Just
as people in the early days of industrialization saw single jobs (such
as a pin maker’s) transformed into many jobs (Adam Smith observed 18
separate steps in a pin factory), we will now see knowledge-worker
jobs—salesperson, secretary, engineer—atomize into complex networks of
people all over the world performing highly specialized tasks. Even job
titles of recent vintage will soon strike us as quaint. “Software
developer,” for example, already obscures the reality that often in a
software project, different specialists are responsible for design,
coding, and testing. And that is the simplest scenario. When TopCoder, a
start-up software firm based in Connecticut, gets involved, the same
software may be touched by dozens of contributors.
An Iv-B economy grows much finer roots and branches of specialization, it is also much more vulnerable to booms and busts.
An Iv-B economy grows much finer roots and branches of specialization, it is also much more vulnerable to booms and busts.
TopCoder
chops its clients’ IT projects into bite-size chunks and offers them up
to its worldwide community of freelance developers as competitive
challenges (opening the possibility of becoming a “top coder”). For
instance, a project might begin with a contest to generate the best new
software-product idea. A second contest might provide a high-level
description of the project’s goals and challenge developers to create
the document that best translates them into detailed system
requirements. (TopCoder hosts a web forum that allows developers to
query the client for more details, and all those questions and answers
become visible to all competitors.) The winning specifications document
might become the basis for the next contest, in which other developers
compete to design the system’s architecture, specifying the required
pieces of software and the connections among them. Further contests are
launched to develop each of the pieces separately and then to integrate
them into a working whole. Finally, still other programmers compete to
find and correct bugs in the sundry parts of the system.
At each point people compete in Iv-B rather than cooperate together, the system then buids a high momentum towards prodct innovation that can hit a ceiling and collapse if the market falters.
At each point people compete in Iv-B rather than cooperate together, the system then buids a high momentum towards prodct innovation that can hit a ceiling and collapse if the market falters.
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