The Long March from Crowdsourcing to a Global Meritocracy
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
The fundamental issue here is that work is increasingly shifting into knowledge work, and knowledge work requires personal relationships and trust. Even assuming you can somehow bridge the trust and fraud gap to create a viable micropayment system for this work—and that's one overwhelmingly huge if—you still have the problem that the newcomer doesn't understand your company culture and the nuances of how you do business.
The idea that there are people out there who can magically solve your company's problems is horse shit. The few really talented people who would "get it" and hit the ground running probably are already super busy. Otherwise people need time to learn how to do the job. In a startup this is done with (hopefully) a smarter tight-knit team iterating rapidly. In a huge company this is done by policies and procedures laid out over time to allow people to be more interchangeable. But in either case you need long-term personal relationships for the employee to realize their value to the company.
the basic idea is that it's becoming easier to grasp what you need than who you are, as a company. If you take research, the same staff of Whatever Inc has to deal with an ever increasing complexity, and thus it could be that it's better to work with people who know what you are looking for than those who know who you are by being affiliated with you for years. Of course not true everything but an increasing amount of challenges.
The problem currently is that most platforms include bidding mechanisms, which as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons don't appeal to the ones who "get it", thus only enabling low wage tasks. Getting this and, fully agreed, the right communication channels facilitating relationships (eg Bloomberg terminals from it's early days) could open a nice window of opportunity for everybody involved...
Maybe I'm just not smart enough, but this is mumbo-jumbo to me. I have no idea what you're talking about.
In the above examples it's way more important to be good in knowing the mobile market locally, Python or storyboarding than having a long lasting relationship with AT&T, IBM or W&K.
when having to choose, i'd already rather go to trada to find someone who's really good at copywriting, keyword picking etc, chances are they grasp what i'm about / need faster than someone who knows that for a long time, but is not so obsessed / good with SEM and would have to acquire those skills.
As it becomes easier for people to find work, folks who could have done some work but were never given an opportunity to do so will get those opportunities. Basically the talent pool will expand.
That's an important point. There are people out there who are able to do work, but who can't find a job where they live. This is the case in the Philippines, where there are highly-educated people (I personally know people with engineering degrees who literally cannot find jobs). Giving these people the opportunity to do a few hours of work here and there, especially at competitive rates offered by a global marketplace, will definitely expand the talent pool.
1. Job security. Most people seem to appreciate having a steady source of income. For a company to regularly outsource their jobs to the "smartest person" means that all the other "smart but not smart enough people" are without a job. So long as those other people are still able to find regular employment (i.e., exist within the traditional model), they'll do that, leaving fewer and fewer people available in the crowdsourcing pool.
2. Quality of job seekers. While it's true that in a meritocracy, the best rise to the top, this works best in a fairly small environment. If the entire ecosystem of web developers was required to compete for every single job, and anyone seeking a developer had only the entire ecosystem to look through, finding an "appropriate match" would become far too daunting, and the employers would be forced to reduce the rigor with which they vetted potential employees. This allows weaker candidates to get potentially good jobs. As a result, the more qualified candidates leave, and the meritocracy system is ruined.
Ad pt 1: Absolutely agree, but a gradual shift could also have supply/demand adoption curves overlapping quiet neatly.
You need to be able to build up your domain knowledge as a company, not just tap into the knowledge of others temporarily. There is also the 800 lbs gorilla of support which can probably never be effectively solved via a pie-in-the-sky everyone does what they enjoy model. Pursuing your passion is simply not scalable, sure there will be plenty of people that get away with it but it is not feasible to say everyone will be able to. Someone needs to mop the floors, clean the toilets, and answer calls to the help desk.
At the end of the day I agree that freelance will probably become more prevalent and the commoditization of software components will certainly reduce the need for in-house expertise. These forces will bring us closer to the authors vision but the demand for support and in-house knowledge will herd us into monolithic organizations for the foreseeable future.
On the specific point on what's holding back a more distributed/networked model of production, I think one obstacle is that labor is not easily "commoditized" in a way that facilitates trade (see http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/horton.pdf for more on this).
Mao Zedong committed genocide against China's intelligentsia. The class of people he murdered were part of China's tradition of Confucian meritocracy. The Long March was the military campaign where Mao won power. So that title is about as bad as talking about a Final Solution to the problem of racism.