Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, what it takes to write good documentation, or how architecture works.

I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?

Otherwise you end up with someone who has their entire identity wrapped up in their work, which can be stressful no matter how much they "care about professional development"

Everyone was forced to do the questionnaire and afterwards we had an opportunity to discuss the results with the company and our managers. All through the process, management stressed how much they were interested in how we can grow, how we can do better in the organisation and so on.

I asked: why don't just sit down with people over a coffee and ask them? I got blank stares. You could tell they thought we were all too stupid to know what we wanted and that nothing valuable could come out of that process. Completely idiotic.

1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.

2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.

3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.

4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.