Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by Shoue » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

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 all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales

Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404

Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.

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

#82

Post by onphonenow » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:29 PM UTC

fimdomeio wrote: post #31

stareatgoats wrote: post #18

> 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 e…

My personal theory (I don't think it is very popular amongst my fellow coops) is that co-ops need well defined hierarchies that have the power to take a lot of decisions and the dutty to report on the decisions taken and the resoning behind it but with that also well defined rules to make sure power changes hands via democratic processes every x amount of years.

Or check out esops or employee owned companies - they don’t have same egalitarian approach - but often run more like a business

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

#83

Post by onphonenow » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

mihaaly wrote: post #68

stareatgoats wrote: post #18

> 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 e…

I am unsure if fast turns is a thing of hierarchical organizations, especially the successful ones, what I see that the bigger (some say more successful) it is the slower it turns. Period. Also it's will to turn is lower by getting bigger, trying to stick to past success and methods as much as pussible because every change is constly and every change is risky, and the members don't want to risk the livelyhood of thei…

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

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

#84

Post by zozbot234 » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

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…

Co-ops and partnerships work very well for low capital intensity businesses, and coding is a low capital-intensity business in this day and age. It makes total sense that people are interested in such arrangements, it's not just a matter of wishful thinking.

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

#85

Post by davidjfelix » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #78

But damn, "getting fired coz most of your coworkers wanted you gone" gonna hurt more than getting fired by some manager.

I'm going to counter this a bit -- if most of your coworkers want you gone, do you want to work there? Does it make sense to continue or would staying just mean continuing a toxic relationship for all parties? I think this just formalizes the quiet grumblings of people who who think "how is x person still here, they don't carry their weight" etc.

I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat.

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

#86

Post by fimdomeio » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

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?

Co-ops are in the first place about shared ownership which is a big help in bringing meaningfullness to the work one does. If the amount of money earned is the biggest motivation then I would say a cooperative is probably not the right fit in most situations.

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

#87

Post by Shoue » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #78

But damn, "getting fired coz most of your coworkers wanted you gone" gonna hurt more than getting fired by some manager.

True, but coops are also more selective about firing and hiring. So if you're a bad fit, you're less likely to end up in a coop, and if you do end up there, you will have more stable employment because coops generally don't fire people during crises, they collectively cut their salaries by a certain percentage, or give up yearly bonuses, and when things get good again, they reinstate their old salaries or bonuses.

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

#88

Post by Shoue » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

code_runner wrote: post #76

KingOfCoders wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The startup went bust during the dot com bubble bursting when our series B fell through (like everyone else). I think a cooperative would be more future proof and not having a binary result. In general I prefer cooperative work and have experienced too much antogonistic work in startups.

But why would the cooperative have survive and why is it less prone to antagonistic work?

Cooperatives have a higher survival rate, both in general and during crises.

> A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

> A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability

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

#89

Post by pessimizer » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

stareatgoats wrote: post #18

> 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 e…

There's something to be said for representative democracy. I want to work in something like a cooperative, but I don't want to be constantly engaged in managing it. I'd rather assign my vote to someone who seems like they have their head on straight, and get a monthly email that tells me what's been going on lately.

Maybe like how pure hierarchical capitalists need a fairly large financial industry to handle the movement of wagers and prizes between investors and producers, a flatter system might need a big and active enough group of secretaries/reporters to keep everybody so informed about internal decision-making and events that normal members don't feel like they have to attend meetings.

It's really a privilege of power not to have to explain yourself. A flatter system might have to dedicate a standing portion of its efforts to explaining itself.

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

#90

Post by pmoriarty » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

Shoue wrote: post #43

bluesign wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it is little worse than unions done good.

That's an odd critique considering coops exist to solve the friction between unions and businesses by building the democratic control into the business itself, avoiding the need for a union. Especially when you consider all the union busting tactics used by leadership at traditional businesses – how are you even supposed to form a union when they won't let you? Coops come at that from a different angle: you get democ…

"Especially when you consider all the union busting tactics used by leadership at traditional businesses – how are you even supposed to form a union when they won't let you?"

Even when you manage to form a union, companies have ways of screwing you over.

Case in point was the recent successful unionization of a Starbucks location in Seattle you might have heard about on the news. Starbucks' reaction? They just closed that location.[1]

[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/business/starbucks-closure-un...