And there’s another reason, also technology-driven, why boundaryless teams are possible now — the democratization of education for software engineers.
Almost every university that matters now allows exclusively online education. You can attend Stanford from Nigeria or Oxford from El Salvador. The smartest companies have expanded their recruiting pool to the planet; institutions of higher learning have done the same. They’re leading the revolution. They’ve not only leveraged the same technologies that we do; in some areas, they’ve jumped well ahead.
And there are technology startups that have focused on disrupting and democratizing education. A number of these, like Lambda School, have focused exclusively on preparing students for careers in software development. In other words, highly qualified people are distributed more broadly than ever. Provided you know how to find and then manage them — a topic we’ll be digging into in detail in an upcoming post.
MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy have unbundled university content to make education more accessible on a global scale.
Meanwhile taxpayer supported Madison K-12 school district spends more than most despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.