
We Looked for Work as a Software Development Team - jpatokal
http://chocolatetin.org/2015/09/30/team-job-hunt.html
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ThePhysicist
A German startup (Tandemploy -
[http://www.tandemploy.com/](http://www.tandemploy.com/)) is trying to
establish something similar by allowing two people to "team up" together and
apply for a single full-time position at a company. This sounds weird at first
but the benefits for both sides are clear:

* The two "job sharers" can freely organize how they want to split their working time between each other, giving them a lot of flexibility and increased work-life balance.

* The company will have filled one full-time position with a team of two people, thereby greatly reducing the risk of sickness and one person leaving the company with all his/her knowledge.

So, basically it's RAID0 for people :)

~~~
yitchelle
That's interesting. From the hiring company's perspective, are they hiring two
employees with limited hours, or are they hiring a company (with two people in
it) to do the work?

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ThePhysicist
I think (not 100 % sure) that companies hire each one of the two people on a
part-time basis, but with flexible working schedule, I guess other
arrangements are also possible though.

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gkoberger
This is interesting. From a hiring perspective, I feel like I'd be a bit wary
of this. It'd be great to have a team that works well together, but I'd be
really afraid it would overwhelm existing company culture/process/etc and
cause a clash.

I think this is why a lot of acquihires fail (like, acquihired employees
leaving quickly). They way the acquired team works together doesn't mesh with
the way the new company works.

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copsarebastards
> I think this is why a lot of acquihires fail (like, acquihired employees
> leaving quickly). They way the acquired team works together doesn't mesh
> with the way the new company works.

I agree that there's typically a culture clash, but I don't think it's because
the acquihired team overwhelms the existing company culture/process/etc. In an
acquihire, most of the workers at the acquired company suddenly are working
for a company that they didn't choose to work for. That's a ridiculously bad
situation to be in as a developer: we have a great deal of choice in where we
work, and it's poor strategy to let someone else decide for you just because
they had enough money to buy out your boss. So developers choose. And they
generally choose to leave because the acquiring company is overwhelming the
culture they chose to work in with a culture they didn't.

This is different: everyone in this situation gets to evaluate the others and
make a choice about their involvement in a business relationship. Of course
there will be differences discovered after the fact that will result in both
sides changing, but that isn't necessarily bad.

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gorena
Well, that's why they give acquihired employees a whole bunch of RSUs. I
worked for a boring corporate acquihirer for a while because they were paying
me the stock equivalent of my salary (which also increased) every year.

~~~
copsarebastards
But, you did leave.

Paying people more doesn't fix the culture clash issue.

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periphery
In the marketing / advertising circles its not uncommon to hire a creative
team (two anyhow). With one one having stronger graphics skills and the other
copywriting. I have often wondered why agencies will use this approach with
"creatives" but not developers. To me it seems like a close knit front end /
back end dev team would be a good match for banging out the campaign based
sites that most agencies do.

~~~
bhrgunatha
I spent some time travelling when I was younger and supported myself in part
by working as a waiter. I got a job in one place in Hong Kong where the owner
hired a manager who brought his own team with him - four other waiters. After
a couple of months delay until his friends were released from prior contracts,
he also brought in his own kitchen team too. It only lasted a year though when
owner and manager fell out and the same thing happened.

~~~
riskneural
It sounds rather a likely risk though... I speculate the kind of manager that
brings his own team thinks long term. When one thinks long term, multitudes of
possible outcomes must be thought through. The vision has to be defended
against all kinds of visualised attacks. It's complex, and often hard to
explain due to the level of detail and time that is put into it.

Then some dick who thought about it this morning over his coffee wants to
suggest you change direction.

It's a bit like software development. There are a bazillion things not in the
code you are looking at, that the developer deliberately didn't put in; an
infinity of tiny decisions. Also there lots of things that are in that it is
later clear should not be in. Decisions on whether to refactor are really,
really hard.

Something something technical difficulties in the relationship between
craftmanship and leadership.

~~~
mattlutze
Tl;dr: lots managers or head chefs will bring other folks because the
environment will be more predictable or enjoyable, and the restaurateur is
usually as or more invested in long-term strategy as/than then lead staff.

The dining industry isn't so deep and complex. For the restaurant manager /
head chef / lead chef, it's generally "how much autonomy do I get with dining
room design, menu design, hiring," "what's the food cost I need to beat,"
and/or "what's the concept (and can I play with it)?"

If the right level of autonomy/restaurateur participation is there and they
can get behind the theme/concept of the restaurant, the chef/manager takes the
job. Then they get to work building a menu they like and training the staff
for the experience they want.

WRT bringing a team with them, as high-stress a job as running a
kitchen/restaurant can be, knowing already you work well with someone is worth
its weight in gold.

Restaurateurs also are not, generally, blowing by and making whimsical
changes. The margins in a restaurant, after food cost, salaries, fixed costs,
are usually not super high, so if they have money in it they're thinking a lot
about how to maximize the ability for that restaurant to grow its business (or
increase margins).

Luckily or unluckily, there's not a ton of strings to pull to manipulate the
restaurant's profit:

\- The rent will be the rent. Changing locations is a huge sunk cost in both
capital and customers, since existing ones won't know where you've moved to
(or be able to walk down the street to get to you) and new ones won't know yet
why they should stop in.

\- Salaries will have a floor for the area your restaurant is in. You can pay
more, but in any case once you get to minimum wage, yeah.

The main way to modulate the profit point is to play with costs on the
ingredients. You see pretty quick that if you cut ingredient quality by too
much, you have to start dropping price points because people won't overpay by
too much for crappy food. And some venues or concepts won't support breaking
out of the average price for prepared food in a region, i.e. you've gotta be
doing special to charge $20 for a cheeseburger.

So, you look at how cheap you can keep ingredients for the quality you want on
the other end, And how well you can build the dining experience to resonate
with the target customer so they fall in love with your restaurant and keep
showing up.

The restaurateur is thinking about that a lot, as much if not more than the
on-the-ground leadership he/she hired.

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dustingetz
Did you consider contracting? You can bill as a team, you control the
interview process, you can split and reunite at will, and the people who are
booked can support the people who are benched are working on open source
portfolio stuff to attract more clients.

~~~
adelsmee
We did consider that. But then I thought to myself "who is going to worry
about toilet paper and payroll and all that stuff". No-one on the team wanted
to do any of that, let alone the sales and networking that are required to
keep a consultancy afloat.

~~~
studentrob
Spitballing.. What about sharing the responsibility by having one person
responsible for 6 months, then change after that? Salaries transparent in a
spreadsheet like at Buffer

Alternatively wonder if you could've spent the same effort networking as a
team by group interviewing prospective HR people to fill the role you wanted.

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lifeisstillgood
Several comments leap out

1\. To all intents and purposes this is a co-op model of an agency.

2\. If the team could not break through to their employers that the employers
were in the way and not letting a team of eight build something to help, then
why do they think they can do this repeatably (is the value of an agency the
ability to build valuable stuff or to persuade business to take the valuable
stuff it needs?)

3\. This should be the model for the future. Damn it, succeed damn it.

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jpatokal
The company in question _did_ let the dev team build the product. However,
said company's tech leadership has been in a state of constant flux and
apparently the management _du jour_ no longer wanted what their predecessors
wanted.

(Note: I used to work for this same company in this very dev team, although I
left long before this happened and Adel was among the few left from those
days.)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That is kind of what I meant - changing management teams, and same teams
changing their minds, is one of the great problems of traditional agencies
(and the rest of us!). Stopping it, or getting out in front of it, is probably
the main survival skill an agency needs (along with building a pipeline)

Ultimately this is a nice idea but which are we - a team of developers who do
not want to be an agency? An agency with a twist? This matters because it
defines how people hire them and view them.

~~~
davnola
Yes, but even the best agency will every so often run into a bad client. I
think that's analogous to what happened here.

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FajitaNachos
What an interesting concept. For developers, it's easy to see the value in
hiring an established team. I'm glad the companies you spoke too also saw
that. I wonder if this could be applied to even smaller groups, say 2 or 3
developers who have worked together well in the past.

~~~
Consultant32452
We didn't get hired "as a team" but I started a gig about a year ago and
during the interview process we talked about other types of roles they were
hiring for. One was a perfect fit for a buddy of mine so we had a quick
discussion about the benefits of hiring us both. It's a remote gig but my
buddy and I are local to each other and have worked well together on previous
projects. They wound up hiring us both but put us on separate teams. I felt
they really missed out on having the two of us mesh well right off the bat
with little social ramp up. They never explained why they split us up, so I
can't begin to speculate.

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fphhotchips
Impressed that this happened in Melbourne as opposed to the Bay Area. ZenDesk
has done a good job of publicising their ability to move comparatively quickly
around here, but this goes over and above.

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calcsam
If a good team did this in the Bay Area with sufficiently strong internal
agreements to ensure they all got hired together they could probably get
~$100K signing bonuses each, comparable to an acquihire.

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49531
Neat! It's always sad to have to disband a well oiled team.

~~~
savanaly
Do you mean a team that works like a well oiled machine? Because a well oiled
team, while having its benefits, is something else entirely :O

~~~
copsarebastards
Keeping this PG: maybe it's a well-oiled team of robots?

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Sven7
Time for team leaderboards/recommendation systems on LinkedIn, Stackoverflow
etc

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lifeisstillgood
Now that's a great idea. LinkedInTeam.com - in fact one could build that as a
seperate "profile" page where each Dev points from their profile to the "meta"
page, and selects certain comments (is this team is great, as opposed to this
person is great)

One could build a profile page quickly from the links and use only LinkedIn
quotes - is quotes that are "trustable".

~~~
asadlionpk
I wonder, if we were to rank team's abilities as a whole. Which factors could
be used in it? (like skills coverage, understanding with each other, culture,
etc)

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Sven7
Maybe code shipped, code quality over time etc

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cdnsteve
Brilliant thinking on your feet of taking a problem and turning it on its
head, still as a team. When a good group of developers get together the things
that can be achieved are incredible. Well done!

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meapix
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_sharing)

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trengrj
A bit of game theory here. As a company, do you offer the entire team a job or
just the best?

