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Many engineering projects (especially outside of software) can last many years, making engineer (knowledge and understanding) retention quite valuable, and the

• chatmasta 12y ago
  I'm familiar with that essay (did you also just watch Aaron Levie's stanford talk?), and that's a good point. How greatly are transaction/switching costs affected when segmenting projects in 6-12 month intervals? I would guess, that when you're throwing senior engineers at projects, the switching costs are non-trivial, but low. It's probably an acceptable tradeoff to pay when developing specialized projects you don't expect to carry over to future ones. There's also the argument of developing a labor force to compete with other enterprises. However, if the best engineers are in sufficiently high demand, it may be more economically rational for them to move between projects every 6-12 months, gradually increasing their pay-rate and improving their portfolio after completing each one. If this is the case, then companies would be forced to hire top engineers on a contractual basis (or pay them a significant markup annually), purely to compete in the labor market for top talent.
  • Swizec 12y ago
    It was my impression that most top engineers already do this by either being freelancers or through poaching. Or even, at the very least, by switching projects internally.