4 ms·

Seems to me that this has a pretty intimate relation to the question of the "nature of the firm." Why do we work in firms rather than as independent contractor

• glifchits 9y ago
  That's a great point, and the nature of the firm is something worth thinking about especially in this context. However, the "firm" structure creates lots of efficiencies. Individual contracts are costly to enforce and having one type of contract (the employee contract) allows hiring to scale a lot better. Employees (and usually not contractors) are exclusive to an employer which is also desirable for employers. Employees also get benefits, which a lot of people like. There's also efficiencies gained by people working in the same room. Any type of creative work for example can benefit greatly from a quick in-person chat, or just bouncing a quick idea off of your colleagues. This is even true for some developers (myself included). Some types of work truly rely on communication between colleagues, and that would be really hindered by latency issues due to low frequency async communication. Coordination is also very important and much harder to do with async communication. Tribalism is an interesting lens, and maybe it started out that way, but the firm is certainly valuable.
  • mbrock 9y ago
    My intuition is that people like to start firms because they enjoy the feeling of being tribal leaders, and people like to participate in firms because of ordinary tribal hierarchical belonging... And the subtle near-mystical benefits to being in the same room, the "high bandwidth communication" of "body language" and all those things, all seem to me to have a great deal to do with the ancient structure of the primate dominance hierarchy! You notice when you bring up the topic of remote work in an organization that isn't fully remote already (i.e., isn't operated by introverted shamanic nomads) that it's totally not a decision about rational economic benefits. It seems to be much more about family, tribe, smelling each other's sweat, etc. Benefit calculations are tricky because you could find just as many benefits to working separately, although it might lead to you to think of work in a different way, a less tribal way. You don't argue that professors, poets, and carpenters need to huddle up in a boiler room to get their work done, because we know that some modes of working more require privacy, relaxation, autonomy, etc. I think tribalism is really powerful and like a core force in our evolutionary heritage. As it happens, I personally tend to inhabit the fringes of the tribe, and I do better work in a solitary or remote situation.
• ilaksh 9y ago
  Because companies existed before email and were originally largely slave labor.
• poslathian 9y ago
  Last years econ nobel prize winner pioneered research into this question. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2016/advanced-economicsciences2016.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...
  • mbrock 9y ago
    Thanks, I'll check it out!