This make sense for highly productive labor, that foreman hiring people for just showing up generally got a positive expected return for this. In fact, this is still how a lot of (sometimes illegal) day labors go about getting work: truck comes by, picks up people ready for work, work get done and everyone makes money.
> Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people?
Because these startups lose money as a matter of principle. The people working there aren't actually performing productive labor. All of that hiring is about creating a large illusion in the market place.
Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped, but even the most valuable projects I did, still made money for companies that ultimately lose more money than they take in. Many of my best projects are for SaaS companies that don't exist any more.
The guy picking up a bunch of people in the back of his truck is about to go build something real and is going to get paid in cash, and the more people he can get in the back of the truck the more jobs he can get done in that day, which means more cash for everyone (and if you're on the paying end, it means that project you wanted done is done faster).
> It's just business for crying out loud.
I don't think this has been true in tech for over a decade. I had a COO once excitedly proclaim that if the company made more money than it cost to run, we would have unlimited runway. The COO seriously thought he had stumbled upon some brilliant realization about a company making more than it costs to run.
The guy with the truck knows far more about business than most execs at tech companies today.
> Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped
Same here and I've been in the biz for ~35 years. An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed. It's a bit disillusioning to think that the vast majority of the work I've done has just sort of disappeared because either a startup didn't make it or got swallowed up into a larger organization that had other plans.
> The guy with the truck knows far more about business than most execs at tech companies today.
Yep. The guy with the truck can't lose much money for very long. A lot of tech execs have gone years without needing to worry about that because there was so much easy money around.
> An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed
I was under the impression that architects also did a lot of spec work, or designs for RFPs that don't ever get built. Or maybe only get built as a model.
I'm not disagreeing with your premise -- there is a lot of programming work that is hidden, lost, or wasted. However, it's not a trait that's exclusively a programming thing.
> An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed.
I don't think that the situation is really that much different for building architects.
In cities that are experiencing rapid densification, it's not unusual to see numerous buildings from the 1950s, if not much later, being demolished to make way for newer and larger structures.
Even when structures aren't totally demolished, it's not unusual for them to be so extensively modified that the original building is virtually unrecognizable, or even completely obscured by the work of other architects.
It's also quite common for building projects to be canceled before construction starts, but after designs have been prepared, and other architectural work performed.
Many projects that do eventually get built often go through numerous revisions, with the final product being almost nothing like the earlier designs.
This make sense for highly productive labor, that foreman hiring people for just showing up generally got a positive expected return for this. In fact, this is still how a lot of (sometimes illegal) day labors go about getting work: truck comes by, picks up people ready for work, work get done and everyone makes money.
> Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people?
Because these startups lose money as a matter of principle. The people working there aren't actually performing productive labor. All of that hiring is about creating a large illusion in the market place.
Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped, but even the most valuable projects I did, still made money for companies that ultimately lose more money than they take in. Many of my best projects are for SaaS companies that don't exist any more.
The guy picking up a bunch of people in the back of his truck is about to go build something real and is going to get paid in cash, and the more people he can get in the back of the truck the more jobs he can get done in that day, which means more cash for everyone (and if you're on the paying end, it means that project you wanted done is done faster).
> It's just business for crying out loud.
I don't think this has been true in tech for over a decade. I had a COO once excitedly proclaim that if the company made more money than it cost to run, we would have unlimited runway. The COO seriously thought he had stumbled upon some brilliant realization about a company making more than it costs to run.
The guy with the truck knows far more about business than most execs at tech companies today.