Re:Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
by chatmasta on Friday October 31, 2014 @02:08PM
(#8540187)
I'm familiar with that essay (did you also just watch Aaron Levie's stanford talk?), and that's a good point.
How greatly are transaction/switching costs affected when
segmenting projects in 6-12 month intervals? I would guess,
that when you're throwing senior engineers at projects,
the switching costs are non-trivial, but low. It's probably
an acceptable tradeoff to pay when developing specialized
projects you don't expect to carry over to future ones.
There's also the argument of developing a labor force to
compete with other enterprises. However, if the best engineers are in sufficiently high demand, it may be more
economically rational for them to move between projects
every 6-12 months, gradually increasing their pay-rate and
improving their portfolio after completing each one. If this
is the case, then companies would be forced to hire top
engineers on a contractual basis (or pay them a significant
markup annually), purely to compete in the labor market for
top talent.
How greatly are transaction/switching costs affected when segmenting projects in 6-12 month intervals? I would guess, that when you're throwing senior engineers at projects, the switching costs are non-trivial, but low. It's probably an acceptable tradeoff to pay when developing specialized projects you don't expect to carry over to future ones.
There's also the argument of developing a labor force to compete with other enterprises. However, if the best engineers are in sufficiently high demand, it may be more economically rational for them to move between projects every 6-12 months, gradually increasing their pay-rate and improving their portfolio after completing each one. If this is the case, then companies would be forced to hire top engineers on a contractual basis (or pay them a significant markup annually), purely to compete in the labor market for top talent.