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Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

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Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#301

Post by bityard »

fwungy wrote: post #254
justeleblanc wrote: post #171

Earlier 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. 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.

I feel like this can be mitigated with the right by-laws and whatever, and also screening very heavily for culture fit during the hiring process.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#302

Post by smokeypanda »

robust-cactus wrote: post #132
whatshisface wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting fact - valve no longer works this way because it didn't work.

Do any sources state that Valve transitioned to a traditional hierarchy? There's been reports of cliques and internal opaqueness going back a decade, but the only concrete difference I've heard versus pre-2012 is a shift towards microtransactions and hardware design.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#303

Post by conductr »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #298
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #14

It 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…

Just gonna throw this out there... perhaps those who were "let go" were not all let go because they were the best of the bunch? Not that such a thing should stop you, we all love a good rag-tag band of outcasts overcoming the evil empire story, but, you know.

I think you’re overestimating the average complexity of software. Low-medium skills folks can probably build functional clones to 90%+ of the software people use daily. They could build a new product of similar complexity. Most enterprise software is a UI for CRUD operations. I doubt they’ll be developing firmware for space X or any type of advanced/mission critical systems. But there’s a lot of room to operate.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#304

Post by twblalock »

dajtxx wrote: post #162
twblalock wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like quite a lot of guilds and unions, the actor's guild started out by defending workers rights against a restrictive system (in that case, the Hollywood studio system) but has evolved into a gatekeeping and rent-seeking organization that primarily enriches its senior members and hurts everyone else. We really, really don't want that in tech. Tech is one of the few segments of the economy where skill trumps credenti…

Skill trumping credentials and connections has not been my experience in a 35 year career. 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 in…

I got into tech without a CS degree and I know a lot of other people who have.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#305

Post by asdff »

JohnFen wrote: post #198
asdff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get hired for guild work as a non guild member, usually you join the guild after though.

Sure, it's obviously possible. If it weren't there would never be new actors on the scene. 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.

The sag rules have changed in recent years to be a lot simpler.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#306

Post by yakireev »

motohagiography wrote: post #187

I sort of thought this is what git was designed for. Need to signal your proficiency? Start contributing to projects and answering stackoverflow questions, but with a flag that says you are interested in new work.

> this is what git was designed for

Well here we are, prophecy fulfilled: tech people who see no difference between GitHub and git.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#307

Post by hankish »

engineer_22 wrote: post #288
hankish wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coop that I'm a part of (Quorum1) has been using game theory to play out just those scenarios. We've been at it for two years and you're right it's been like 10x as difficult as starting a normal company (I'm a serial entrepreneur and have started lots of traditional companies too). But we think the payoff is worth it, plus doing things differently is just straight up more fun, so there's that. What we're finding…

-> 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

Lol, yes you're right I do. Don't have it yet though. :)

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#310

Post by somenameforme »

asveikau wrote: post #154
dzikimarian wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of very proficient people are simply not interested in responsibility that comes with flat structure. 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.

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…

But where is the room for ambition in a large company with flat staffing? If you, completely independently, build something adding $2 million of revenue at e.g. Google, you've increased the company revenue by 0.0007%. Even hundreds of millions of dollars remain but a decimal point. The company is simply so large that even if you achieve amazing things, they're going to be largely irrelevant. So the only real avenue for ambition is climbing the ladder of hierarchy. But when that ladder doesn't exist?

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.

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