Crowdsourcing: Tracking Job Trends

There is an interesting article on Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe in the June issue of Wired. Crowdsourcing is touted as the latest unexpected threat to our professional lives. In this case, companies advertise about a task that can be done remotely, and then pay small sums of money to anyone who can do it. The idea is that it is cheaper to solve some problems by finding an amateur on the outside than to hire a full time professional on the inside.

Companies have used crowdsourcing to hire programmers on the cheap. Why hire a professional programmer for $100 grand a year, when you can get some starving grad student to do the same work for $1.50 an hour? 

The article starts out with some entertaining sections on TV executives who have made money showing the kind of amateur videos that one finds on YouTube. Instead of paying professionals to create TV shows, these innovative execs find amateurs who will give away their work. Howe points out that most of these movies are terrible, but that there are a few diamonds in the rough. The article states that 57% of the 12 to 17 year olds who are online are producing some kind of content. With 12 million kids out their generating movies and blogs, one is bound to find a few keepers. It’s all about numbers.

The most engaging parts of the article come near the end. In those sections, Howe describes how big companies like Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Eli-Lilly, Boeing, and others pose scientific queries on web sites like InnoCentive or YourEncore.

Despite the huge R&D budgets at these companies, many of them have a backlog of problems they can’t solve. The solution is to pose the problem on the web, and then wait for some woman in a garage to come along with an answer. If she does, then these big firms will be willing to pay her $10,000 or even $25,000 for her time. That’s pretty cheap compared to trying to start up an R&D project in your own shop.

The problem with Crowdsourcing, of course, is that much of what amateurs produce is of little real value. But on sites like YouTube, it is the crowd itself that sorts out the good bits. On more technical sites, the subject matter tends to filter out the dilettantes, and only talented folks who can stand the heat, or at least understand the question, will bother to reply.

Those of us who watched the Internet emerge knew from the beginning that something very important was happening. Few of us understood, however, all the consequences that this new technology would have for those of us in the working world. First there was outsourcing, and now there is crowdsourcing. Are these good developments that lead to innovation, or bad developments that take our jobs? I'm not sure I know the answers to those questions, but the big question is: what happens next?