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From experience I can tell you this won't work. Finding good workers is the hardest thing a company does and any plan based on "we can easily go out and find skilled people" is doomed to failure from the start.

When I first started at my current job they had the idea of hiring one person (me) and then using the money they'd use to hire a second person to outsource using sites like scriptlance. I had to over see these freelancers and it didn't go too well for a few reasons:

1. Most people claim they "have" skills when what they mean is they think they could quickly acquire those skills if you hire them. Which leads to shoddy work.

2. People with no loyalty to you tend to do poorer quality work which again leads to shoddy work.

3. Most unemployed people are the lowest quality workers (the ones who were coasting up until the economy turned). That makes it hard to find the actual good people because the signal-to-noise ratio is so out of whack.




Are you sure that experience can be extrapolated to the labor market as a whole? I get the feeling that the difference in capabilities from one individual to another is much more pronounced in software development relative to many other fields. It's a testament to how hard software development is. While this idea might not work for something like software startups (or anything that requires extremely skilled labor, like medicine), I don't see why those criticisms would apply to fields that don't take a decade to perfect.

Also, I think it would be difficult to confidently infer that the unemployed tend to be the lowest quality workers. That might be true outside of recessions, but during a time of 10% unemployment, (and much higher if you look beyond the bullshit U-3 indicator) a lot of those people were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had jobs in shrinking industries.


The little literature that I've seen on this suggests that extremes of ability differences are more the rule than the exception. And if you work with the best, the best improve most readily. Read First Break all the Rules for documented examples with everything from driving trucks safely to data entry.




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