Kudos

Euan referenced this post by Andy in his blog. I’m just copy pasting here:

“Imagine a machine that you can put into any country and when you turn the handle, generate jobs. Not regular jobs, but microjobs: short jobs that you can do at home are done and when you are paid you go on a short holiday and you have the certainty when there is another microjob waiting for you. That is living a la carte.”

Andy is referncing Pajamaproject as his example for a microjobs marketplace. I think Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is very similar, and could be expanded to include human generated jobs.

But comparisons aside, what I really like about the microjobs concept is that it makes me think of Grid Computing.

Grid computing relies on a master machine that delegates jobs to worker machines. The program is built in a highly multi-threaded design so that each thread could be run under a process on one of the workers. The master is in charge of delegating the jobs and collecting results. 

Sounds to me that’s how your normal workplace would function. You have a boss that delegates tasks to his employees. The employees work really hard and the boss takes all the credit. Maybe we’ve finally found a way to realize the work-from-home methodology that was so hot during the late 90′s.

What would it take to make a Human Grid? Could a Human Grid make the workplace obsolete? Will we all work occasionally from home, and spend our lives hopping from vacation to vacation, as Andy suggests?

I really hope so, but don’t hold your breath.

The reason workplaces have not fragmented into home based employement is because many corporate tasks require that employees know about the corporate’s:

• Cluture, ethics, brand and ethos.
• Infrastructure, regulations and policies
• Partners, other employees, competitors and customers

Also, there are many practical reasons, starting with Information Security and ending with access to hardware, applications and tools.

For example, I dont see any corporate delegating creation of graphics for it’s website to a transient home worker if that means the whole world can know what tomorrow’s marketing strategy is going to be.

Microjobs are cool, but if you’re looking for a career with the bigger companies don’t count on it happening just yet.

Unlike other expressions of the human capacity for tool making, computers are, perhaps uniquely, totally versatile in the sense that they can be programmed.

Computer programming is set on simple principles; 0′s and 1′s, on or off. From those humble foundations, springs complexity as layer after layer of abstraction are added, each designed to enhance our ability to utilize the one underneath.

When a programmer works on writing software, she usually does not dwell on the complexity she is creating with each line of code but , like art, no two pieces of software will ever be alike.

Software development is difficult to implement and a managerial challenge if ever there was one. It is a practical tautology that software projects neither finish on time nor on budget, while users are usually dissatisfied with the end product for some reason or other.

This behavior extends to IT. Generally speaking, the more versatile an appliance is (and thus more reliant on software), the more complex and uncertain to implement and maintain it will become.

This is very interesting because there are engineering tasks out there that are no less complex nor less monumental than writing software, yet are easier to manage in terms of risk; building sky scrapers could be one example. That’s because sky scrapers exhibit no emergent behavior.

Many smart people are addressing this challenge by thinking up new ways and creating new tools, to help managers tackle software projects. Probably one of the most interesting of those is Alistair Cockburn, who maintains that software development is most similar to a cooperative game.

I stumbled upon Alistair’s article about software development as a cooperative game (via coding horror), and it was absolutely fascinating. Only rarely do I read an article that leaves me saying “that’s right!” and “I can relate to this” and “damn, so true” so many times in one sitting. So before I go on – Kudos! to Alistair.

Mr. Cockburn’s article is a bit longish, yet packed with good material and is worth some serious discussion.

In future posts I will separately address, and add my own thoughts, on the points that are made in the article – starting with #1, Communication (here is a short excerpt):

“…The first thing to get is that no communication is ever perfect and complete. It just can’t be done. It is not even in the realm of possibility. Your listener, or the receiver of the communication, has to jump across a gap, at some point, and has to do that all on their own. You can’t do it for them. If they are very different from you, then they can’t jump a big gap. You have to explain some basic concepts to them, and then build forward until they build their own bridge of experience so they can finally get what you are saying…”

“The point is, we write these specification and design documents as though we could actually ever explain what we mean. And we can’t. We can never hope to completely specify the requirements or the design. Not even the faintest chance. When we write, we assume that the reader has a certain level of experience. If we can assume more experience, then we can write less. If we have to assume less experience, then we have to write more.“

“All communication is touching into shared experience.”

More on this to come. 

I’ve read lately that retail chain Best Buy is far into a new pilot program where employees get to work whenever they want. They can come and go as they please, as long as their targets and task deadlines are met. There is a hidden bonus here (aside from boosting employee engagement) – targets and tasks need to be thoroughly defined and tracked for the program to work. Both managers and employees have a good incentive to work those parameters out.

The pilot is being expanded from HQ staff to the retail floor. The assumption is that today’s workers can manage their own time, coordinating shifts with fellow employees and working together to meet store targets.

I find the experiment to be very interesting in a Web 2.0 kind of way. What Best Buy is basically doing is to shift power to the worker down the chain. That’s exactly what W2.0 does for the internet user. It shifts power down the chain, making each person a contributor.

Because of this conceptual similarity, I’m wondering how Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0, to be exact) can facilitate this transition at Best Buy. The article didn’t include any data on the kind of IT in place to support this shift in employment dynamics, but it stands to reason that such infrastructure is required.

Furthermore, the assumption that employees have the responsibility and capability to manage themselves as contributors is very exciting to me. Is this shift in mentality that characterizes today’s younger employee the result of growing up into a social internet? Or is the social internet a result of these attitude changes, and if so what caused them in the first place?

I’ve read an article on Ynet that describes the future of jobs, as resulting of Web 2.0. I have a strong disagreement with parts of that article.

To those of us that don’t read Hebrew, here is a summarized translation of what was written:

In the late 90′s decision makers failed to predict the growth in demand for employees of the new generation; programmers, ERP implementers, knowledge managers and others. As a result, public professional education lagged behind market demand.

Today, Web 2.0 is again causing radical changes to the job landscape. People are talking about Second life marketing experts, PHP ninjas, Interface hackers, open source programmers and others.

Early retirement will befall CSRs (who will be replaced by the users themselves, as creators of support knowledge), brand developers (because the ‘long tail’ enforces a move from brands to tags) and we’ll see demand for Crowdsourcers, You Tube/flicker training experts etc.

Researches beginning in the 80′s show a decline in “traditional” industries, and a switch to advanced industries such as telecom and software. Traditional industries will need to incorporate knowledge workers into their production cycles if they wish to survive.

Globalization dictates that today’s third-world countries (such as India and china) will be the producers and service providers while first-world countries will specialize in high-end R&D, marketing and design. So, as a self proclaimed first-world country we need to invest heavily in the skill sets that will enable our workforce to integrate into the above mentioned first-world niches.

Phew, breathe out.

I don’t have a fundamental argument with the writer or the trends he describes. However, I have a strong disagreement with the totality in which he describes the coming changes. I resent a vocabulary of revolution and advise that we adopt a vocabulary of evolution.

It is quite plausible that viral marketing will be another tool to be used by a marketing manager. But the role of ‘marketing manager’ as we know it today will not vanish.

I agree that wikis and blogs are invaluable tools for customer care, but call centers are far from fading into the night.

It just might be that a company will reach a strategic decision to contribute some of its intellectual property to the open source community, but that does not mean you need an “open source programmer“. What you need is a programmer who can submit and collaborate with the open source community; a skill set that can be acquired within a week.

Current employees need not fear the revolution, but rather need to evolve along with the market and the advances in technology and society. The need to evolve is not new. People who work in high-tech learn new technology all the time. So do doctors. So do marketing people. So does almost everyone, with the rate of learning depending on his line of work.

Do we need to have our public education system adapt? Of course; our teachers are no different from marketing managers. If they don’t adapt they will become non-relevant. That is not to say that others will not fill the gap. It only means that the public system will become irrelevant as it was during the first bubble where we saw a proliferation of private institutes such as John Bryce college and Sivan (incidentally, I taught courses at John Bryce at the time).

‘Interface hacker’, or ‘PHP ninja’ are just goofy ways to carry a message across as to the skills and attitude required of the candidate. There is nothing “new” about those jobs. A good programmer is a good programmer. If she doesn’t know everything required for a specific task, she’ll sit and read a book, get some guidance – and do her job.

First and foremost, Web 2.0 is an emergent system. Emergent systems are by definition impossible to predict. Not a single soul managed to predict where Web 2.0 was going, and not a single soul will be able to predict where it will head. All we can say on Web 2.0 is that within it are created new systems that are better as more people use them.

It is the revolutionary (bon) tone that unleashes the demon of hype. Hype begets loss of rationality and loss of rationality begets a bubble. We really don’t need another bubble.

I call to the stop of the dreamy eyed prophets; they are scaring all the sheep.