Living a la carte

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:40:39 +0100

I started this post yesterday and lost it due to a browser crash (visiting the PajamaNation site ironically enough). I've recreated it as well as I can from memory:

Via Euan, I came across Andy Roberts post on microjobs yesterday:

This is not the same thing as telecommuting, working from home for the same employer you used to work for in the office. Nor is it the same as freelancing, where you agree to work on site for perhaps 3 weeks or 2 months for an employer who doesn�t want to create a permanent post. There�s more in common perhaps with the jobbing worker who travels around doing small jobs in which he is proficient for a large number of customers.

I think microjobs are an interesting idea and warm to the concept of the a la carte life style. One of the things I loved about working for myself was the freedom to choose goals and the flexibility to persue them how I wanted to. But this was also my downfall: poor goal choice, poor execution strategy. It appears that most of the jobs I'd had were good at teaching me 'how to do' but not 'how to decide'. I've made this my mission since then; to learn how to put the ladder up against the right wall.

If employment is painful I think it is so because your individual goals are misaligned with the goals of your employer. That so many people survive the grind for so many years suggests to me a lack of strong goals. I think this may spell trouble for microjobbing. The safety of employment is a shelter for people without goals. The flexibility and freedom of microjobbing could be a boon to those looking to persue theirs.

Could I survive as a micro-jobber? I have valuable, marketable skills, and a lot of experience. On the other hand my skills tend to relate to complex problems filled with interdependencies. And I want to care about outcomes. One of the problems with consultancy is that you must retain a sense of detachment. It's not your problem just a problem you are helping out with. Microjobbing by it's very nature must surely magnify this effect, no?

So I am concerned about survivability, how to make microwork meaningful, and how to get a sense of involvement. We'll need good answers to these things for microwork to take off I think.

Roberts points to PajamaNation which purports to be a micro-job advertising site. I wasn't able to take a good look at their site and browse the micro-work list since it routinely crashed my browser, Safari. I'm not sure whether I could throw it all in and become a free spirit. But I certainly think there is a role for a new intermediary.

Whilst at PAOGA we did some work within the recruitment sector on a new approach to employment that offered an improved balance of the interests of candidate and employer by giving the candidate more control over their information and making them "more than a CV". In this new world we had imagined recruitment agencies would have to change. To remain a part of this picture it would no longer be sufficent for the agent to sit, like an opportunistic vulture, passing mutilated copies of CV's from the left hand to the right. The agent would have to deliver real value by working with candidates to improve their quality.

Decentralization implies intelligence being redistributed from the centre to the edges of the network as in the Internet where intelligence has tended to be redistributed from data centres to the home (even if Google are fighting this trend with every fibre of their collective being!). Employment is a highly centralized area, yet an area in which we can observe little significant intelligence that can be distributed; Most businesses (and most candidates) suck at the employment game. Whilst the microjob concept eliminates some aspect of emplyment that cause this to be so it still implies fitting an individual with specific skills, experience, and attitudes to a need. This is an imprecise science at best and microjobs means that businesses will have a need for vastly more of this than they do now. In essence it will throw into sharp relief just how bad we are at this.

So I think that if microjobs are going to take off we will need new intermediaries who are excellent and organizing related microjobs into larger assemblies and fitting the right (and available) team of microworkers into place in a JIT fashion. I'm not sure this is what outsourcing agencies are qualified to do since I perceive outsourcing as primarily a cost-reduction exercise. Microjob enabling a business is about taking advantage of the intelligence at the edge of the network.

I kind of feel like I should have a point at the end of these ramblings. Oh well, next time maybe.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on microjob

Living a la carte