Hey teams, charging a premium? Watch out for the zombie unbundlers. They are everywhere and they are relentless. Remember, your split is not a Nash equilibrium. Swear an oath of allegiance to each other once a week.
You and I are a team. We charge $200 per hour with an equal split. The unbundler comes along and whispers in my ear. He says I'm better and he can pay me $105. Of course, being awesome (and human) I agree with his assessment. He says I must keep quiet about this. Easy to agree, since I know you won't like it. Then he tries to get you for $95 or less. The bigger the group, the better this tactic works. The more complicated the scenario, the better this tactic works. A variation of this just happened to me this week.
You are like so carrying the band, you really should do a solo album. :-)
Its an interesting take on what tends to happen 'naturally' a lot (which is folks find a manager they like and follow them from place to place). But as T_S_ here points out there is a whole new spin on negotiations.
Sorry, I was just using it to mean the relentless, unenlightened people who just might pop the bubble of team spirit without caring about the consequences. Not an industry term in this context.
An excerpt "It was widely reported that FriendFeed was bought for about $47 million, or about $4 million for each employee, though some money went to its outside investors."
There are going to be a lot of subtle difficulties with execution, but the concept itself is brilliant. It's easy to see how this could basically become the next Wal-Mart by enabling user generated talent monopsonies.
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.
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 :)
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.
This could be a great alternative to Odesk/Elance/etc. I've done a decent amount of outsourcing ($X00,000) and some projects are much more suited to a team that knows each other than a group of individuals.
And past just doing group projects, this could turn into a linkedin for developers, where you could inquire about dev X from people who have worked with him.
This sounds great until an entire group leaves your company to join another. I guess if you reap the benefits of hiring an entire team, you must willing to endure the loss of that entire team as well.
* The team URL is bland. We are grouptalent.com/teams/61, but can't we be grouptalent.com/teams/hackthology instead?
* It wasn't clear what the "submit for approval" button was for, so one of my team members pressed it before he should have while we were entering data.
* Entering education is a bit cumbersome. My team is made of EE and CS students from CWRU in the BS, MS, and PhD programs, so our education section looks pretty weird.
So what about a team of people who have not worked together formally in a company before? I know several people who attend various programming and user groups around town (in this case Portland, OR) and there are some I'd really like to work with and I think we'd work well together as a team. Is there a way for a team like this to form?
Hi! I'm wondering if you're recruiting only for developers or for teams that might include developers but also folks in other specialties - for instance my team includes a front-end developer, a project manager, a graphic designer, a 3D object modeler, and a web writer (yes, before you ask, a team this diverse obviously rotates based on project needs and we each have substantial crosstraining).
Currently we're aimed mostly at teams of developers but we support any team who can launch a software product (which usually requires a developer). Your team definitely sounds like it could be a good fit.
Cannot agree more with 'hire effective teams over individuals'.
And, when having to chose between high competence meeting minimal expectations on team spirit/communication/people skills versus the other way round, ALWAYS choose the former.
Curious about the plans for a revenue model. Are they going to charge teams to list? Or charge companies to find them?
The big challenge with any outsourcing platform is to retain recurring revenue from existing customers - because the problem is that once two parties connect with each other and do a successful project, they can just as easily contact each other direct thereafter; without any need for the middle-man.
The plan is to eventually charge companies to find teams. It's true that the site might be a single use for many companies (leave once they hire a team) but I think that's a common problem for any recruiting site.
Sounds like a decent way to do it. With that model, you might experiment with 'sliding scale' plans - by offering more expensive packages with access to more teams (and perhaps more relevant teams; ie- location).
And a little more input on your revenue model: I think you want to go subscription, but make it long term to justify a relatively high initial price point (since you have to maximize that initial transaction due to the little problem we discussed above). Might be best to just make all plans 1 year. It simplifies things; and then you've got a decent probability your customers will renew again year after year.
This is a great idea. Often when I do projects through Elance I bring in team members to supplement different parts of the project. It would probably be beneficial to have a point of contact for each project as communicating with clients takes a ton of time. Otherwise one person turns into project coordinator and misses out on the fun stuff ;-).
Overall I love this idea and wish you great success! Keep it up.
Very well done guys, looks great and really speaks to how work in general is becoming more like how movies are made...Someone pulls expert teams together with certain needed skill sets, everyone kicks ass on a project, disperse, and repeat on the next one.
I tried to fill out a team profile but had problems. Now keep getting "We're sorry, but something went wrong." when I try to login. I guess I'll try again later when the Hacker News rush has passed.
Got an error when I tried to sign up as part of a team. No OAuth, just standard sign up fields. Seeing standard rails error page. "We're sorry, but something went wrong."
Still got confirmation email. "Confirm my account" link worked, and I'm into the site. Confirmation email is a little stark though, it should be fleshed out a bit more. Only way to tell it was from grouptalent was the from address.
