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Comment on Crowdsourcing and the end of job interviews

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I don't buy this. In a job interview, both parties enter into a formal agreement: I will do this for you and you will in turn compensate me. We both agree on the terms and we both sign the dotted line. If either one of use does not hold his end of the bargain, then we part ways. But at least initially, we both trust each other to do as agreed. After everything's signed we have a reasonable expectation of what will happen in the following days/months. It's a tarnishment of our reputations (and in extremes, legal liability) to renege on our agreement.

Additionally in traditional employment there is the expectation that good performance will be rewarded, minimally with the privilege of keeping your job. At the very least, the employee's performance will be monitored, and things will happen in response to that performance, particularly if the performance is bad.

Compare that to crowsdsourcing, where it's completely at will, there is no agreement to deliver anything. As the article says, anyone can do whatever the hell they want whenever they want.

Why would anyone who has better options go the crowdsourcing way, where there is no expectation of anything, either formal or implied? There is also no expectation at all of performance even being monitored, much less exemplary performance being noted.

So what is the benefit for the for the "crowd" of crowdsourcing?

Being an easily replaceable cog in a giant machine is no step forward. This is even more retrograde than the factory era, where your widget output per minute was at least monitored and you got marginally small benefit from being the best cog in the wheel.

So no. I disagree. Anyone who can do anything nontrivial of value will not subject themselves to crowdsourcing. Even a new professional trying to break into any field will do better to seek out an opportunity that will get them the good kind of attention if there is above average performance. The Harvard grads in the mailroom are aiming to do exactly that. The benefit of the loss leader of accepting a shitty job is the chance to show off and wow superiors.

Crowdsourcing is built to anonymize workers and make them utterly and completely replaceable.

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