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Comment by entangld | Hacker News Reader

>>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand.<<

People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.

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This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time.

Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.

> Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency.

I think the problem here is that workers are even less fungible than corporate stocks. The process of separating out the chronically unemployed but capable from the chronically unemployed because of fundamental flaws is quite a job in and of itself.

Hello, I'm a freelancer. I'll do the job you want for 150% of my former salary, yet at a lower price that my boss sold it to you !

I wonder why everyone is not doing that... I cut the middle men, so that means I get to go to dinner with clients, I get to negotiate prices, I got to be friend with the CEO of the startup that employs me.

I always suspected that the salary of a commercial was a high price for a very comfortable job, and I can confirm it !

According to economics, companies exist when workers are able, together, to output more than the sum of their parts. More enough to compensate for the boss overhead, and then some. In fact, it's recommended to go indie if you're medium to strongly competent in a wide range of skills such as marketing, sales, programming and operations... But for most specialized workers, the company provides the collective which makes sure they can package their work together with others and sell it to the client as a final integrated product.

I agree that this is the ideal situation but I think the system has been perverted. A single developer alone will probably bring less money than if he was working in a company, but the money he earns personally increases.

I personally blame a whole generation of people coming out of management school thinking they deserved a higher salary than anyone else when in fact they were doing a job that was equally important (no more, no less) than any worker in the company.

Your work now consists of your former job and being a salesman. That explains why everyone's not doing it.

"Being a salesman" consists in being a nice human and a little bit of an actor. Any self-respecting roleplayer can be one.

It's also because most people just want the comfort and stability of a job.

Someone just submitted this link to Coffee & Power (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971171). I haven't tried it, but this concept seems like a small but good start to solving the labor granularity problem.

Right, because looking for a job takes a lot of time. So the opportunity cost of taking a crappy job might prevent you from ever finding a good job.

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