Draft Strategies

I ran across this whitepaper this week about the various draft-day strategies employed in classic Rotisserie Baseball leagues. Of particular interest is the notion of "information assymetry", which is an fancy economic term for the difference in information available to all parties in a transaction. Given the glut of information that is readily available at the click of a mouse to the average roto-league owner, relying on beating your opponents by beating them in the information war is a questionable strategy.

If decisions are guided by economics (i.e. valuing players in the most economically efficient manner), teams can maximize their draft day returns. In our league last year we removed a major component of draft day strategy which is bidding on the players. Teams simply selected players when their given draft slot opened up. When the value of a player is bid on (not just defined by when they were drafted) it adds a whole new dimension to the game.

It got me thinking about my particular profession--software development. Relying on "information assymetry" as a means of longevity in this industry seems like a fool-hardy strategy. The road is littered with lots of people who immersed themselves in the expertise of once-prized, now-dead technologies.