old Zhu Zhaohui, his parents initially did not understand why he was always on a business trip the past 18 months. The time he felt afraid and went through difficult times are worth it since over 500 million people use data on Baidu Maps that he helps collect.
On Monday, the Open Location Platform company said it would be the provider of map content for Baidu Maps outside China following the firm’s expansion of coverage to Europe and other parts of the world, Yahoo Finance reported. The expansion aims to provide service for the growing number of Chinese tourists to Europe and other continents.