Brad Greenwood

Prasanna Tambe
Associate Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences
New York University

Friday, October 24, 2014

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: Learning and Wages in High-Tech Labor Markets

Abstract

Using a new data source on the reservation wages of IT workers, we argue that IT workers often accept lower pay in exchange for acquiring new technical skills on-the-job. This drives a wedge between workers’ pay and their perceived market value that is a) larger for IT workers than for other professionals, b) larger for mid-career IT workers, c) increasing in job tenure and d) larger for IT workers in high-tech regions. These effects are largest at employers that are investing in new technologies and for workers with the human capital that is most impacted by recent technological innovation, both of which are consistent with an explanation based on skill acquisition. These findings are also robust to a number of alternative explanations for why high-tech workers accept lower wages, including greater use of stock options, perks, and other non-wage compensation by high-tech employers, immigration-related mobility restrictions, and explanations based on labor market information asymmetries. The implications of this wedge for some notable features of the IT labor market—such as IT turnover rates and age-based sorting of IT workers across firms and IT industries—are discussed.

Nick Berente
Assistant Professor, Dept of Management Information Systems
University of Georgia

Friday, October 17, 2014

10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: Complex Coordination Routines and Open Source Software Development Processes

Abstract

Despite being geographically and temporally distributed, having high-turnover and consisting mainly of volunteer-developers, open source software (OSS) communities can often successfully assemble complex software products. Contemporary theorizing around OSS development suggests that isolated volunteers execute bounded and small development tasks on separate software modules while complex development problems are deferred until they become simple. Overall, according to this account, OSS development processes should be simple. However, the presence of complex OSS products suggests that OSS development processes somehow address complex development problems – problems do not turn from complex to simple out of thin air. This suggests that OSS development processes are likely to vary substantively in that they need to be concerned with both simple and complex tasks. In this paper we reconcile this paradox and empirically explore how OSS processes are carried out when facing relatively complex development problems. We conduct an exploratory mixed-method study of OSS processes and their compositions within a successful mid-size OSS project – Rubinius. We analyze how the project’s development tasks are coordinated based on varying types of tasks related to solving problems. We use computational sequence analysis techniques to describe the level of observed routine variety (i.e. variety of activities and their ordering) using digital trace data from Github. We detect four clusters of routines in Rubinius in terms of their degree of variety: 1) triaging problems, 2) transferring information, 3) technical inquiry, and 4) solving simple problems. Using qualitative inquiry, we observe that each routine cluster serves distinct information processing functions such as evaluating, shifting, understanding, and accommodating the complexity of development problems. From this exploratory analysis we theorize on the relationship between routine variety and efficiency of successful routines. We conclude with a process model of coordination routines capable of generating the requisite variety necessary to attack complex development problems.