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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?

#311

Post by kortilla »

groby_b wrote: post #212
marcusverus wrote: post #101

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. 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…

Have you actually ever seen a co-op work? > 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…

“On the backs of others” implies the world is zero sum, which is just dumb. If you come in with an idea that gets 10% more efficiency out of an industry, you can pay more to the laborers for the same work they were doing before and still become a millionaire.

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.

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

#312

Post by yellow_lead »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #71
jjgreen wrote: post #13

We're sitting in the park, drinking Thunderbird and arguing with the pigeons.

That's funny, there are no pigeons where I live. I recently came back from holiday and I enjoyed looking at them and analyse their seemingly erratic alas scavenging behaviour all along. I even felt sorry for the not-so-well-groomed ones... We don't think enough about pigeons... oh well... back to work.

Reminds me of the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' - https://youtu.be/GmlSSSN7C78?t=14

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

#313

Post by sangyh »

for data science/ML folks, I created a small slack group with 17 ppl who are helping mentor and mock interview each other ..

if anyone is interested in joining, pls fill this out: https://forms.gle/CAbVhBYmc34EeBMM9

we have a notion page to help with introductions/interview scheduling and a slack to chat with each other.

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

#314

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kortilla wrote: post #311
groby_b wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually ever seen a co-op work? > 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…

“On the backs of others” implies the world is zero sum, which is just dumb. If you come in with an idea that gets 10% more efficiency out of an industry, you can pay more to the laborers for the same work they were doing before and still become a millionaire. 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.

>still had no part in making the improvement.

Please explain how this "improvement" happened without the "laborers"

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

#315

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Kalium wrote: post #286
whatshisface wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the business. For one with steady recurring revenue and a predictable future, they could value it on a risk-discounted basis. I agree that the unicorn model wouldn't work well for someone who was going to put most of their money in a single opportunity. Fortunately, any given business is virtually guaranteed not to be a unicorn.

Yes, you're right. I think that's the problem here. Worker-owners can't value their equity for the same reasons investors would. Those reasons aren't available in this hypothetical context. I think you need a different explanation for why worker-owners would value equity if they can't expect to be able to sell it for a profit. Might I suggest avoiding the question of equity and financial value entirely? Successful wo…

>I think you need a different explanation for why worker-owners would value equity if they can't expect to be able to sell it for a profit

Because you believe what you are doing is more important than maximizing how much money you can make

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

#316

Post by AndrewKemendo »

robswc wrote: post #87
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…

I just don't understand the incentive and it seems like it would end up as a race to the bottom, no? 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.…

Because you get to set the pace for whatever you are doing as a group instead of someone else setting the pace for you

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.

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

#317

Post by kortilla »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #314
kortilla wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“On the backs of others” implies the world is zero sum, which is just dumb. If you come in with an idea that gets 10% more efficiency out of an industry, you can pay more to the laborers for the same work they were doing before and still become a millionaire. 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.

>still had no part in making the improvement. Please explain how this "improvement" happened without the "laborers"

Lots of ways. Buying cost critical supplies in bulk from cheaper suppliers. Switching from truck based shipping to rail for distance where the flexibility isn’t needed.

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.

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

#318

Post by Huggernaut »

somenameforme wrote: post #310
asveikau wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Some interesting approaches that companies are taking around this are described in Matt Parker's book, "A Radical Enterprise" for example, companies being made up of many microenterprises.

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...

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

#319

Post by robertlagrant »

whatshisface wrote: post #255
robertlagrant wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sorry. I genuinely don't understand. Is it that the ten people report to the manager, but the manager also reports to the ten people?

What happens if half of the ten think the manager is good and the other half think he's bad?

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