221–230 of 342 posts
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Perhaps we should organize....
And expect lower salaries as a result. Nothing is free
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Loomio is a great tool. It works great for certain types of things but I've struggled to really build an effective worker community with it multiple times. At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance.
> At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance. 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.
Blind[1] is a decent community to get a glimpse into what employees truly feel about employers, get referrals and overall tech career advice. It can get rather toxic and troll-ey at times, but you can filter that out to focus on the useful stuff. [1] - https://www.teamblind.com/
Most coworkers I know refuse to fill out any "how happy are you at work?" surveys or fill out max scores because they think (and I don't doubt them) that any and all information could be used by management to jeopardize their career -- basically they see their work an totalitarian information state...
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It didn't really make sense to me. How did you imagine any decisions working?
For technical stuff it works okay, because people can make decisions just by doing whatever it is, or by talking to the team and agreeing on something. It's a lot harder to get people to do that for bonuses and pay.
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!
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Many ambitious people thrive in a flat environment, though. That's one reason some people like startups. 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 total…
A good boss is a BS shield, that enhances productivity. I enjoyed startups when I was younger, but now I like to be focused. Fighting fires for a living can result in broad experience, but also less deep work, which can “stunt growth”. At least that’s my opinion/experience. They were also the most fulfilling, that completely disappeared 8 years of my life.
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It's hard to imagine such an organization working out over the long term. The incentives are all wonky! The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. I for one can't think of a less attractive idea than taking a product idea that I love and turning ownership and creative control over to a group of strangers. And that's probably why these things are so r…
A co-op doesn't mean everyone must share profits equally. 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.
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So this model only works if the laid-off employees can self-fund the new company, right? and they can afford to lose the invested capital if the startup fails?
Maybe that explains why there aren't a lot of co-op grocery stores or hardware companies compared to the number that used outside investment or the capital of one individual rich person to get started, but software engineers are in a better position to do this than most professions that I can think of.
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?
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> The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. 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 t…
>> to GPT Nice verb, is this an original coinage?
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> The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. You could say the same thing to describe working for any corporation.
Any corporation which fails to extract more value from it's employees than it pays them doesn't stay in business for long. 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 s…
Same rule applies to co-ops
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Interesting fact - valve no longer works this way because it didn't work.
Oh wow, I had no idea. When did they stop?