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Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

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Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#11

Post by altras »

Jensson wrote: post #6

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

There's no extensive research on this topic. I really doubt coops are paying more than FAANG and if the only thing that you're after is money then coops are surely not your thing and that's OK ;)

In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#12

Post by evolve2k »

black_puppydog wrote: post #5
timinou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the tech field but in the consulting space, both Crisp https://dna.crisp.se and Enspiral https://enspiral.com came up with interesting organisational structures that they've extensively documented.

The fact that enspiral keeps coming up as an example tells me that doing this right is really hard; if it were easy there would be more examples people would mention, no? edit: I hope it's clear I'm not trying to diminish the efforts, to the contrary! Here's also an interview with Richard Bartlett on the matter: https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on... And an episode from the General Intellect…

There’s a big online event on these types of collaborations happening later this week run by enspiral people.

People from many different organisations are attending, this stuff is definitely spreading.

https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/

A pop up digital village for building equitable, collaborative, distributed organisations

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#13

Post by mypastself »

It’s high time I stopped reading Medium articles shared here.

I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. It’s filled with vague, corporatey platitudes about ego and altruism, and there’s almost nothing in it about how this concept applies specifically to tech.

The supposed “cons” sound like the ad equivalents of leading questions:

> The relationships in a cooperative are adult-adult oriented

> All of those might be very painful if you’re not used to vocalizing your inner thoughts in non-violent ways

Well jeez, I guess I’ll skip it if I’m not allowed to respond to assigned Jira tickets with my fists.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#14

Post by Lutger »

Jensson wrote: post #6

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

Regardless of the commercial success of coops, your premise that the main reason for work is money does not hold up to scrutiny. If merely adequately compensated, money turns out to be really low on the list of things that actually motivates people.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#15

Post by leereeves »

tacoopcurious wrote: post #2

I'm happily employed but I still want to keep an eye out for interesting developments in the tech coop space for AI. The field being what it is these days, N people sharing knowledge, code, and (as permitted) data could handle N similar applied AI projects much more easily than 1 person could handle 1. Are there successful examples of this model anywhere?

Eleuther and LAION are close to being tech coops for AI, and have helped open recent AI developments (LLM and diffusion).

They aren't actually coops and really belong to just a few people, but they do show that an AI community can do good work.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#16

Post by Jensson »

altras wrote: post #11
Jensson wrote: post #6

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

There's no extensive research on this topic. I really doubt coops are paying more than FAANG and if the only thing that you're after is money then coops are surely not your thing and that's OK ;) In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg [2] htt…

Working at Google for a few years made me lots of money so now I don't need to work for many years. Working a lower paid job means I would need to waste more time working and less time doing what makes me happy.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#17

Post by akvadrako »

willbudd wrote: post #9

I've been interested in forming this kind of organizational structure for a while. However, I have doubts about how to ensure sufficient levels of trust between individuals involved, given the different dynamics in terms of monetary compensation and "hiring processes" compared to traditional top-down companies. In that light, I wonder if perhaps a better alternative is for each individual to remain independent as the…

I've worked on this idea too, except a little inverted. Everybody is a full member of the coop, but those who bring in more earn credits which can be used to fund new projects or bump up salaries to a point.

You don't need to reach a consensus, you can just have an internal marketplace, like kickstarter. If you want something done, you can help fund it, perhaps getting some benefits in return, like a best-effort ROI.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#18

Post by stareatgoats »

> Decision-making in cooperatives can be very daunting for beginners.

Having 13 years+ of experience in cooperatives I can tell you that it is daunting even for old-timers. We started off with most decisions being made in weekly meeting (that sometimes dragged on for most of the day), and ended up with having monthly meetings for the large decisions, but weekly meetings in smaller groups instead. In short, meetings everywhere, about all things large and small. Meetings about whether to have consensus or majority rule, about whether the principle that everyone needs to follow a decision is sound etc etc.

Personality might have something to do with it. But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena.

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#19

Post by _puk »

Jensson wrote: post #6

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

Because in the current climate that's not a sure thing..

If FAANGs* remove themselves from the equation due to hiring freezes or redundancies a lot of people will be left earning below FAANG pay in a non co-operative environment.

It is proposing joining a co-operative as a possible alternative to that.

That, and it's not always about the money. It's surprisingly rewarding working outside of monetisation of attention.

*Or whatever the latest acronym is

Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

#20

Post by actually_a_dog »

Jensson wrote: post #6

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

Why don't we all just join FAANG and make the big bucks? That's kind of a ridiculous statement on its face. There are multiple reasons why someone may not want to work for a FAANG company.
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