Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianl | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

The 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 :)

This. I deal with this kind of sentiment daily after switching from lamp to work here at microsoft.

I heard some Microsoft employees own and use iPhones. Isn't that frowned upon?

Lots 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.

When 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.

the 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.

I 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.

This 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.

Teams 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.

Anybody remember when Apple in its beginning years hiring teams?

The story goes that there were internal battles..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com