Earlier quoted context omitted.
And expect lower salaries as a result. Nothing is free
Do you have any examples of where labour organisation has led to lower pay?
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Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
251–260 of 342 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#252Right 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... Add company here: https://forms.gle/abCCJ5ByvDFcyRP2A If anyone is st…
Am I missing something here? There are only 4 companies in that spreadsheet...
Gotta start somewhere - would love for anyone to add some more.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, or "should we spend millions on Steam Deck which will pay off in 10 years" vs "should we all just get a big pay rise now with the money?" 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!
At Valve the corporate wing made (and still makes) those decisions, trying to have ten people agree on who deserves to be paid what and whether it should be invested instead hasn't been tried in any company I know of. In contrast having managers who are collectively answerable to those ten employees through the share ownership structure has been tried, and it works out okay.
> having managers who are collectively answerable to those ten employees through the share ownership structure has been tried
How does that work? As in the employees are owners but the managers aren't?
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. 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...…
Most of those coops are professionally managed, if they're of any size.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
At Valve the corporate wing made (and still makes) those decisions, trying to have ten people agree on who deserves to be paid what and whether it should be invested instead hasn't been tried in any company I know of. In contrast having managers who are collectively answerable to those ten employees through the share ownership structure has been tried, and it works out okay.
> having managers who are collectively answerable to those ten employees through the share ownership structure has been tried How does that work? As in the employees are owners but the managers aren't?
In this example we're talking about 11 more or less equal shareholders, one of whom is a manager.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent. It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got…
To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first? 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…
I think you're absolutely right that not everyone is equally employable right off the bat (though most folks can, with time and effort, become super valuable team members). It's very important to be up-front with that somewhat harsh reality and to bake that directly into your organizational design. When done correctly it becomes a benefit rather than a weakness.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#257Each man for himself. I'm seeing a dog eats dog mentality.
That definitely wasn’t the case for me. I was laid off with 30% of my company several months back and the support was absolutely enormous. Tons of people reaching out on LinkedIn, leads being passed around from coworkers both laid off and still employed. I went through the interview process and had offers from 4-5 companies within 2-3 weeks. Many of my colleagues had similar experiences.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#258I'm in a few Slacks where former employees have gathered. Not necessarily just in the most recent round of lay offs.
It is critical for me to keep in touch with like minded people not to mention to maintain friendships.
Slack is pretty easy and free as long as you don't care much about retention of old content.
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#259It just occurred to me that so many people were laid off, we could start the world's largest software co-op (and arguably one of the largest tech orgs, period). We could build software products that every industry needs, that every worker owns a part of and can vote on org-wide decisions. Literally everyone you need was laid off... Tech people, business people, marketing, sales, etc. We just need a forum and some vol…
> Literally everyone you need was laid off...
All the least valuable people were laid off…
Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
#260Related question: are any actual software engineers getting laid off or is it just support/admin/management who work in the tech sector? (I have been dealing with consulting contracts for software engineers lately, and was surprised to see that hourly rates are significantly higher than they were 5 years ago)
Yes, I know talented engineers from several companies that were laid off simply due to being unlucky enough to have ended up on the “wrong” project
Or maybe they are not so talented after all.