Hacker News Reader

>> a company might pay each member a bit more for a team experienced in working together, as in theory they should be more productive more quickly.

On the other hand, if you already have an established team, merging them when they see themselves as distinct groups might be tough.

The other issue I see is that I doubt companies will want this to become common in the industry. Even if it's great for hiring (and I think it often would be - especially for new projects), do you want support something that might encourage a group of all the employees in a particular specialization to band together and decide they want to all leave at once? I wouldn't. Especially since that might happen right at the time when new development is slowing down and deep knowledge about the current system is the most valuable asset related to the project.

I guess there is a fine line between collective bargaining and holding a company hostage.

Remember when the cast of Friends all negotiated for $1M/episode, and they pitched it as "you pay us all, or you don't have a product"? I don't recall any public outcry that they were holding NBC hostage.

As we move toward a completely digital society, it only makes sense that the digital gatekeepers will have more leverage. Employers hate that.

>> I don't recall any public outcry that they were holding NBC hostage.

My mental image of the cast of Friends holding NBC hostage is that of two people with guns trained on each other, both yelling, "come any closer and I'll shoot."

> There tend to be a couple issues with this model. For one, what if the hiring company interviews the team and wants 7 of the 10? The team has to make a decision to either look for work where they can all be on the team, or abandon members.

Exactly. We've been approached a few times by intact teams all wanting to join. My approach has always been that I love talking to people in this situation, but that our contracts, interviews, and offers are all between the company and the individual and that while we may have an initial project in mind where they'd all work together, that that was not guaranteed to hold true over time.

I'll also ask them individually if a case like the 7/10 above happens, would they prefer to get 7 offers or 0 offers? (I don't want to be the source of telling Alex, Becky, and Charlie that I didn't think Dave was strong enough to join the company if they don't want to hear that.)

And going forward the issue could also become on-the-job performance, where it could potentially come up where one team member underperformed. In a large consulting company environment the solution is easy (remove and replace), but with this kind of model it can be more complex.

If Alex, Becky, and Charlie have been working with Dave for some time and think he's just fine, you might consider that your short interview appraisal of him might be flawed.

That's possible (and we'd take that into account in interviewing, as would any sensible company).

It's also possible that he's a "really nice guy" and close friend of theirs and they're blind to his weakness.

It's also possible that he's a very strong contributor in a domain and skillset that the hiring company simply doesn't need.

It's also possible that while dave is great, your team doesn't need a dave regardless of how good he is.

  For one, what if the hiring company interviews the
  team and wants 7 of the 10?

In the model OP is talking about, that's not allowed. You either hire the whole team or none of them. The team knows this, so they're mostly not going to be running off to look at unrelated offers.

Thanks, but I'm not sure I understand your comment. Where does it say anything about the rules of this proposed idea? Isn't this a hypothetical?

It is inferred that the group would always work together on projects, so their availability would be the same... If you sell yourself as a group but everyone still looks for offers of their own, it kind of defeats the purpose

This is starting to sound more like a good old-fashioned agency.

And this is where the rubber hits the road.

In theory, yes, some actions are 'not allowed'. But this isn't an mathematical excercise it involves real people.

e.g. Who get's told the 'offers'? Do they get separate salary offers, or is it a single pot? If the latter, how do they decide what's fair? What happens if evereyone's extremely happy but one person? Or two people? What happens if there are competing offers that different members perfer unequally? How do the ongoing salary reviews go? Can individual members be fired after being hired?

It's going to be very messy, and I would imagine may not work a good proportion of the time. I would imagine a lot of the answers of the above questions would start looking like the answers given by a union, something that the tech community as a whole has avoided so far.

To take the proposed model to it's logical extreme, what if you only want 3/10, 2/10, 1/10? Now you're suddenly back to hiring individuals again.

The whole point of hiring a team is that you aren't evaluating individual performance or skills; you're evaluating the groups' performance and skills. If the team is good, the people who can't immediately be helpful will re-train so that they can provide skills that are useful in the new context. The team will evolve to become the exact team that you need.

Right, only wanting to hire 7/10 means the company thinks they're better at evaluating team members in a single interview than the team is at evaluating its members after working together. Or they just can't afford a team that large, and it's not the right one for them.

Unless everyone in the team did the same job it's pretty likely you'd end up in a situation of "we really like you 7 for the application layer, but we have a great front end team already, so we don't need you 3. So, do the 7 of you want a job?"

That seems like a best-case scenario to me, unless the team is 3-4 people and someone is looking to create a capability or product from scratch.

Add a filter for team size? That way you're not looking at teams that are bigger than you can afford.

It's a hypothetical that's only meaningful at all if it's an all-or-nothing deal. If it was anything else, it would essentially just be normal hiring and therefore boring.

Understood, but I also would think finding an 'all-or-nothing' deal for a team of any real size would be somewhat unique at that point. If you have a team of 10, and all 10 are required to come along, there is likely some chance of redundancy unless we're talking about pure greenfield projects and buyers with no staff.

I've heard of a company in Ottawa hiring students who worked on a final project immediately after graduation. They would set up a subsidiary, and give them a project manager to help guide the new projects.

I work at acompany where we usually work as team for several customers. They all have problems that need to be solved. We have an intact team witch broad knowledge and specialized expertise with each team member. Some times we work closely with other "natuve" workers, sometimes on our own. For each project one at our side is responsible for project management and communication. Doing this we are able to do multiple projects simultaniously as we work from remote and meet with skype or whatever. If needed we do onsite workshops. Some customers disn't know that model and had been skeptic about it, but the most are happy because they are wery flexible, for example if the project will be paused for a short while.

Without a doubt it is inherently difficult to hire a whole team. On top of that each team member may have different requirements, availabilities, etc.

Is it so bad that 7 of the 10 individuals from a team get an opportunity together? Referrals are a growing part of business, and who is to say that a whole team cannot eventually work at another company? You have a better chance applying as a team than anything else.

There are team hiring platforms out there, and at least there you can see what type of opportunities exist for you team. Worst case you say no.

Yeah, I've tried to keep a team together an leave a toxic employer. People just aren't interested. It's very rare that the need (or expectations) line up exactly.

Seems like this is better for freelancing when you can sell a solution and maintain autonomy in how you produce that solution.

Usually the closest I have seen to this is a architect or manager will be hired at a startup, and he will high a bunch of people from his own team.

>how to categorize teams and/or individuals

+ web design team name

| team member name | Role |

--

team member 1 - developer

team member 2 - creative director

team member 3 - designer

team member 4 - designer

team member 5 - production artist