Getting hired by Amazon, Apple, …, Yahoo, ZDnet: tips and future hacks.
Trying to digest a cheesy crust pizza this noon, I was wondering if instead of a pizza I was carrying a baby. The good thing was that there would be two of us going back to work, even if the one was rather unqualified to give me hand. What a delight for my pizzababy to grow mentally through this early job! Apart from hanging around with Bruckner’s twins (le Divin Enfant) getting early to work will permit it to develop the working flexibility that parents preannounce and corporations tend to establish through rotation programs.
So, how often will it switch jobs? Every 3 years, two times a year, each month or…. why not several times a day?
Assumption: A job may less and less be outline of your style, status and skills, THE choice that you make in your self-creative youth and pursue with passion until your hands have shrunk and you mumble wisdoms on professional resilience to your children.
It seems (to me, to you too maybe?) that jobs get more and more project–centric, existing-skills based, time and locality indifferent.
with Theme-generated-tasks’ accomplishment transforming into task accomplishment around a theme.
The digital business field, where change is well in advance, brings up a strong trend on segmentation of the classical notion of job.
Two examples on the internet can tell the story:
and
These two companies propose a per task remunerated employment, amazingly different as regarding necessary skills.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk mostly addresses the non qualified workforce and Innocentive the ultra specialized scientific one. The concept on both is that you’re hired on a per project basis, for a translation, to prove the Fermat Theorem or to fill in the ISO forms.
It is then highly important to have a personal job management system to handle contests you participate and your prizes, puzzle your profile and communicate with trusted professionals.
A sort of e-mployment survival kit to prevent you from e-xploitation.
This vast talent pool of potential Mechanical Turks, scientists and everyone between, also creates opportunities for providers of meta-HR services to aggregate and compose job particles into a real job.
Providers such as advisors, agents and therapists:
social engineers, serial trendsetters, legal timing planners for fringe technology testers (“get the trial before the action is criminalised with a law”), real life rehabilitation mentors (“get rid of Wii gestures when in the grocer’s”), tec-addiction therapists, viral marketing therapists/ digital image makers (banal already maybe), mini-krach recoverers, startup estate agents, other (attention, this is not a generic term, it can be a job where you are paid to differentiate and foster evolution), and so on.
A combination of a middlejob with a classical one or the mix of various middlejobs could result in a steady plus variable income, mental coherence and growth, an optimised planning and a life-job balance.
On the “which?” the question is open. On the “how many?” 2 jobs maybe ok while 3 or more could definitely assure the statics of the e-mployement construction. …
Job- memo for my pizzababy: Exercise with 3 or more jobs, with an hourly basis frequency, vary the status. In case you need help call your agent.
After it was digested I went back to work.
Georgia
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Tags: Amazon, Artificial Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Bruckner, business, career, Digital Business, employment, engineering, freelance, Innocentive, Internet, job, KISS, krach, legal, macro, Mechanical Turk, micro, monster, other, pizza, social, social engineering, therapist
Agile, Amazon, Books, Business Process Management, Economics, Globalization, Internet, Networks, Organization, Uncategorized, editing, image, innovation, media, operations
Mmm, I don’t get it, in a few words, what’s the key message you want to convey in this post?
Btw, love your tags!
Never eat pizza at work…
It observes a change on employment: working in parallel in multiple jobs that are not necessarily neither thematically related nor under the same employer.
The observation starts from the two platforms set up by Amazon and Innocentive to outsource a big part of their tasks/not to another enterprise neither to an employee but to a per-project collaborator ( a contractor).
These contracts exist already for specialized engineers (and maybe others), however the fact of setting up a platform, may signify a strategic change on the way employment is perceived : rather than an personal engagement, a job can equal a collection of tasks.
To support the generalization that employment is transforming into personal multi-project management,and for a company into an opensouce project some arguments are that:
–For a company: it should be easier and cheaper to manage a platform and the risk of matching offer-demand when addressing a pool of hypothetically everybody over 18 equiped with internet than managing individuals
–For the jobs : Apparently any domain can be “industrialized” since very different jobs can be cut down in tasks (from backoffice support to science).
–For the market: stimulates the chain of providers by leaving space for new types of jobs
–For an employee: Increases the degree of implication as he/she is challenged to invest her/his various skills on various projects
Thus this generalization calls for reactions : do you believe most employees will be multithematic freelancers?Has the web this kind of influence?If yes in what form (what jobs, how many, what frequency of swithcing?)
If nope why not?
I think it’s an interesting point (but you are diffusing it with the pizza story—which is not my fav. food this morning, I should add).
So what do you see as the solution? Is there a personal job management system out there? LinkedIN? Or agencies? Or self-management?
About employees as multithematic freelancers. That is definitely a possible future, encouraged by the huge lay-offs during the last recession and the hugely self-taught digital workforce, able to develop projects in fairly small teams.
That doesn’t apply to everyone, companies will benefit hugely from keeping some resources in-house, but to certain types of resources—those which either need to be replaced periodically, making outsourcing cheaper, or those that are only needed periodically, what you called “ultra specialized”—can and should probably be outsourced.
So, while still hypothetical, an interesting point indeed.
Georgia, I have two grown-up pizza babies ( respectively 11 and 8 ) and I can tell you one thing : I’ll make whatever I can to ensure they are educated enough to choose what they do for a living.
Whether it is to work on a project basis or to fully invest their energy into one or a couple of companies or public services in their whole professional life.
We have to be careful here : this per project thing may be sexy if you’re a skillful professional. Then you can make enough money to compensate for the stress coming from the lack of visibility on your forthcoming projects. I’m not sure that this situation may have such appeal for people with less moneyable skills.
Besides, I also believe that people need to buy into a larger project than their own carrier, they need to have a carreer that makes sense, they need to have this belonging and loyalty feeling, even if it’s only for a couple of years. I have worked for about half my carreer as an independant consultant (actualy I currently am today) and this is what I have missed during these spells. This is something that the good money you make can’t buy.
Lastly, I think that believing that a company can work like this is a mistake. You need to have people (from experience I would tend to think half of the work force at least) making sure you keep a company culture, team spirit and all these soft elements that glue people together and make the spine of a successful company.
Georgia,
This is an interesting post – we’ve found that many of our Solvers use our network as a way of working fullitime or suplementing the income from their day-job. They say they enjoy the freedom of choosing on a project by project basis, and enjoy the challenge itself.
If you ever want to learn more about us feel free to contact me!
Regards
Liz Moise
Marketing Manger
InnoCentive
Vincent, sorry for the pizza breakfast yesterday
Self-management is forever. Probably focused on: mentality change on resilience, stress management and value repositioning (how frequently and rapidly you review your plans, substitute corporate loyalty with personal integrity etc).
This is what I sense and what Cecil’s experience as a freelancer states.
Cecil, I also believe that without a larger project and some ideas to believe in, work becomes ugly. I stay open to the question if these will be provided by the corporate institution or the agency that helps you with multithematic freelancing and makes your children happy to grow up with you. Thanks for sharing experience, it’s precious.
Vincent, nice you mentioned LinkedIn : I feel that it has an enormous potential to evolve into a powerful tool because it can interconnect project platforms like innocentive and match the knowledge accumulated on professionals and their networks. Up to now, it has had a rather passive networking function, I know few people who use it actively to find a job or contact other professionals on a specific purpose. Maybe because it is rather immature, but again I don’t fully get its business model.
Liz, thank you for the reaction. I would be very interested to have your vision on the current situation as well as the perspectives of Innocentive. I’ll contact you soon.
Cecil, I am quite anorthodox with dollars euros drachmas, so the term still doesn’t begin a list of composants: moneyable skills , moneyable skills, skills are skills no? It is just that some folks get their check late, too late sometimes.
it’s not the issue of the check being late it’s the one of it being
very light indeed.
what i’m talking about is the feeling of being part of something bigger and collective. It could be an open source community or a corporate institution. It just can’t be you own carreer project and it certainly cant be an agency (whose fate is to be desintermediated anyway with tools such as Linkedin or the forthcoming NotchUp).
I have many professional friends that are freelancers, making excellent money and who happen to be quite depressed by this. They dont want to go back to regular job because of the loss of income but on the other hand they feel like they haven’t contributed to some kind of collective professional adventure. And boy they miss it.
I’m a huge fan of linkedin. I’m not quite sure what their business model is but i’m not sure they’re bothered if you consider the number of users and page views. I think they actually implement a concept that has never been realized before (other than with ridiculous and unMcLeoded business cards) : the professional network. This service represents a huge value for an IT professional like me.