Elasticity: Big Companies, Small Businesses, and the Web

As we’ve been reading about Elasticity, its been more in context of a large business needing diverse employees. Why is it like this nowadays? Since when did you need to have the skills of three people in order for a company to hire you? Back in the industrial age, you were just expected to come in and make door hinges or whatever you were hired to produce. You didn’t need to know how to sell said door hinges or how to distribute them, the company had guys for that. Now, here we are, with resumes being packed with skill diversity in order to show how “elastic” you are as an employee. I believe that the reason this came about was with both the rise of small business and the internet. As a small business owner, you cant afford many employees, and you wore many hats in order to get things done, maybe you had employees that were there to help pick up slack in all departments. Eventually this became commonplace, and big companies took notice. Same idea with the web. many new skills were required to navigate this playground of possibility. Companies we’re quick to hire computer engineers, and then they would shuffle them around after they figured out how many they needed. all this led to the norm being elasticity, because as a big company, I would rather hire a person who can do multiple tasks decently than pay for two people’s salaries. This also encourages companies to take a closer look at people, as its more of a long term investment if you can hire an employee who is very capable in multiple areas. I think that this is a positive shift in the way the hiring process is continued in more modern companies, at the very least its helpful for the non-sales seller and entrepreneur.