[FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled

[glen ☣]

No, you didn't miss the gist of the thread, which is:

there seem to be all these unfilled tech jobs, but that polymaths don't generally get placed/maintained in them unless there's something special about the organization.

My claim is that individuals within those organizations _make_ the environments that facilitate polymaths, not the organizations, themselves.  To run with your "ideology" idea, I would claim any putative org-layer ideology would reduce entirely to individual-layer ideology.  I.e. in order for an organization to be (somehow) "ideological" distinguishable from a naive aggregation of the ideologies of its current constituents, we'd have to identify constituent-independent org structures that implement that org-layer ideology.  To falsify my claim, we need only identify a common org structure through the orgs we choose to identify (some Xerox, Sun, Apple, Venice, Redfish, etc.) as facilitating the good experience Owen described.  Then, perhaps provide a mechanistic explanation for why that org structure is capable of implementing org-layer ideology.

One part of such an org structure might be "soft money" or "black budgets" ... a kind of free energy usable by motivated bureaucrats.  Typical start ups don't really have that sort of money.  But large organizations like Intel, Xerox, the CIA, or government general contractors probably do.  Another one might be publicly traded companies with very high stock prices (like Apple), where they feel comfortable acquiring more debt or have liquid assets available to provide a robust response to failure.  But in either of those cases, your criticism holds: motivated constituents can defect and abuse their freedom.  So, to falsify my claim, some other org structures must be in place.  What are they?

On 03/15/2017 03:05 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I may have missed the gist of the thread.  I thought the observation was that there were exceptional places to work that were able to maintain and grow a talented and productive staff.   What makes them different?  Perhaps it is that they are ideological and are not just concerned about the number of gold stars that come with each participant.  In contrast, there's the possibility that this kind of technology grows without that deep motivation, and just for the sake of growing.

-- 
☣ glen