4 ms·
Interesting idea, hiring a team like this could have its drawbacks. For instance, what happens when they want to leave? You have a segment of your work force le
by ianl 15y ago
Interesting idea, hiring a team like this could have its drawbacks. For instance, what happens when they want to leave? You have a segment of your work force leaving with domain knowledge all at once.
It seems really good for teams, you get to pick your co-workers (at least some of them) and you can negotiate larger compensation packages as a group.
- foresterh 15y agoI would be inclined to think there's less risk of the team leaving than of individual contractors leaving. They've found a gig, are working with their friends (or at least people they've chosen to work with) and are committed to each other as well as the project to stay on.
- rbranson 15y agoThis is solid. The team is not going to leave as a whole as much as any business would abandon a healthy (or maybe not so healthy) customer relationship. I also think that people will leave the team for the same reason they'd leave a healthy employment relationship: startup opportunity, education, family, retirement, etc. If the whole team does decide to move on, it's likely that the set of circumstances that would push a "packaged team" like this away would probably cause mass attrition with normal employees as well. Just today a friend of mine told me the 2 layers of management between him and the CEO quit on the same day, and he's feeling like he wants to quit now as well. So goes the pack.
- dxbydt 15y agoThe real drawback isn't the team leaving, its groupthink. I think we've all experienced this firsthand at some point in our lives, especially when we're getting hired for the first time - you walk into a room with the entire programming team. You are a stranger, but the team know each other. The team has agreed upon a common methodology, a common programming language, a common framework, maybe they all use vim on the Mac. You walk in & say something stupid like, Hey guys, lets just do this in xyz language, you open your windows laptop & fire up TextPad & next thing you know, you're getting those weird "hey he's not really a part of our team" look. Then you pretend like you hit the wrong button and quickly bring up cygwin & they heave a sigh of relief :)
- keithnoizu 15y agoThis. I deal with this kind of sentiment daily after switching from lamp to work here at microsoft.
- Luyt 15y agoI heard some Microsoft employees own and use iPhones. Isn't that frowned upon?
- dxbydt 15y agoWhen I worked at Sun Microsystems, my manager & most of my colleagues used Windows. The inside joke was that Java performs much better on Windows than Solaris, but we weren't supposed to say that to our customers.
- andywood 15y agoLots of MS employees have iPhones, or use Google in the course of work. Responses vary. Fellow enthusiasts may give you the high-five. Your peers, and even younger managers might give you a light-hearted ribbing. Old-timers might give you a ribbing that's jokey on the surface, but actually a bit disapproving. Higher-up executives may actually indicate to you that it's a career-limiting move.
- zackattack 15y agothe founders of grouptalent would be prescient to advance sociometer usage - i'm going to blog about this in the next few days, but basically, you can determine electronically when groupthink conditions arise, typically within 30 seconds.
- shareme 15y agoAnybody remember when Apple in its beginning years hiring teams? The story goes that there were internal battles..
- smackay 15y agoTeams with domain knowledge should be especially valuable since they learned all the important lessons on somebody elses dime. The domain knowledge need not be too high-level for example. A team that could assemble all te infrastructure to run a modern web app could probably command a high premium due the time they would save in getting any company up and running.