(no subject)

There’s an interesting general problem I keep running into throughout my own career and, secondhand, through the careers of my friends. It seems that almost every company winds up with people who have lost touch with reality in the management structure. When that becomes sufficiently entrenched in the company, there’s really nothing else to do but leave. This can break up competent teams and scatter them to the four winds.

It seems to me that it should be possible to create an intermediate state between “individual employee” and “contract house”. Call this a Team. It would include at least one manager (possibly a project manager and a people manager, or one person who combines both functions), at least one developer (though you’d likely need more than one for this to be at all worthwhile), and at least one QA engineer.

The incentive for a company to hire a Team would be that they could get a group that already knows how to work together and can trust each other. They would be hired as a group of W-2 employees (though they might have their own health plan if they’re big enough for that to be efficient), and would leave as a group if they decided that management had gone insane and the company was doomed, or be laid off as a group if the company is performing layoffs. The Team would arrive en masse to the workplace and start demonstrating good work habits for other engineers to learn.

The risk would be that the team would up and quit as a group, gutting the effectiveness of the engineering department, if they decided to move on to greener pastures. The obvious check for this would be to have a contract for giving a series of warnings to upper management, with mandatory minimum times between warnings: “The following problems at this company have our Team worried. If this trend continues, we may leave.” “We do not believe that the measures taken are addressing the problem. This is your second warning.“ This could be just as healthy for the company’s upper management as the Team would be for fellow employees if they take such warnings seriously.

Would a real company hire a group like this? I don’t know. But if someone can pull this off and demonstarte this is a viable pattern, it might improve the quality and stability of the technology industry. It strikes me as a knowledge-industry descendent of the traditional labor union. (A group of such Teams could even form a Guild, where people could move between Teams easily because they come with recommendations from other Teams.)