If coordination services command high wages, as John predicts, this suggests that demand is high and supply is limited. Here are some reasons why this might be true:
Coordination solutions scale linearly (because the problem is a general one) or exponentially (due to networking effects).
Coordination is difficult, unpleasant, risky work.
Coordination relies on further resources that are themselves in limited supply or on information that has a short life expectancy, such as involved personal relationships, technical knowhow that depends on a lot of implicit knowledge, familiarity with language and culture, access to user bases and communities, access to restricted communication channels and information, trust, credentials, charisma, money, land, or legal privileges.
Coordination is most intensively needed in innovative, infrastructure-development work, which is a high-risk area with long-term payoffs.
Coordination is neglected due to systematic biases on an individual and/or institutional level. Perhaps coordination is easy to learn, but is difficult to train in an educational context, and as such is frequently neglected by the educational system. Students are therefore mis-incentivized and don’t engage in developing their coordination skills to anywhere near the possible and optimal level. Alternatively, it might be that we teach coordination in the context of centrally coordination-focused careers (MBAs, for example), but that many other careers less obviously centrally focused on coordination (bench scientists) would also benefit—a problem of interdisciplinary neglect.
Note that, if the argument in my review of interfaces as scarce resources is correct, then coordination can also be viewed as a subtype of interface—a way of translating between what a user wants and how they express that desire, into the internal language or structure of a complex system. This makes sense. Google translates natural-language queries into the PageRank algorithm, Facebook translates “friends” into databases and networks, and Amazon, like any store, translates the user’s desire to “buy a product” into an extremely complex sequence of supply-chain actions.
Not all resources/interfaces are best viewed as forms of coordination, although virtually all forms of economic activity depend heavily on coordination to get things done. A non-coordination purpose of some resources is to meet basic individual survival needs, such as agricultural production. While this is obviously necessary to facilitate coordination as well, I don’t think most people would tell you that they avoid starvation in order to better coordinate.
The most actionable advice I can take away from these thoughts stems from point (3) and (5) above. As people proceed in their careers, they naturally gain access to skills, contacts, and other information that is translatable to other roles and jobs. Each job is a chance to “harvest information” that is locally abundant in one environment and port it to another environment where that information is scarce.
In considering what job to take, applicants should form a detailed model of what information they’ll be able to harvest from their employer. Employers likewise should consider what information they can harvest from their new employee. This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange.
If coordination is indeed a neglected skill, then it’s important to figure out whether it’s teachable, but neglected by the educational system; or unteachable, but learnable. Figuring out what is useful and what skills are required to coordinate effectively in a particular line of work seems like a key component of useful experience, and a topic to steer conversations toward in dialog with mentors and more experienced peers.
“This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange”
this is very interesting idea! sadly, i have no idea how to check it.
If coordination services command high wages, as John predicts, this suggests that demand is high and supply is limited. Here are some reasons why this might be true:
Coordination solutions scale linearly (because the problem is a general one) or exponentially (due to networking effects).
Coordination is difficult, unpleasant, risky work.
Coordination relies on further resources that are themselves in limited supply or on information that has a short life expectancy, such as involved personal relationships, technical knowhow that depends on a lot of implicit knowledge, familiarity with language and culture, access to user bases and communities, access to restricted communication channels and information, trust, credentials, charisma, money, land, or legal privileges.
Coordination is most intensively needed in innovative, infrastructure-development work, which is a high-risk area with long-term payoffs.
Coordination is neglected due to systematic biases on an individual and/or institutional level. Perhaps coordination is easy to learn, but is difficult to train in an educational context, and as such is frequently neglected by the educational system. Students are therefore mis-incentivized and don’t engage in developing their coordination skills to anywhere near the possible and optimal level. Alternatively, it might be that we teach coordination in the context of centrally coordination-focused careers (MBAs, for example), but that many other careers less obviously centrally focused on coordination (bench scientists) would also benefit—a problem of interdisciplinary neglect.
Note that, if the argument in my review of interfaces as scarce resources is correct, then coordination can also be viewed as a subtype of interface—a way of translating between what a user wants and how they express that desire, into the internal language or structure of a complex system. This makes sense. Google translates natural-language queries into the PageRank algorithm, Facebook translates “friends” into databases and networks, and Amazon, like any store, translates the user’s desire to “buy a product” into an extremely complex sequence of supply-chain actions.
Not all resources/interfaces are best viewed as forms of coordination, although virtually all forms of economic activity depend heavily on coordination to get things done. A non-coordination purpose of some resources is to meet basic individual survival needs, such as agricultural production. While this is obviously necessary to facilitate coordination as well, I don’t think most people would tell you that they avoid starvation in order to better coordinate.
The most actionable advice I can take away from these thoughts stems from point (3) and (5) above. As people proceed in their careers, they naturally gain access to skills, contacts, and other information that is translatable to other roles and jobs. Each job is a chance to “harvest information” that is locally abundant in one environment and port it to another environment where that information is scarce.
In considering what job to take, applicants should form a detailed model of what information they’ll be able to harvest from their employer. Employers likewise should consider what information they can harvest from their new employee. This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange.
If coordination is indeed a neglected skill, then it’s important to figure out whether it’s teachable, but neglected by the educational system; or unteachable, but learnable. Figuring out what is useful and what skills are required to coordinate effectively in a particular line of work seems like a key component of useful experience, and a topic to steer conversations toward in dialog with mentors and more experienced peers.
“This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange”
this is very interesting idea! sadly, i have no idea how to check it.
Relevant specific example.