It seems that we have constructed a world of jobs where consistency is the primary value, even though the end goal is just to get some work done. On the Intern

It seems that we have constructed a world of jobs where consistency is the primary value, even though the end goal is just to get some work done. On the Internet we have constructed systems that accept contributions from people that can be as little or as much as they want to contribute - like Wikipedia, or newsy sites like Hacker News, or Github. These websites succeed where those that require too much up-front commitment fail. Like Nupedia (or even SourceForge, in the old days, when it was the "go-to" place for open-source development). Out in the real world we still demand (mostly), mandatory minimum levels of commitment. Or, where work can be casual, it gets paid much less than the "regular" jobs. There are opportunities for any company that can work out how to make use of those who want to work, at least some of the time, but who are unable or unwilling to commit to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. We could blame the contributors of Nupedia for the failure of that website. And we could blame all those open-source programmers who were too lazy to jump through the minimal set of hoops that SourceForge required for contributors, for the demise of that website. But we know that better alternatives exist, which are more tolerant of slackness and lack of commitment from their contributors. So we can see that those older websites were not the best possible way to organise how to get people to contribute their efforts.