Crowdsourcing and the end of job interviews

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/02/crowdsourcing-end-of-job-interviews.html

by Panos • 14 years ago

7 2 14 years ago

gm• 14 years ago

I don't buy this. In a job interview, both parties enter into a formal agreement: I will do this for you and you will in turn compensate me. We both agree on the terms and we both sign the dotted line. If either one of use does not hold his end of the bargain, then we part ways. But at least initially, we both trust each other to do as agreed. After everything's signed we have a reasonable expectation of what will happen in the following days/months. It's a tarnishment of our reputations (and in extremes, legal liability) to renege on our agreement.

Additionally in traditional employment there is the expectation that good performance will be rewarded, minimally with the privilege of keeping your job. At the very least, the employee's performance will be monitored, and things will happen in response to that performance, particularly if the performance is bad.

Compare that to crowsdsourcing, where it's completely at will, there is no agreement to deliver anything. As the article says, anyone can do whatever the hell they want whenever they want.

Why would anyone who has better options go the crowdsourcing way, where there is no expectation of anything, either formal or implied? There is also no expectation at all of performance even being monitored, much less exemplary performance being noted.

So what is the benefit for the for the "crowd" of crowdsourcing?

Being an easily replaceable cog in a giant machine is no step forward. This is even more retrograde than the factory era, where your widget output per minute was at least monitored and you got marginally small benefit from being the best cog in the wheel.

So no. I disagree. Anyone who can do anything nontrivial of value will not subject themselves to crowdsourcing. Even a new professional trying to break into any field will do better to seek out an opportunity that will get them the good kind of attention if there is above average performance. The Harvard grads in the mailroom are aiming to do exactly that. The benefit of the loss leader of accepting a shitty job is the chance to show off and wow superiors.

Crowdsourcing is built to anonymize workers and make them utterly and completely replaceable.

ilaksh• 14 years ago

I think he is right, and its cool in a way, but also there are problems.

I like odesk a lot because if I sift through enough 'jobs' I eventually find some actual specs. I can just start working on a prototype and usually after sending out two or three links to prototyped applications I can get a project.

The problem is that since I'm competing with everyone in the whole world who saw the spec and decided to try to get it, I can't charge US rates, and I now need to move to India in order to afford the cost of living.

Where this is going is that there will be so many developers, people will just post specs, and the developers will _have_ to submit prototypes, and whoever's prototype is selected wins, and everyone else just wasted their time.

And within not too many years we will have Watson-like computer programs competing on sites like odesk.

Actually, even without really sophisticated AI like Watson, you could probably just take the huge repository of applications available to one of the giant Indian outsourcing companies (from previous projects, yes technically would not be legal to use a lot of it but many clients won't care as long as it means they can solve their business problem cheaply) and apply some fairly standard (but contemporary) AI to searching/pattern matching it against specs, and then that becomes the prototype or even iteration one of actual product. Or even the final product.

The end game for this is technological unemployment for software developers.

I think that better technology and efficiency is very important, but we need to take a very hard look at wages-for-labor and the division between the worker class and investment/ownership class. The idea that class doesn't exist or that membership into the ownership class is actually merit-based is a myth.

http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...

Crowdsourcing and the end of job interviews

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