Zvi Mowschowitz reviews Talent by Cowen and Gross. (CGM)

My best approximation of agreement re hiring between CGM and me is that working together is an iterated game and each player is trying to figure out whether they can keep everyone interested / motivated / productive along the lines of shared inquiry.

Where we seem to disagree is on the nature of work.

A perhaps irrational belief of mine is that work along the lines of /r/overemployed should be encouraged. To put a finer point on it, we should be okay with all of us holding multiple jobs because work has expanded beyond the wage-hours of the past, and we now wear a constantly shifting array of hats throughout the day. ¹

Whether employers like it or not, they are now competing with at least Family, Friends, and Netflix for staff attention.

Adding other employers into the mix shouldn't matter. Work may even improve, as people are incented to both automate tasks (get more done per hour) and adopt industry standards (work by-products are then more likely to be re-usable between jobs).

CGM seem to disagree with this view because they put a premium on chats, video calls, and meetings. All of which are /r/overemployed anathema -- witness all the posts similar to the following:

OMG! Job 1, Job 2, and Job 3 all scheduled their annual retreat for the same week. What should I do?

These synchronicities destroy people's ability to work multiple jobs. From an employer perspective, one should always be paving the way for employees, ie. right-sizing problems and tasks for the worker while minimizing coordination losses.

Another indicator of disagreement is CGM's heavy use of interviews, which benefit those who synchronously interact well with others. ² Since /r/overemployed employers want people who will complete work with a minimum of interaction, interviews then seem like a poorly chosen hurdle.

Granted, this is all from my own knowledge + capital heavy perspective and is likely inapplicable for much of the world of Talent (there are few overemployed line cooks or CEOs). However, CoVID-mandated work-from-home has shown that people can get a lot done when they don't commute, and for some, those and other savings can be enough to support multiple jobs.

While CGM perhaps envisions a future of synchronous work, with the rise of EaaS (Everything as a Service) work does seem to be shifting towards smaller ad-hoc groups, ³ so why shouldn't those teams be formed across companies?