Isn't that, uh.. a pretty big downside?

If a team is even considering going somewhere else, and are willing to do though the effort of interviewing like this, chances are you are already losing any and all members of the team that you wanted to keep.

I've actually seen entire teams quit a few times in my career, but instead of them all quitting the same day, they quit within month or so, and it's the one that have the highest market value that go first.

If a company is afraid that an ENTIRE TEAM is going to quit on them, they have to make sure they are paid market rate, and happy with what they are doing, and who is managing them: There's no magic. Happy teams don't spend their time interviewing for new jobs.

So the minute you are worried one of your teams will submit a job application to Stripe, this means you know they are unhappy, and you aren't doing anything about it: Don't worry about third parties and fix it!

I've seen this too. It is important to remember that these people are very likely good friends outside of work, talk frequently and openly about work issues, job prospects, etc., and have been through hell together and back.

If things are getting to the point where one person in the group has soured on the company, you can bet they have all been griping about it for months over beers. This in turn sours the rest of the group and then they inevitably start dropping like flies once the first one leaves.

In the instance I saw that occur, I think they had their valid reasons, and it wasn't anything horrible about the company they were at--just found something better. But I started placing mental bets with myself on how soon it would be until the rest of the group left--turns out I was more or less right, except for one of them.

That said, the impact was definitely felt as they were all super talented people I'd love to work with in the future. So for companies afraid of hiring groups or several close referrals from a single person (which are essentially the same thing), the best thing you can do outside of providing an awesome and competitively compensated place to work is ensure there is solid documentation for things, and when possible ensuring that critical business knowledge won't be lost if someone leaves.

Possibly. However, I would counter that if you have a whole team leave you then, as a first step, you should look at yourself as to why. On the other hand, any company should be prepared for that kind of departure -- which I know is difficult.

If it helps, let's remove the human element and think about it from a disaster recovery perspective. You need a replacement plan for the whole group. It's vital if you want to do things like take your team out to lunch (food poisoning) or to any group activity (transport accident) or be in a single office (anything that takes out the building will take out your team).

Could you rebuild your product team from scratch and still proceed with the deliverables that have actually been checked into source control and the issues that have been entered into the issue tracker? It's a good question to ask.

Unfortunately the people element is too big to remove from this equation and should be included in your risk model. Another thing to consider is that people are just generally assholes and will take advantage of a system like this. Like I said in a previous comment, I was part of a small group that joined a company, and the outcome was awful for everybody included. Disaster isn't really relevant here, everything started to fall apart, people quit included me, morale was awful, etc. When I joined, all I wanted was to have an interesting job, but they wanted an "alliance" with me. It was fucked in the most Machiavelian, spoiled brat way. I can't imagine that won't happen elsewhere. Anecdata, n=1, blah blah.

Incidentally, their DR test at one point wasn't really a valid DR test, since it didn't do of any sort of rigor. Not to mention the other DR tests/events I've seen at other companies ;).

Yeah, fair enough. It does introduce an interesting social dynamic.

> people are just generally assholes and will take advantage of a system like this.

Not to belabour the point but could you expand on what you mean? I would think that a rational economic actor would take advantage of a beneficial opportunity that presents itself.

Sure - I'll give you my real world example. Apologies in advance for the long story.

I was "poached" into another company in a relatively large company in finance as a linux admin along with a PM coworker who I viewed as a good person and incredibly technically savvy. She was brought on by the AMRS CTO of the previous company. In a lot of ways, when we joined, we were viewed as a single unit with a single agenda by many of the other folk at the company. I tried steering of it as hard as I could, but it got pretty hectic for the entire company when the two "agendas" didn't work that well together. It might've just been the culture, but a few other things at the company gave me an off feeling that threw an enormous Machiavellian vibe all throughout, but that's a different story.

The guy who brought me in, though. He pulled me to the side after they decided that the dynamics were too much and switched me to a different team where my old PM coworker would act as my boss. The idea was nice and I had more freedom (they never took away my root access), but he completely confirmed that people can, and do, take advantage of "teams" to push an idea. He told me three things all paraphrased, but not inaccurate things:

"You're my fall boy. If something happens, I want you to fall in my place."

"I want you to outperform all of the other teams in the company." No pressure, right.

"You're here to push my agenda." I believe that his end goal with his 'agenda' was to become CTO, which.. thankfully.. didn't happen. Instead, [edit: very large company]'s head of tech stepped into that position.

---

The reason this gets to me and how I can see that attitude being incredibly expansive if adapted, is because this is a well known name in finance right now with increasingly large names from other companies coming in. Nobody's really batted an eye at it. This also isn't the first time I've seen this kind of attitude before. It's incredibly systemic finance and I see the same attitudes in SV. It doesn't seem like a leap of faith to say that the same bleedingly charismatic and moralistically dead attitudes exist there, too.

There's a certain attitude and behavior from those who feel that they're at the top that distorts the way they act. Watching House of Cards felt all too familiar. It was all very creepy, and I don't see that behavior going away any time soon.

My 2c.

For those specific companies that lose good teams, yes. But you could certainly argue that anything that moves workers into better jobs more efficiently is improving the allocation of resources in the economy, so it's a net upside.

Yes, but people are dickholes who take advantage of these setups. I was part of one of those setups, but only realized what was going on after I joined.

There's absolutely a middle ground, but I'm not sure that direct hire of teams is not of them - yet. For that to work, many other things would need to happen first. I'm looking forward to the day that happens. For now, I'll stick with freelancing and hope others hop on this bandwagon with me.