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Assemble an On-Demand Team

 

Assemble an On Demand Team

At Assembla, we try to work with the best people available in the world for any given job. It takes less than four weeks to assemble a team. They're distributed, but they're very real teams, and that's the idea.

Past

In the past, to create a collaborative working environment, there had to be some fairly durable and expensive kind of a social structure in place, be it a formal employment relationship, or a family or local community relationship, and those things are expensive to create. They're durable structures.

The way we talk about that in the software business is in terms of fixed costs, how much does it cost to maintain your inventory talent, and scalability, how long does it take to get the new people that you need? And both of those, in the current ways that people build commercial software, are not very good. They can either hire people to work in their normal location, or they do outsourcing, which transfers the same model to some offshore location.

Present and Future

What we haven't had, ever before in history, is the possibility of a much more lightweight mode of affiliation. What we've seen in the open source world is a totally different model; it's not outsourcing, it's a single global team...

When you start to think about how people can organize themselves into small teams or very large groups, you start to look to open source techniques, and how people are working together on the internet, and you find a lot of ways to apply that. And it's a single global team that's on demand. People work when they need to work, and we think that's going to be an important force in a lot of different areas. It's a profoundly new economic force in the world.

How to Put a Team Together

At Assembla, we use competitive trials to assemble a team. On an open source project, people actually have to submit code that's good code before they get commit privileges. In the commercial world, we can translate that to competitive trials. People are interested in working on my project, they find out about my project because I advertise very widely, they submit their resumes, I give them paid trials. I offer them $500 or $1000 to do an actual task in the project.

There's no interview, there's no test, there's just work on the project. So it's extremely efficient.

How to choose a good trial task

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