I just left a huge multinational corporation that despite its economic power was wasting millions/billions and not achieving anything in the tech space due to huge mismanagement, as everyone at the top was completely clueless but well connected and good at bullshitting and too busy fighting private wars just so they can climb the corporate ladder to coast for massive paychecks. Basically very wealthy crabs in a bucket.
Money and talent aren't everything. You also need competent leadership who can steer the ship in the right direction and are motivated to bring value to the company not just to themselves.
Milking money from ads is all they can do. Innovation is very hard when everything has to go through many layers of approvals and there are constant re-orgs. People are fighting over small slices of the pie, rather than growing the pie.
If the ad money stops rolling in, Google is done.
Smaller, more agile companies are usually where innovation comes from. Google accomplished most of the good things it did when it was small.
What isn't effective enough? What do you envision going better?
There's nothing wrong with voting as a concept.
But most organizations implement voting such that it happens fairly infrequently on somewhat complex proposals which are fully understood by few and have been heavily guided by leadership. Those proposals tend to be necessarily high-level since voting on all of the little details is impractical. As such, the overall "choice bandwidth" of these traditional voting paradigms are quite low. Also the level of thoughtfulness, engagement, and participation are often low as well (ask anyone who's been involved in an old school coop and they'll confirm this). Also these paradigms are not very agile and do not adapt well to projects which evolve and change over time.
There are lots of potential solutions, but the high level guiding principle is to design structures which are able to support and incentivize more choices being made more thoughtfully by more people more frequently.
So, governance which functions more like a (well-designed) video game and less like a city council meeting.
At Quorum1 we focus very heavily on using stigmergy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy) as a design principle. The idea is to use internal marketplace structures to (a) gamify the process of building consensus and (b) break what could be large/episodic/top-down/waterfall/boolean decision making processes into smaller more spectrum-based decisions. So instead of voting Yes/No on a big proposal and going with whatever got 51%, you run a participatory budgeting process to simultaneously fund multiple potential solutions which then evolve and cross-pollinate until consensus emerges over time.
The strategy is to encourage ongoing experimentation and continuous decision-making able to adapt and evolve as new information comes in over time.
It helps if your community has experience with running a cooperative community. Things like Robert's Rules of Engagement, active listening, differences between a super majority and majority...it's important to not have to reinvent the wheel and have some experience with democratic decision making progressions.
In my ideal world, those who only have money, should work for highly skilled techies.
Of course, it wouldn't be 1:1 mapping, but a collective tech union-like open institution would go far in leveraging against hostile employers.
CEOs get golden parachutes on signing. It's time tech workers start demanding what their exit package looks like in case of layoffs/reductions against their will. I know a lot of this is wishful thinking, but in the face of an increasingly bleak economic landscape, we may need something like this sooner than later.
Maybe. But remember that the Hollywood guild system also acts as gatekeepers keeping people out of the system.
Some of my coworkers went to even lower ranked schools or altogether don’t have degrees (though I admit it’s uncommon).
It's mainly leveraging cartel power rather than proof of work. Even if you have a lot of experience acting in non-union productions, you're still ineligible from joining SAG. To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing for SAG because the number of aspiring actors far exceeds demand, so SAG increase wages without causing the most of negative effects with cartels, but I don't think this is the same for tech.
The issue with the "proof of work" standard is it sets up a difficult conundrum. You need to work to join the guild, and you need to be a guild member to get most work.
It’s great when you’re in but if you don’t have the connections to get in you can find yourself on the outs for years.
If a SWE guild can find a way to eliminate the nepotism and create a meritocratic way to get into a guild…
But the number of times I've heard directors and such tell stories about how they wrote a line for a non-speaking part as a favor to the actor in the role, solely to allow them to get their SAG card, is disturbing.
It's indicative of a high degree of gatekeeping.
Not to say working has no value, but neither does schooling have no value.
Software is the high paying industry with the least gatekeeping I'm aware of.
I never got around to finish my degree. Neither did Bill Gates. I've worked with highschool dropouts and Harvard graduates. And by and large, nobody cares!
We really, really don't want that in tech. Tech is one of the few segments of the economy where skill trumps credentials and connections for people entering the field. As a result, tech benefits from a lot of talent that would be ignored by more traditional methods of filtering candidates.
And what would tech workers gain? Unions don't stop layoffs -- look at the past few decades in the auto industry for proof. Unions would also negotiate standard pay packages that might be attractive to low performers, but would hold high performers back. Plus, severance packages are already legally mandated for layoffs in the places where the majority of tech workers live.
This is not simply false, this is the typical FUD spread by people who have no idea how guilds or unions actually work.
SAG does not prohibit non-union actors in SAG-covered productions. In fact, appearing in a SAG-covered production is how one qualifies for membership into SAG.
SAG sets minimum thresholds for pay, benefits, and rights. Actors are free to negotiate better packages if they have the leverage for it. Most don't, which is why the actor-waiter meme is a thing for people hoping to get cast into a SAG-covered role. As someone who has appeared as a background actor in a SAG-covered production: SAG minimums are significantly higher than non-SAG pay, at every level.
I have been a member of several unions and I know what I'm talking about.
You can disagree if you want, but I am speaking from real life experience.
I have been part of the legal counsel to several Hollywood guilds/unions, and have participated in the production of multiple Hollywood and non-Hollywood productions. Like you, I was also a member of a non-Hollywood union (while I was in the public sector), though that experience is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
The intended legal requirement can be very different from the way it’s practiced on the ground.
My own attempts to break-in + friends’ experiences shows a clear pattern: the guilds gatekeep, almost arbitrarily, and creates environments primed for abuse.
Perhaps the legal, corporate side of the guilds should realign with the reality on the ground and change this. That is, if this is an undesirable state of affairs.
It sounds like you and your friends tried to get hired as crew onto jobs for which you have no experience, because if you guys did have the experience you would already be union members and you would be swamped with work or offers. (The thresholds are pretty low. I'm one production away from being a member of several unions and I'm trying very hard to avoid that since it would limit my ability to work on non-union productions).
Most jobs don't hire people without experience without someone vouching for them. Why would you think that Hollywood would be different? They don't know you from Adam and from their point of view there are millions of other people just like you that are willing to put in the time and effort to start at the bottom instead of trying to skip a few rungs.
If you want to work in film, start at the bottom (i.e., meaning as an assistant or an extra) or work non-unionized productions (generally, low-budget or student films).
I’ve been a member of SAG (as a child, but still!) and the WGA (as an adult). The systems are imperfect. They are also significantly better than productions with no guild affiliation.
The gatekeeping by recruiters and HR departments is extreme - until I got my CS degree a couple of years ago I could not get interviews anywhere, despite the fact I'd never been sacked from a job and was always one of the best coders in my teams with the broadest range of experience.
I lucked out many years ago on getting an interesting job but that job went through a series of acquisitions and after a while I kept trying to get out but couldn't get interviewed anywhere.
Then I finally get a degree and get a job made with a contact while doing that and all of a sudden a few years later I can at least get to the first round of interviews.
Software development is in no way a meritocracy, and companies see us as interchangeable components with very little intrinsic value as SV workers are finding out in droves.
Software developers are essentially the blue collar workers of the 21st century. We are the modern fitters and turners. Highly skilled in some cases, but not valued.
(I agree that there's some gatekeeping, and I'd rather see the industry pay less attention to degrees.)
If you had trouble getting your foot in the door, it's probably because of something else.
> Software development is in no way a meritocracy, and companies see us as interchangeable components with very little intrinsic value as SV workers are finding out in droves.
That's just not true. Interchangeable cogs in a machine don't get paid several hundred thousand dollars a year. If you want to see what being interchangeable really looks like, work in the food service industry.
I have never got paid close to several hundred thousand dollars a year, and I have always had trouble getting through the HR degree filter until the last couple of years when I finally got my CS degree.
You could be right, the problem is me. I don't have enough contacts due to 15 years of fully remote work and spending too much time at my previous job, and I don't want to flog myself any more because I'm in my 50s.
But I am certain my career has suffered greatly by not having that piece of paper 'proving' to HR I know what I'm doing. And yes, I am bitter about it ;)
Whereas in tech, that isn’t the case for the majority of the employees at large companies. Yes, you have consultants and contractors, hit the vast majority of people at Google or Microsoft or Facebook are full-time employees, not hired on a project by project basis.
And that changes both the incentive structure and the organizing power. There are other unions that could be better parallels to trying to organize tech — but I don’t think the Hollywood guild system is the one to try to copy. You’d need to have specific unions covering each company (even if many companies were still affiliated with the same umbrella union) and carve outs and contracts for each company or even subgroup of workers inside a company. You couldn’t just do a blanket SAG-AFTRA style guild for everyone at every company when most of the employees are not on contract but full-time. It just wouldn’t work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#:~:text=An....
King Arthur: I am your king.
Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you.
King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.
Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then?
King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cos some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader!
Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say.
They are a logical evolution of the Digital Nomad movement from years past (some emerged from Upwork).
However, each member is expected to be an independent LLC and handle their own country-specific revenue withholdings and taxes.
Why wouldn't the traditional approach of starting a company to sell those things work?
Co-ops have never been a successful software business model. Not even once that I can think of.
That model seems to work ok for open source, but since you are talking about building things people will pay for, I'm not seeing how it would succeed.
The functional difference between a co-op and a normal business could be as small as having a board that is informed (because the shareholders are employees and naturally very informed), and that doesn't go for the usual extreme comp levels at the top.
I honestly can't find any.
Anyway our economic model is toxic to cooperative businesses. So yeah it’s gonna be hard to find examples of successful coops.
I don't really buy that.
Our economic model rewards businesses that make money. In tech, you don't even need to make a profit, just having a lot of revenue is enough to get a ton of investment (although that might be changing, and that change is probably good).
If a software co-op could succeed as a business, why hasn't that happened?
There are successful software worker coops out there. Usually small and medium.
And there are examples of firms that follow the spirit but not the legal structure. Effectively worker owned, but regular corporations on paper.
Generally worker coops have been shown to provide more stability/sustainability, worker engagement in many cases.
My intuition is that these virtues are less in demand than rapid growth and big exits when it comes to software ventures. Also a big issue might be that this business form is simply less on the radar for people, which can be perceived as risky or off base.
But there might be domains and types of projects that would fit very nicely.
B2B relationships are extremely difficult with cooperative business models due to a lack of understanding (both on law side and just "personal feels" side of things).
Loomio[1] is a successful product-based co-operative, and was spun out of another successful co-operative called Enspiral[2]. Enspiral got up to over 200 co-owners before they started splitting off to other companies.
This is just looking at New Zealand, which is small and doesn't have a big co-operative sector. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples around the world.
1. https://www.loomio.com/about/ 2. https://www.enspiral.com/
Igalia is a co-op of software developers. Seems to work well for them.
Perhaps maybe its a good starting point for developers or those just wanting smooth sailing... but for others... why stay in a "system" with a low ceiling? They could take a risk and create a startup and earn much more.
>We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them.
Regarding this. I _wish_ it were that easy. If it were, I would just spin up a consulting business, lol. Its probably the case SDEs know more about what the client needs than the client itself does... but getting them to pay for something new is incredibly difficult.
I guess at the end of the day, I don't believe you could throw 100 talented people in a room and just expect results to start happening. I would love to join this as an experiment though.
That's the difference
Do you want to work for the desires of wall street or do you want to work for the desires of your friends and community around you?
You can't do both and have investors unfortunately.
And that's probably why these things are so rare. After all, it would take a helluva lot of drive and energy to bring such a thing to life--probably much more than it would take to start a company in the usual way. If you were capable of building such an organization, why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time?
Making millions doesn't have to be a selfish act, by the way. If you want to help people, money affords you the opportunity to do so in any way you please. Horray, effective altruism!
Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? Software developers, who get a chunk of profits instead of a measly 150K? Software consumers, who're likely business owners? Folks who have money to pay for software?
How do you think co-ops work? Are you imagining a flat organizational structure like Valve Software? An open source project plus invoices? Those are all interesting ideas, but co-ops presently work like employee-owned business and usually have managers and compensation structures that fit the obvious way those things work. HN's tendency to GPT whenever exposed to something it doesn't know about is driving me nuts today. :-)
Because of that such company will either stay small (probably leaving ambitious people with unfulfilled ambitions) or change along the way, because you simply will not find enough people to make it grow.
It's been a few years since I pondered this, but I used to spend a lot of time thinking on this subject. I think for it to be successful you need a lot of the type of person that prefers to work in such an environment, and to make effort to keep it that way. That might mean staying small staffed, but I'm not totally convinced it even needs that.
One could argue that social economic systems, at scale, are functionally similar to a massive corporation operating on a flat environment. And you end up with a similar issue there. "Company" ambition doesn't really have a viable path forward, and so the optimal solution is to just coast by - and direct your ambition towards your own personal stuff. Or even set the ambition aside, and just enjoy life. At least until the consequences of everybody operating under a similar system of demotivation kicks in.
Once you can break away from many traditional imaginations of what a business is and how it should run there are some interesting possibilities.
Very challenging and easy to get wrong though I'd guess.
https://itrevolution.com/articles/radical-enterprise-pioneer...
Somehow that works, so maybe that suggests ~50% of employees at a business could be in self-organising units of less than 10 people?
And that is true even if the group is the best people possible. The only way would be to have no disagreement, but then you would probably be creatively dead.
To put another way, i suspect communication scales quasi linearly with managers, but at least quadratically without.
And while they may have support staff, they typically "work alone" in the sense that there's one partner per account, so very little oversight or management is needed.
The primary purpose of this "collective" is to create a "brand" of sorts. Ernst and Young has more prestige than say Franklin and Franklin. This draws in higher paying customers.
I feel like there are sufficient differences in this kind of business to a typical software business that the comparison is not especially useful.
Which is not to say that a coop can't work, just that the comparison to accountants and lawyers doesn't work.
My brother is an attorney in a small practice of 6 attorneys. They are all partners, share ownership, and rotate who the managing partner annually.
Realistically, you may as well talk about it as something that can't be done. If anything, it's probably easier to stack eggs than to get more than 4 people to work collaboratively without the current incentives and rules making it all hold together.
The fact that even Valve, which is one of the companies closest to the idea of having endless free money, and thus the most forgiving to a structure like that, didn't make it work, must surely at least give us pause for thought!
How does that work? As in the employees are owners but the managers aren't?
What happens if half of the ten think the manager is good and the other half think he's bad?
On the one side, you'll have a normal company where the workers own the company (well, most employed engineers own some shares in FB, Google etc, too), on the other hand you have anarcho-syndicalist groups that are super hard into the process and THE PLENUM is paramount.
Presumably in a smaller private company with 100% insider ownership, it could be arranged that employees have more influence. For example, the employees could vote on board seats or raise and discuss issues at a General Meeting of the company’s shareholders.
This would presumably not be the case in VC-funded startups where the founders and VCs would choose the board and retain the lion’s share of equity and all nominal control.
In practice, in most companies that are not agency-style partnerships the insider ownership doesn’t really matter in terms of influence from what I’ve seen. In agency partnerships there is a dual class issue of partners and regular employees.
A private company with a BDFL who retains 50% + 1 control but has the minority stake dispersed among the rest of the employees seems like an interesting approach. The “B” comes into play in how the majority owner supports decision making. The “D” acts as a forcing function and guardrail to limit the effect of internal politics.
today? checks created date.
I mean, lol, this place was basically blasting anyone who dared say GPT Bing was going to be less than the revolution of our lifetimes. Right before it went off the rails.
Nice verb, is this an original coinage?
What we're finding is that if you start with the right culture and balance the incentives very carefully you can basically create a magnet-like mechanism where the more people join the network/coop, the greater the value derived for all members and the greater the opportunity cost for the remaining hold outs to not join.
Well, now you owe us a blog post
How about an internal market where people bid for tickets?
There are crypto projects facilitating governance of organizations. They could help both enforce and simplify keeping records. Example: https://aragon.org/
Edit: Earlier I suggested hiring people for internal-money, but that might be tax evasion. Don't do it without consulting lawyers in your country.
This can be done without involving anything crypto related too. A great design principle to incorporate is Stigmergy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
To be clear though: Just because folks talk about using "markets" doesn't mean those marketplaces have to be built around "currencies" as we typically imagine them (crypto currencies included). They can be built around anything that can be counted or conceptualized numerically. For instance, HN / reddit votes are a type of stigmergic marketplace.
When designed effectively, markets can be massively scalable engines for human consensus.
If that were true, there would be no successful co-ops anywhere in any field of work. That's obviously not the case. Just look at this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives#United_St... if you're from the USA, I'm sure you'll be able to recognize a name or two.
Just like a democracy dies once the voters figure out they can vote themselves money from the public till, a coop dies when the workers realize they can decide they don't have to work.
The flattest companies (meaning, the ones where individuals had the most autonomy, and were actually interested in business ideas that came from the bottom up) cared more about culture fit and the ability to learn things quickly.
You could say the same thing to describe working for any corporation.
But yes, you are absolutely correct, and the value added by a productive developer is probably vastly larger than the value added by the rest of the rank and file. That's why developer centric startups can grow so large, so quickly.
Still need the rank and file to take care of pesky things like sales, payroll, governance/compliance, etc...
Same rule applies to co-ops
https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust
https://baxendaleownership.co.uk/torchbox-digital-agency-mov...
[edit formatting]
Yup, there we go
The systems and processes for running a psychopathic corporation are laid out like the Netflix Paved Path for anyone who wants to play the game of "get as much as you can." This path will push you to build the most exploitative thing there is possible in order create maximum returns for capital (even if that becomes you). The end result is what you see: GE, Exxon, Amazon, Wal-Mart, BP Google, etc... an organization with no long term goal other than making money for investors. Is that your definition of "Working out over the long term?"
How about we build a real strong community where we're all owners and we have a say in how the process works, we share in the wins and the losses and don't screw anyone over ever. It's possible, yet somehow all of my fellow geniuses - despite all our ingeniousness - can't unpack this super simple problem that cooperatives around the world have been solving forever. Oh sorry, a few anecdotes about some failed ones and some old hippies that fight yet retain amazingly robust communities, means it will never work.
The systems and processes for "share everything from the beginning" - while working within the economic system that exists today - that's severely underdeveloped and needs thousands of former-capitalists like you and me to start putting the work in to change it.
Or you can build yet another private dictatorship cause it's "easier" for you.
> why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time?
Because there are (a lot!) of people who are more interested in an equitable work than extracting fortunes for themselves.
Because you "make millions" on the backs of the people you string along, and not everybody wants that.
> Horray, effective altruism! You mean the thing that allows you to ignore any current problem in favor of pretend problems a hundred years out? And conveniently includes making yourself rich, which is of course only happening to fix said pretend problem. And, well, your life really pleasant on the backs of others, but that's a rounding error.
> Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? One option here is helping an industry that's currently setting itself up for a marvellous collapse because it treats open source as an opportunity to extract only. (Until the maintainers give up, and then there'll wailing and gnashing of teeth)
Another side is helping people live a more sustainable live. There's nothing wrong with a co-op to e.g. ensure health care and pensions. While working reasonable hours.
Could this fail? Probably. Maybe even likely, because co-op folks tend to be a bit more idealist, which makes business survival a bit harder.
But let's not pretend there aren't a lot of people who wouldn't be willing to join a co-op, or that it generates absolutely no benefit.
The laborers made more money because of your idea while performing the same work. They are better off and still had no part in making the improvement.
Please explain how this "improvement" happened without the "laborers"
Those are just the low hanging fruits without any major impact to how work is done.
Stepping down into the internals of the business, it’s going to vary a lot but in manufacturing you spend time looking at high failure rate processes, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. Changing these with effectively no change to how individual laborers work is quite common and can significantly improve yield stability and throughput.
Going even lower level, it might be as simple as better insulation around a bake process resulting in 50% less energy.
You might be interested in reading about the improvements in steel mills where the labor required was reduced by an order of magnitude over the last 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis
Improvements come without labor all of the time and it’s a frequent point of contention with the labor when it eliminates a role rather than acts as a force multiplier.
I couldn't have explained worker alienation better had I tried
1. Milma - Kerala Co-operative Milk Marketing federation. Virtually every household uses and trusts milma. It has been around for 53 years.
2. Indian Coffee House - It is a worker co-operative restaurant chain. Very successful and is around since 1958.
3. ULCCS - India's oldest worker co-operative. Operating from 1925, mainly in construction sector. It also has an IT wing.
How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself? Would the judiciary in that part of the world uphold them or strike them out like the judiciary of other parts of the world have done.
Tip, if you are female and married a rich bloke, move to the UK, prove your British citizenship and then get divorced in UK law courts!
Amber Heard knew the British law courts are biased against men!
You sign them with the co-op as the other party, same as any other business.
I know lawyers let you put WTF into business contracts because its a business to business contract anything goes, but business to human contracts are different and this is what amazes me about the ethical nature of lawyers & law firms knowing some of those lawyers will go on to become judges of all things.
Been There, Seen it, Done it!
In industries where they really care about trade secrets but are also dealing with people who know how to negotiate, you see a lot of contracts where you get paid your full salary for say a year to sit at home and do nothing, as compensation for not working for a competitor during that time.
But its ok to pay poor wages and let staff go, using the law as a weapon? Isnt that anti capitalist? Isnt that against the spirit of the law?
>with people who know how to negotiate
Rather the employment is not so one sided, the employee has to take everything dished out to them.
>you see a lot of contracts where you get paid your full salary for say a year to sit at home and do nothing,
You also see people put on gardening leave where the contract contains nothing to handle certain situations.
I disagree. Knowing what to build is the hardest part of the tech industry. It's why the industry funds a constant stream of failing startups: it's the trial and error process of finding out what the world actually needs built.
Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those?
The people who invested to start them. A co-op is just when the stakeholders get together to buy something (shares in the startup, in this case) instead of having a handful of not-so-informed and partially disinterested investors provide liquidity.
And if the people investing aren't the workers, how is it different than the VC model?
Say you find 100 tech people that can afford to put $100k each to start the company. Then what? Do they put up money and work for free? If you have to give the money back in 1 year as a salary what about the second year? How about marketing budget, office space, equipment etc?
As for why the employees would work for equity, well, they'd value it for the same reasons the investors would. If 1M shares is worth $20M to a group of investors it should be worth the same to 100 employees. You're obviously going to be using personal runway, which millionaires have more of than average workers, but SWEs have been making enough money over the last 30 years that it will be easier for them than almost any other profession.
Something is only worth what you can sell it for. If you can't readily sell your equity to anyone but your fellow worker-employees, how sure are you that it'll be worth the same to them as it might be to investors?
Might I suggest avoiding the question of equity and financial value entirely? Successful worker-owned coops seem to handle it mostly by making shares the thing that gets you voting rights with the rest going into wages.
Because you believe what you are doing is more important than maximizing how much money you can make
Actually better [1]: "Additionally, the average cooperative wage paid at all reporting worker cooperatives is $19.67 per hour, more than $7 higher than the minimum wage in the 13 states with the most worker co-ops."
Oh, I'm sorry. You were probably talking about the infinitely small minority of software workers that make the top of the top salaries + non-controlling equity that is just more salary really. So long as you don't get laid off right?
Should all labor be structured around some pipe-dream that everyone can be a billionaire as long as nobody shares or cares about those around them?
The problem is that it's an apples to oranges comparison friend
On average most people make more than people on average in corporations it's just that the lottery ticket like chance of getting so rich that you can move into the capital class and leave all the peasants back on earth is not only unlikely, it's explicitly an anti-goal.
[2] https://ncbaclusa.coop/blog/worker-co-op-employees-now-earn-...
This is not a general position about how all or even any significant portion of labor should be organized. This is a specific comment, offered narrowly in a particular and rather unusual situation.
You seem to be treating me as someone who opposes cooperatives. This is amusingly far from correct. My objections here are not anti-cooperative, they are practical objections to the contradictions in the plan of someone I would like to see succeed.
It's not "either or", it's "yes and" is my point.
And yes the plan is to pay what the cooperative approves. If we can afford 500k per worker and meet all cooperative goals and the organization approves it in the annual budget then that's what everyone will get.
It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got 105 members at the moment and are growing every day.
We've got more info here if you're interested >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1
We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs.
Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart.
Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.
Our group is 18 months in and going strong. However, the structure is based on a decade of thought work from some of the founding folks, so we've been very intentional with the design.
Some of the keys to our approach have been:
1. Our main focus is on "professional empowerment" (learning, networking, experience building, etc) not getting people paid work. We do happen to get people paid work, but we set the expectation up front that it's a network first and a consultancy second. We can guarantee professional growth but not necessarily immediate employment. Of course, the bigger the network grows & the more brand awareness we build, the easier it gets to staff people quickly.
2. We use gamified incentivization mechanics to recognize and reward anything that benefits the collective with actual cash and longterm passive income: mentoring/coaching, bringing in business, building internal tools, working on products we're incubating, etc.
3. We're very focused on membership diversity in terms of role type, career stage and interest. We've got members with full time roles who are only in the group to coach & mentor, long term consultants looking to staff juniors on projects, juniors looking to get their first experience, entrepreneurs looking to exchange mentorship for help with their startups, etc. There's a network effect that starts to kick in when there's enough different sorts of folks involved. That is absolutely critical to longterm success. But it also requires a lot of patience.
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As you say, this is definitely an extremely hard nut to crack. That's part of the reason why we're putting a lot of effort into developing the model and offering it to other community-centric organizations to incorporate into their own orgs. The more orgs which adopt these sorts of models, the more data we'll have on what works and what doesn't.
Please let me know how I can help via the email in my profile.
FWIW I'm starting a residential trash/recycling cooperative to roll back the capitalistic accretion of all public works, so anything anarchic-syndicalist I will support however I can.
There is so much drama and you always have a share of people who don't pull their weight and the resentment that comes with that.
Another thing people never remember is that depending on your country you are on the hook for your share of the looses incurred if the co-op runs with a loss. Your are not insulated from the losses in the same was as if you are just a shareholder.
Right now, the biggest problem is discovery, i.e. who is still hiring vs who just has stale jobs listed on their website. I'm working on making this list so it's much easier to discover the (literally thousands of Seed to Series B companies still hiring!)
See companies that are hiring: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hY...
If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends' Seed and Series A companies. VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight. email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)
All the least valuable people were laid off…
I can imagine the news will say "aha, see, there weren't really that many who were capable of being entrepreneurs who were working at FAANG", but really it's just the same old lack of access to capital, and if they did have capital many of them certainly would and could.
Plenty of worker-owned coffee shops, book stores, grocery stores, etc are famously successful. Be more open-minded, ya scrooge.
I say this as someone that regularly employs <$15/hr freelance talent. You have to manage them differently but they can produce just the same on the majority of tasks I need of them.
(a) Open governance model: the companies decisions has input from employees and users, even the general public (with care taken not to suffer attacks e.g. sybil attacks from false users)
(b) Ethical goal model: have a non-modifiable set of goals and ethical standards (improve the lives of everyone). Not maximizing revenue, but genuinely improving wellbeing of everyone. (this should have the benefit of attracting ESG investors)
(c) Cross-industry cooperation: open sourcing as much as feasible, and asking users and other collaborators for donations to maintain the project. Likewise, contribute financially to projects that are useful for the company. Basically, establish cooperation networks among open source, open governance and ethical companies.
Literally everyone you need was laid off... Tech people, business people, marketing, sales, etc. We just need a forum and some volunteers to organize. We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them.
(there are lots of different kinds of co-ops, and I'm not suggesting any particular model other than a worker owned organization where the workers own and control the company)