A guy who mows your lawn a few times is not an employee. You can argue for decades over what precise threshold makes you an employee, but in general employees are like groundskeepers who are with you long term. Yes, it is good to involve groundskeepers in big decisions that affect them and their work. If you want to sell the mower for cash, the groundskeeper says “well if you do that I can’t cut the lawn and everything will look terrible and you will then fire me for failing to keep the lawn looking nice” then you should listen. A lot of discussion of this only happens at the end of that cycle, when the CEOs start firing the groundskeepers for failing to keep the lawn etc., so it seems futile to add them to the conversation at the exact point when you know what they’re going to say (“you shouldn’t fire us, you should buy a new mower so we can do our job”). The trick is to do it earlier and incorporate the knowledge embedded in your workforce into your decision making. If you have a hundred people working for you who can see and experience the problems you have first hand, you should find a way for their brainpower not to go to waste.

Giving employees regular input into big decisions is a good idea in the long term. Giving them stock is a way to motivate them to be less inward-looking and think about the company as a whole, and a convenient mechanism to formalise and fine-tune the power balance. If you have a bunch of stock (initially 100%), you can think of the voting power it entails as a resource that you can spend on people who are going to vote well with good information and the right kind of interest in making the company sustainable. Giving it to employees is a good way to spend that resource. They know more than regular shareholders and are empowered to change the course of the company from within.

If you can’t bring yourself to give away any stock due to unstoppable greed and a belief that employees are dumb lawn mower operators who would never know what’s good for them, then basically… good luck.

Not necessarily disagreeing, leadership should certainly try to get feedback from those on the lines, but from everything I’ve heard, law firms are intensely political, more so than your average corporation. I’d be curious to hear more about how it plays out in German companies, but it seems like distributing power might broaden those power struggles and might draw away from the ability of the company to focus and adjust quickly. There’s a reason that in wartime, the Roman Republic would (temporarily) become a dictatorship by handing power to the Consuls. Companies that don’t have market dominance are essentially in a state of war and need the ability to be nimble, including firing large portions of their staff to reallocate their resources when needed, it’s only the sleepy giants with heavily entrenched power that can afford to relax and focus on spreading the spoils of rent seeking to all interested parties, and even they can only do it for so long until a disruptor comes and tries to break them, somehow.

I don’t think we should seek to require that employment be more stable, because down that route lies moribund companies and an ossified economy, and at some point, that can no longer sustain the standard of living that Westerners are accustomed to, because companies in places that don’t have that will eat their lunch. I think we should just seek to make the penalties of not being employed less severe, with much improved social safety nets. Let people continue to compete hard, let them continue to associate and dissociate freely, but don’t let the penalty for dissociation be financial ruin for employees. If we achieve that, we’ll likely make the economy more dynamic, as risk taking is no longer so personally risky - it would give everyone the ability to operate from a place of security and rationality rather than fear and anxiety (from “a position of fuck you”, if you’ve seen that clip from The Gambler) and do what they should do rather than just trying to tread water.

My answer to that is basically that these are the same things people say about autocracies vs democracies and it doesn’t really play out that way in practice. The argument goes that autocracies have a big advantage in agility through top down control. But somehow when you mobilise them for wars, democracies are much better at it. Somehow they keep winning, but only when the citizens agree with the aims of leadership. The huge information flow in an open society producing better analysis and better technology, and the enablement of distributed effort through distributed power, amounts to a better machine. Even if democracies have a tendency to become more centralised in wartime, because to some extent there is an optimal balance for each scenario like you say. But the underlying forces of democracy stick around, and leaders still act in a way that’s constrained by it lest they get thrown out. Modern democratic wartime politics is not much like the Consuls at all. Back to companies, if you can find a goal that your employees support, then they will similarly be a better machine at working towards that goal.

If your response to challenges as a company is to shut out your employees and tell them to obey, you are missing out on this machine’s power. The only reason you would want to miss out on that power is if you had no other choice, because you were unable to frame the challenge in a way the employees can respond positively to. Democracies have a way of correcting that (among other things), which is called getting voted out; companies don’t by default, so at best you’re usually running a shitty version of democracy and yeah, bad democracies sometimes perform pretty poorly.

Thanks for the well thought-out response. Good point, if you can get people to feel real ownership of the company, that’s extremely powerful (I’ve experienced that in my own small company, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in a large company, maybe somewhat at Apple under Jobs).

I think my main argument is to not mandate structure with law, I’ve seen a number of people calling for that. I think that if we strengthened social safety nets, this sort of thing would become more common, as people became more free to leave workplaces they didn’t feel invested in, and more companies would try to foster it to attract employees.

If it’s a better strategy then companies that do adopt it will out-compete those that don’t. Social safety nets are a fine idea generally but I don’t think they would specifically encourage this practice. You don’t really want people feeling free to leave the workforce entirely. (This is an unpopular conclusion of capitalism but if nobody has to work then nothing happens and then nobody gets to eat.) The better structure is for people to be able to move to better places that make them feel empowered and rewarded etc. Safety nets are useful in that people can try things and fail, which is another desirable quality in a society, but I don’t think you can rely on them to make employers improve their offerings.

A pretty huge issue in modern capitalist economies is that people are locked into underpaid jobs with no prospects and no investment in their future other than to hold on for dear life. That’s a massive waste of our potential and a terrible experience for those workers. (And because failing these people is part of the complex of interconnected root causes that lead to anti-democratic sentiment, it is an existential problem.) You want companies to compete to use people better than that, and sharing in the rewards and the decision-making makes for a much better plight for a worker at the lower end of the pay scale. Heck, there are companies today that pay everyone the same salary, determined by the company’s profit divided by N. Their people post on HN sometimes.

The great thing about the free market in America is you can create a company and run it as you please. If you're more successful, other corporations will copy it.

Apple is the most successful company in the history of the world, and yet it's one of very few tech corporations not doing layoffs at the moment.

Every company is in a different situation.

Small error: in the Roman Republic, the dictatorship took power away from the consuls (with short term limits - normally 6 months), who were the normal leadership. And one of the things that republican dictators prided themselves on, was the speed at which they resolved the urgent issues and handed power back to the consuls, often in weeks if not days. Of course, this all went to pot at the end of the Republic when the rival warlords from Sulla through to Octavian saw the dictatorship as a means of taking control of Rome, so had extended periods of dictatorship "the problems are so vast I need to be dictator for 10 years".

Whoops, you're right, thanks! It's been a while since I listened through Mike Duncan's The History of Rome :-) Looks like the consuls nominated a dictator. Was the dictator ever a self-nominated consul?

I keep looking at this and the original comment and it saddens me. It took about 2 minutes for WalterBright to type out his original (IMO awful) analogy then disappear from the conversation. This comment however was carefully written and thoughtfully provides a thorough rebuttal of the analogy while also contributing a lot to the discussion raised by the original piece. But it's not going to get the attention it deserves and doesn't look like it'll get a response from Walter :-/

Apologies for adding a slightly empty comment but clicking the little "upvote" button didn't feel like it was enough.

Don’t worry, I am used to it. When the Walters of the world run off, that’s fine, I have people like you to get through to. Thanks for your kind words.

At least you and I read it :)

This is just par for the course on HN. Only engage with the weakest responses to your comment. Do not engage with anything providing a decent rebuttal. Makes your thoughts look more solid and the “opposition” look worse as the thread develops.

Nowhere did I say that management should not gather input from employees. Nowhere did I say that it was a bad idea to give employees stock.

I said that being paid for a job does not imply ownership.

> If you can’t bring yourself to give away any stock due to unstoppable greed and a belief that employees are dumb lawn mower operators who would never know what’s good for them

That rude comment doesn't deserve a reply, but I wrote one anyway.

I suppose I did speak a bit accusatively with the word “you” instead of impersonally, sorry, but this is how some people think of their employees, it’s an attitude you almost outright expressed with your analogy, and it was worth addressing. Obviously what you said is the legal position, nobody was saying otherwise. But it could imply ownership if you wanted. That’s a plausible change you could make to either the law or company structures. It’s something that can change over time simply by publishing information on company regulators’ websites that people look at when they start companies, if you want. Are you open to that kind of change? That’s the question, and you didn’t seem very open to it at all. Some people, especially labour activists who have been trying to give workers more rights since forever, would probably respond positively. You don’t have to have an answer.

> nobody was saying otherwise

The parent I replied to wanted to use the government to force the issue.

You and anybody else are free to set up and run a corporation the way you please. If it works better, others will copy it. You can even set up a collective, or a commune, or a workers' cooperative. It's not illegal in the US.

Whether I am open to your vision of how a company should operate is irrelevant. In a free market, you get to choose how your company will operate. And the best structure will win.

> Back when I ran Zortech, which was privately held, we gave each employee a cut of the monthly sales.

That’s really awesome man, I wish you’d started with that.

We also demanded that employees could wear whatever they wanted in the office, but when meeting a customer, they had to wear a suit. This caused some grumbling, which we dug into, and found they were simply reluctant to buy a suit. So we paid for their suits.

And ... they loved them! They were really proud of their suits (for many it was their very first one) and enjoyed visiting customers with them on. Our customers liked it, too, and would remark that no other tech company representative would wear one. They took it as a mark of respect for the customers, as tech representatives usually were slobs. It was a big win for us, and a fun way to differentiate us from our competitors.

The conventional wisdom is one's dress doesn't matter, but in my experience it makes a big difference.

Corporations are creatures of the state; they are legal fictions with no existence outside law. Why do you think they have boards? Because the state requires them to.

If the state deems it good policy for corporations (say, above $x,000 capitalization or y employees) to have employee representation on their boards, the state is well within its rights to introduce this condition.

The state should also perhaps consult the public as well, what with us all living in "democracies" and all that other stuff you read in marketing materials.