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BYOT: Bring your own team
- mathattack 10y agoInteresting. Seems like a cheaper alternative to acquihiring. :-) Long term I'd love to see stats on this. My intuition is you'd wind up more successful, similar to how referrals make better employees. There does seem like some risk though - the team will likely succeed or fail as a group.
- depot 10y agoDon't you think they'd separate if they failed? Or is separating the same as failing? If I had a team I'd want to keep it together but not so much if it doesn't actually work.
- cperciva 10y agoSeems like a cheaper alternative to acquihiring I was thinking exactly the same thing: This is like acquihiring except that it skips the "spend a year on a proof-of-talent product which gets thrown away after the acquisition". Of course, the downside is that the team interview process isn't likely to be anywhere near as effective a filtering tool as spending a year building a product.
- tedmiston 10y agoAnd two programmers that work well together isn't equivalent to two technical co-founders that work well together.
- joncooper 10y agoIt also skips the part where the team being hired gets a large signing bonus.
- cperciva 10y agoSure, but an (acqui)hiring bonus is balanced by the time spent creating the acquired company. I'd think of it as being part signing bonus and part back pay.
- mbesto 10y agoI'd imagine any smart working team would negotiate this heavily. This setup appeals heavily to someone like me (with 2 other people specifically), but I would also be personally be asking for $300k+ salaries for each person + signing bonus + RSUs. It would be a happy medium between a lengthy and pricey acquihire and getting 3 developers/PM people who you know already will work well together. I'd recommend that anyone doing this that they negotiate their salaries very heavily.
- lawnchair_larry 10y agoWhat experience are you drawing on for that recommendation? Big companies don't typically negotiate wildly on salary, as it's tied to a leveling system that breaks too many things if your numbers don't fit. They would have to negotiate on levels and make everyone VPs to meet your salary demands, which would cause other problems. So, this might not be the best advice. Acquihirees get a few knobs to turn, but salary is the least turnable.
- mbesto 10y ago> * What experience are you drawing on for that recommendation?* I work on tech M&A.
- lawnchair_larry 10y agoIs your experience different from mine then? You do see companies negotiating on salary?
- mathattack 10y agoIs there that much room for a company like Strike to negotiate on salary? I hope they're that entrepreneurial. For better or worse, I've seen large companies sometimes acquihire (amongst other reasons) as a way to pay up without killing their salary bands.
- ryandrake 10y agoAn acquired company's owners also get to pocket whatever the purchase price of the company was, less investors' take. Sweet deal! You get paid for your "company" and you also all get jobs! A team-hired group foregoes this, unless they negotiate an up-front "team acquisition fee".
- biot 10y ago> There does seem like some risk though - the team will > likely succeed or fail as a group. And the team may also leave as a group.
- mathattack 10y agoYes. Live by the sword, die by the sword. :-)
- abalone 10y agoNo, acquihires require the consent of management. Stripe makes it clear this is primarily for software engineers, not "managers".* This is for "group defectors" i.e. engineering coworkers who are unhappy at their current company, complain about it together, and can coordinate their migration. This (potentially) gives them a way to move together as a team. *(Granted, some startups are 100% engineers, but they could make much more money via an acquihire than this route.)
- studentrob 10y ago> Stripe makes it clear this is primarily for software engineers, not "managers".* If a team already works well together, what is their new Stripe manager going to do? That sounds a bit awkward for said manager. He or she would be in a weak negotiating position with the group. I'd argue that although Stripe isn't seeking to hire more managers, they are outsourcing management a little bit by allowing these not-yet-hires to form their own teams. It does relieve some burden. I wonder what happens when something goes awry and a correction is needed. Will the group follow the new manager's suggestions? So many things could go right or wrong with this.
- pyb 10y agoGreat idea ! But if they are going to be interviewing all team members separately through the normal process, it seems unlikely that a team as a whole would pass their bar.
- mathattack 10y agoI think they'd judge the team as a whole, rather than individuals. So it would be "Does the whole team average X?" as opposed to "Does the weakest individual hit bar X?"
- pyb 10y agoThat's not what I understood from the post.
- mathattack 10y agoRereading, I think you're right. If we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time; you’d all be free to accept or decline individually, but of course we’d hope you’d all accept This implies individual hiring criteria. It's interesting that they let the group try and solve a problem as a team. I wonder how this will impact compensation and offer acceptances.
- tedmiston 10y agoIt sounds like the interview process is still mostly individual (emphasis mine): > Once you’ve applied, we’ll take you all through the hiring process together: we’ll make sure you hit the same stages of interviews at the same time, bring you all to the office on the same day, and try to design at least one interview problem that you can work on as a team.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoI thought that too. Maybe the team should be evaluated as a _team_? I mean, forget the individual resumes altogether. If everyone on the proposed incoming team says they're happy with everyone else on the proposed incoming team, then just accept that at face value and hire the team. Also, if the conventional wisdom is that hiring excellent tech individuals is difficult, then hiring excellent tech teams -- would that be easier or harder than hiring individuals?
- LaurenceW1 10y agoBut then how do you prevent your fate as an individual in the company from being tied to the others? Do you get put on the same team? Do you get promoted together?
- jzwinck 10y agoThe devil you know is better than the one you don't. You'll be joining a team either way.
- Southworth 10y agoTotally fascinated to see how this plays out. Been thinking about "crew hiring" as I've roughly termed it, cohorts of flexible, ad-hoc, a-gamers who like to move around, groove on idea and commit when it feels solid, interesting and a great fit for them. Taking this further, we see companies becoming an "atelier/studio methodology of multiple "teams" working within a collective space for a unified aim.. We can all easily see how this could degenerate as well as succeed. It's a super fascinating idea, and I am genuinely fascinated to see what plays out. I have yet to bet against Stripe.
- stormbuilder 10y agoAlso known as consultants, who get hired full time if the company likes them and viceversa.
- ff_ 10y agoThis is an amazing idea. Kudos to the Stripe team for putting it into action! Personally I can feel this "flow", and I have some favorite pair programming friends; it's hard to beat the feeling of having someone else that completes your sentences or writes down in code the idea that you were thinking out after just saying a couple of words or exchanging a single glance. The probability of this happening on a new workplace with people that you don't know doesn't seem so high to me, so this idea really makes sense. Has any other company thought of this before?
- ChicagoBoy11 10y agoI remember reading a blog post about a year ago where this guy talked about going through a similar process of "applying as a team" at a different company - just commenting now so if someone who also read it (but unlike me actually remembers who it was) can post it here. This is definitely not the first time I've seen this concept on HN, though
- ChicagoBoy11 10y agoclay_to_n posted the one article I read!
- clay_to_n 10y agoI'm sure there are older precedents, but the first thing I read about this concept was from this article from 2015, in which a team applied together to various companies: http://chocolatetin.org/2015/09/30/team-job-hunt.html http://chocolatetin.org/2015/09/30/team-job-hunt.html HN discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10390834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10390834
- eadz 10y agoThere is a startup that specialises in recruiting teams rather than individuals. https://goelevator.com/ https://goelevator.com/ I can't see many downsides - except for the poor companies that have whole teams disappear on them.
- 10y ago
- Roritharr 10y agoDamn. I just talked with our CEO about that exact concept as our new innovative hiring method. Now I look like a copycat. -_-
- kbar13 10y agowell if he accuses you of being a copycat, you can bring your team to stripe.
- mikeyanderson 10y agoJust use GoElevator.com we make it simple.
- pyb 10y agoBTW, are there any London based companies reading this, who'd be interested in a BYOT ? I might be interested in applying together with another developer.
- sumobob 10y agoSuch a great Idea. I feel thers a lot of programmers out there who like to work with certain people and personalities in any capacity, whether that means at a startup or on side projects. Its rare to find programmers that you can get in a pair programming "zone" with, once you do, you're reluctant to lose them.
- bsimpson 10y agoI swear I read a blog post about a year ago where someone detailed their experience applying somewhere as a team.
- bobwaycott 10y agoTo whomever at Stripe: is this only for on-site teams, or are you open to remote teams?
- avibryant 10y agoWe're open to remote or distributed teams within the US and Canada. All else being equal, we'd prefer to hire people in SF, but for a sufficiently great team, being elsewhere wouldn't be a showstopper. We're conscious of not wanting to miss out on the diverse, talented set of people that happen to be outside of the bay area. (I may be biased here: I work for Stripe from a small community off the Canadian coast).
- JabavuAdams 10y ago> from a small community off the Canadian coast ?
- wolfico 10y agoI have a mostly US based team that might be interested but we have one employee in Mexico. Would that be a disqualifier? We'd be willing to transfer the infrastructure for that (foreign subsidiary and payroll and all that which is already in place.)
- jorgeortiz85 10y agoYou should apply anyway and describe your situation! Supporting additional countries is challenging from several angles (payroll, international tax structure, compliance, etc), but we can talk through your particular situation individually.
- bpchaps 10y agoBe very, very careful with this. I was once brought to a company where my boss and her boss came from the same company essentially at the same time. My boss was considered overly aggressive with wanting to make (good) changes and "spoke too fast" (seriously, grown ass people made that complaint) this, but her boss was pretty much universally hated. That attitude reflected extensively downwards onto me and her. I couldn't handle it and had to leave after four months.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoYeah. I think you've hit on another danger: group culture clashes. It seems like an entire team would be more difficult to beat into submission, I mean, acculturate, than just one single person.
- bpchaps 10y agoThe HR person at that same place told me that they often hired people knowing that they'd quit sometime into their employment and hinted they were there for only for political weight. So yeah, acculturation often runs deep and sharp.
- huangc10 10y agoThis idea sounds excellent and definitely some outside of the box thinking! However, if I had a team that I really work great with and trust, I'd probably do a startup instead with said team. That's just me though. I think this concept might attract fresh grads more and could be integrated into a BYOT internship program.
- jonwachob91 10y agoNot all engineers want to be entrepreneurs ;)
- enjo 10y agoI for one am a big fan of getting paid. "Doing a startup" is no trivial task. Just getting the funding in place to provide enough money to pay everyones bills is more than almost any "startup" ever achieves. This might be an interesting way to ensure that I work with people I'm inspired by. I dig what they're doing.
- overcast 10y agoYou can "do a startup" while working at an existing company. People do it all the time working nights and weekends on a project.
- snuxoll 10y agoNot so easy once you have a family, I barely have time to mess with new tools in my home lab, working a second job just sounds taxing (the only reason I even have an LLC is legal shielding for the odd repair / small business IT job I have on the side).
- overcast 10y agoPeople with families create things all the time. Not an excuse.
- 10y ago
- choward 10y agoThat's a pretty creative way to get rid of referral bonuses. I suppose you could refer a whole team though.
- zindlerb 10y agoStripe doesn't have referral bonuses.
- rajacombinator 10y agoKudos for trying something outside the box.
- andrewstuart 10y agoI'm a recruiter (yeah, yeah, recruiters know nothing) and I'm going to call this as a fail. It's INCREDIBLY hard to get even one person employed. The bar is so high at most employers that almost every applicant gets rejected. So the likelihood of all members of a given set of X people being employed is almost zero. What happens to the team dynamic when the employer wants to employ Jenny and Steve but not Bill, Mike and Vivek? This might sound good but it aint going to work.
- enahs-sf 10y agoThis has been a common practice in enterprise sales organizations for while. - Hire new CRO or President of sales. - He "builds out a team" generally consisting of people he's already worked with in the past. - Sales org grows. - CRO moves to next company. wash rinse repeat ad infinitum. Why would this process breakdown given a team of proven, successful engineers who have shown to be capable of building/scaling a product in the past?
- andrewstuart 10y agoWhy not the same? Cause sales ain't software.
- jchendy 10y agoCare to explain what the relevant differences are?
- andrewstuart 10y agoBetween software engineers and salespeople? Really? A better question would be "what do they have in common?"
- joncooper 10y agoAmong other factors, salespeople have a large variable component to their compensation. They tend to be highly economic animals in a way that most engineers are not. Hence a former boss can easily convince them to join up by making a compelling argument about their prospective earnings.
- ekianjo 10y agoYes, finally, a company that realizes that bringing a team is much better than bringing one employee at a time.
- curryhowardiso 10y agoStripe changing the game again. Well done team Stripe!
- lzecon 10y agoThis is cool, but to really make this game changing they'd revamp their interview process to interview all members together (or in pairs of 2-3) some people just perform better with their partner and the interview process itself should account for it (if they're assuming that's true).
- biot 10y agoDidn't they already cover that in the article? "... we’ll make sure you hit the same stages of interviews at the same time, bring you all to the office on the same day..." Or are you saying even the initial interview should be as a team rather than starting with individual ones?
- lzecon 10y agoIt would be awesome if they could interview as a team instead of individually.
- stegosaurus 10y agoI'm a bit confused as to how this works in an employment scenario where the contractual terms aren't fixed. How is salary negotiated? What happens over time - do you just become discrete employees? What about internal promotion - does it just not happen? I would find it incredibly difficult to get together with friends and decide 'right, i guess we're all worth X each then, let's go for that'.
- desdiv 10y ago
- megablast 10y agoGreat for the situation where everyone is a clone. Shitty in real life where some people are clearly better than others.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y agoWhat if some members of the team are more senior than others? What if members specialize in areas with differing market rates? It just feels somewhat clumsy.
- Falcon9 10y agoWe had to do this the old fashioned way with my current team: One person gets in the door at the new company, talks up the abilities of the old team members and how they would slot in nicely with new company's needs and gets another person in, then another until the old team is fully reunited in the new company. We've been a very effective unit once we removed the road blocks in the new company!
- jzwinck 10y agoSo exactly like immigration to a new country. Interesting. But given the short expected tenure of an average employee these days, I wonder how many are willing to wait for this long pipeline to complete. Getting hired all at once could mean working together for three years starting today rather than starting in a year or two, when attrition is already ripe to occur at the new company.
- rhizome 10y agoI call this "getting the band back together," and is a thing that does not always endear you to your coworkers.
- Falcon9 10y agoYeah, we slowly "outlasted" the coworkers and now it's just us over here. Management is happy, we're happy, old coworkers have jobs elsewhere. Side note: we only brought the good parts of the "gang" over, left the deadweight behind.
- Rapzid 10y agoSomething like this happened with Rackspace cloud management about 6 years back.. :|
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 10y agoId love to do this with each person working 2.5 days and splitting the salary. That way I could work part time and the company gets full time work.
- jzwinck 10y agoBobTom, I had a long discussion with you on Monday about exactly how we could solve this problem affecting our production systems. Now it's Thursday and you're telling me you have no idea what we decided three days ago? You're fired.
- mrfusion 10y agoI imagine they share an email account. And have some overlap in their schedules to debrief.
- slackstation 10y agoThere are already groups that function this way, they are called consultants. If you are a high functioning team and want to keep working together, then form a consultancy together. You will probably get paid more over time. The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well. You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back. You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a team nor as individuals. It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount. The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what they could bargain for individually. Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain. It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company. If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy. Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even more chaotic. Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.
- qrian 10y agoIf forming a team massively benefits the hirer, the bar of hiring will go down thusly, meaning that people being hired also get compensated indirectly.
- slackstation 10y agoNo. Salaries are relatively inelastic while profit is wildly elastic. Per engineer, Google, Facebook, Apple make multiple millions of dollars in profit per fiscal year and yet very, very few engineers make $1m+. Even $500k is out of reach of most non-managerial engineers. So, no if Google made 2x or 4x the profit with the same engineers, they company would pay them the same exact rate if they could. Often times they do. The only way to really gain serious income is ownership of a technology that you can sell either directly to the market or to another company. No matter how much you make, as an employee you are always trading lower risk for lower or linear rewards. The company compensates you for your years of experience at a market rate but, retains the fullest share of the profits that they can. They also own the code of your labor after you leave the company so there's that. You work (especially as a developer) makes the company money even after you've left. If code wasn't so complex and hard to maintain, there would be even lower salaries (compared to profits) at software-based companies.
- apapli 10y agoGreat in theory, unworkable in practice. The downside to this will be the negotiated rate, and that is the upside for Stripe.... along with the lower risk hiring outcome they also receive. When time is not on your side your negotiating ability is severely hampered. There will always be an imperative for someone in a team to "hurry the paperwork" along faster than someone else because they need the financial security of a job etc etc. So unless the "team" is happy to delegate the entire negotiating process to one person with complete authority this situation will be unavoidable. And let's face it, not many people will blindly put their faith in someone else to negotiate every aspect of their next full time permanent position, including whether or not to accept it and give notice at their current employer. Money isn't everything of course, but this is a sure-fire approach to limiting your income, thus don't think there will be many takers. As someone else said in the comments here, the more practical alternative that actually does work is called consulting.
- ryandrake 10y agoNot to mention: If you believe you have the skills necessary to pass an interview at Stripe individually, there's only down-side risk to doing a team interview. Therefore only people who do not believe they are lock-ins individually will choose this option. End result: Only teams of mediocre or less-confident employees will use it.
- potatoyogurt 10y agoNot necessarily true. If you're part of a team you really like, being able to guarantee that you can work with people you like at a new job is a pretty big upside. And if you're really good and are confident in your interviewing skills, then you can afford for the team interview to not work out, because you can probably find just as good a job somewhere else (or reapply as an individual).
- apapli 10y agoThat's fine, money isn't everything. But this is definitely not the strategy to employ if money is high on your priority list.
- galistoca 10y agoI don't know, to me it just sounds like a gimmicky way to get more people to apply. That's what recruiters do. They try to get as many people to apply as possible, and then filter the hell out of them. So just because a recruiter "reached out" to you via linkedin or something, it doesn't mean they think highly of you. Actually, you should assume that they don't care at all about what you've achieved. You're just one of many fish they're trying to pass through their funnel. That's why I am genuinely curious what they plan to do once they hire teams. Let's say you hire a team of a designer and a developer. It's not like they will be always working together and with no one else in the company. Chances are you won't be working as the tag team forever. That would be stupid both for the company and for these people because you are being too closed minded and won't learn much by only interacting with the other person when there are so many other talented people in the company. I presume that isn't what they plan to do. Then that leaves us with the option of just hiring them "as a team" but once they're in, there's no guarantee that they will work as the same team, just like how most acquisitions work--when they acquire a company they say stuff like "Company A's expertise will be helpful in us developing our such and such core features", but after the acquisition they all disperse and get assigned to different teams after a while. So... what's the point? Well that's why I think it's a gimmicky way to attract attention and get more people to apply. Any counter argument?
- bbcbasic 10y agoI think you have hit the nail on the head. With the HN exposure all the better. Any team that gets an offer should come back and ask for +50% since they have as a united team the upper hand.
- vasilipupkin 10y agothere is really little downside. Imagine a team of 3 applies and one guy is just brilliant and the other two are just average. First of all, average people are worth it if you can get 1 brilliant guy or girl. Secondly, you can always let the average people go few months later and keep the brilliant person, if you so choose
- studentrob 10y ago
- samstave 10y agoNice to see this idea starting to start up: I've founded a slack group of all my Devops folks uber exactly this philosophy... We are starting SVOPs (Silicon Valley ops) - we have built some shit... But mostly we just wanted to start a consortium. Join us if you'd like... SVOPs.slack.com - we are all actively looking for people or help - or even jokes or learning or what not... Silicon Valley needs much more community (not in the Facebook kind, but in the "hey lets play DnD and drink and talk shit and be like OMG I heard about that and dos you know also....") kind... We have a culture - it's not evenly distributed but it's here and it drives a lot of shit... Come join. Where you are physically located doesn't matter: Sam@sstave.com
- sbilstein 10y agoThis definitely happens all the time formally and informally in SV. Sometimes a manager is poached and brings a bunch of old employees along...sometimes a small acquihire happens. Or after an acquisition event some portion of the company decides they would rather be elsewhere and talk to execs at a larger company.
- qaq 10y agoCan we bring our own CTO & CEO :)?
- jorgeortiz85 10y agoThey can certainly apply as part of your team! Though you should give some thought ahead of time as to what their roles would be at Stripe. We're not currently hiring for the roles of CEO or CTO ;).
- dorfsmay 10y agoPros for Stipe: hire a lot of people at once, hire a bunch of people who are probably working well together. Cons for stripe: risk of the team bringing not only their previous company culture, but also their group micro culture. Risk of all of them leaving Stripe all at once (they did it once). Pros for the new team: I can't think of any, I've never been in a group where I thought everybody was great (and beside I see meeting new people as a perk of changing job).
- mikeyanderson 10y agoWe started a company for exactly this purpose. It's called goElevator.com and it allows you to make multiple teams of people you'd love to work with—we present dozens of interesting companies with anonymized profiles and let you know the potential opportunities before you ever have to interact with a recruiter or hiring manager.
- spullara 10y agoEven if they all get hired together any organization of size would have problems keeping them together. I have seen many team acquihires that immediately get broken up and they at least get a huge premium relative to this offer.
- d--b 10y agoI have very big concerns about culture. When you bring new people to a company, they tend to work the way they use to in their previous occupation. More often than not, a new employee will start his sentences with "What we used to do in this situation" or "that's why we did it that way at X", trying to both build up on his past experience, and to find an anchor of familiarity in an unfamiliar environment. This is normal phase and usually wears off after a few weeks/months. But for as long as it lasts, this behavior can be annoying for your current employees as they have built up their own thing, and they don't necessarily want to be reminded that there were other options that they didn't follow. The risk that you take when bringing a team of 3 to 5 people is that they go in their own corner, dismiss all the tools that already exist, recreate the work environment they are used to, don't mix well at all with other employees, etc. And what you get from people being used to work together, you loose in management pain. I think the usual way of hiring one person, who then can refer to the good guys in his previous team is a much sounder approach, as it lets time for the culture to adapt.
- newman8r 10y agoreminds me of the dual interview in Stepbrothers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1DAJxwWv2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1DAJxwWv2E
- morgante 10y agoCool idea. It's basically trying to cheaply scale the concept behind acquihires.
- k__ 10y agoSounds nice. There are probably many people who want to work with their friends, especially when they did OSS stuff together. On the other hand, I have different opinions than other people about when to leave a company, so I'm mostly on my own, even if I have worked with many good people who I'd love to take with me, haha.
- a_imho 10y agometa. Interesting idea, and I like it very much, however the wording of this metaphor is a bit offensive? >the industry has always focused on hiring atoms; we’d like to try hiring molecules.
- clentaminator 10y agoWhat about this is offensive?
- a_imho 10y agonon native so might be that, it just sounds weird comparing humans to atoms, like saying to your future employee we will treat you as a cog in the machine. OTOH, I think you are right, I was oversensitive.
- clentaminator 10y agoWas just curious as I wasn't getting the same vibe from it myself. Plus, these guys - http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/working_here http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/working_here - already have the whole "molecule" thing covered :)
- dougdonohoe 10y agoIf you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team.
- pwaring 10y agoI wonder how much litigation risk is involved with this. If you poach one key employee, the original company is likely to be a bit grumpy but probably won't do anything. If you poach an entire team, litigation may be worthwhile - especially if that team is their entire development staff (I've seen this happen in the UK insurance industry, cases go on for months and potentially involve millions of pounds).
- anaulin 10y agoAn interesting idea. I'd like to see some numbers on how many teams does Stripe get applying for jobs this way. (I'd love to also see measures on how well the teams hired this way perform, and how well are employees retained, but that seems hard to measure.) I am somewhat skeptical that this will be a great success. Just because a team performed well in one environment, it doesn't mean it will continue to do well in new circumstances (unless they are hired as external or independent consultants, as others have suggested in this thread). As an individual looking for a job, I would also want to know if applying as a team lowers or increases my chances of getting an offer.