Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 176 posts

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

#101

Post by bernawil »

Shoue wrote: post #81
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #72

Some of the worst politics I ever saw were in nonprofit entities. Primarily, it was because some with dominant personalities made decisions that were not rational, informed, and or fair. The faithful talent tend to get hurt the most, as they invest more resources being driven by their ideals. I am all for profit sharing, but someone has to take responsibility for risk mitigation. The worst firms are ones where every…

Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven. The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims: > Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in…

> Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven.

A tech consultancy cooperative works exactly like most non-profits: they don't post a profit and distribute everything as salaries. The "non-profit" part is for the entity, not the people running it.

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

#103

Post by sofixa »

sokoloff wrote: post #58
sofixa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should let Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart and similar know this. Their union busting tactics are widely documented (including shutting down locations starting to form a union).

They do know this. Many of their tactics are specifically directed at “make the employees not want the union”. Some of those tactics are under-handed, even despicable, but it’s safe to say that they know this and act in accordance.

Firing everyone in a store in the process of unionizing isn't "make employees not want the union", it's retaliating against those that do and instilling fear in the rest.

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

#104

Post by Brian_K_White »

Jensson wrote: post #16
altras wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have the money and left the shitty organization that produced it, and now I don't have to work, and find after some time of happy relief, all my hobby interests do not provide enough sense of purpose.

I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now.

If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true.

I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price)

There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig.

But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected.

I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it.

Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.

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

#105

Post by PedroBatista »

AstralStorm wrote: post #96
onphonenow wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - so in your view Elon as the top person in Twitter hierarchy will not be able to change Twitter except very slowly ?

My view (not OP) is that Elon will break the company and get it to fail. He does not understand that Twitter is an ad driven business which also means PR is critical or you don't get advertisers. Most businesses that tried to pivot from ad driven to subscribers have failed. One that tried to do so in so dramatic a way? Never heard of it. Elon is not doing a simple management style change, he's changing everything wit…

He understands what Twitter is and he and his buddies ( jack for ex. ) want to turn it into something else.

If they’ll succeed that’s a whole different matter. Not only because they were “wrong” but also because “reality” will have a say in that.

You invest all you money building a nuclear reactor in 1929, you’ll be not wrong but the timing was off.

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

#106

Post by UncleEntity »

kodyo wrote: post #63
mypastself wrote: post #13

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…

Visible frustration sometimes counts as violent communication, according to the book.

I used to work for the post office in the early 90s and a couple coworkers got into one of these visible frustration violent communications with the one who started the argument getting two weeks paid leave for ‘stress’.

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

#107

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I like the idea of a co-op, but I'm always worried about "in a perfect world," not happening (like Communism sounds like a great idea, but human nature screws it all up).

For myself, I'm not competitive. It's a life choice. When we compete, we win, and winning always means that someone else loses. I've spent my entire adult life, in an environment, where I help "losers" to get back on their feet, and it has had quite an impact on me.

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

#108

Post by beedeebeedee »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #94
Shoue wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven. The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims: > Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in…

Many have taken issue with William Forster Lloyd's assertion: "tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in ca…

>I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature.

I find that comment odd, given that they cited papers that directly spoke about the functioning of coops. Conversely, your comment mentioning the tragedy of the commons seems very off topic. Could you explain more how it relates?

Best of luck =)

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

#109

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

TylerE wrote: post #45
samtho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party. Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically ni…

The signal I’ve started looking for is an above the fold “minutes to read” stat. Sites, like Medium, that have it are practically all worth ignoring because it’s either astroturfing or just navel gazing.

The New York Times has the "x min read" stat listed under articles on its homepage.

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

#110

Post by forty »

PedroBatista wrote: post #105
AstralStorm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view (not OP) is that Elon will break the company and get it to fail. He does not understand that Twitter is an ad driven business which also means PR is critical or you don't get advertisers. Most businesses that tried to pivot from ad driven to subscribers have failed. One that tried to do so in so dramatic a way? Never heard of it. Elon is not doing a simple management style change, he's changing everything wit…

He understands what Twitter is and he and his buddies ( jack for ex. ) want to turn it into something else. If they’ll succeed that’s a whole different matter. Not only because they were “wrong” but also because “reality” will have a say in that. You invest all you money building a nuclear reactor in 1929, you’ll be not wrong but the timing was off.

Timing being an important part of a strategy, I'd say wrong timing still counts as being wrong.
Post reply on HN