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
#2I'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?
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#3Tried to found one 25+ years ago. In the end not enough people were left of those initially interested and we founded a startup. Should have gone through with the cooperative even with 5 people.
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#4I'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?
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.
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#5I'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?
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 Unit podcast relating to this:
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#6Nowhere 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?
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#7I helped run a housing coop in the US several years ago, not something that I ever thought to put on my tech resume, but I'd be interested to hear if someone wants to start a digital coop near me, I suppose..
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#8Tried to found one 25+ years ago. In the end not enough people were left of those initially interested and we founded a startup. Should have gone through with the cooperative even with 5 people.
Why do you believe a cooperative would have been better?
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#9I'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 their own one-man company in a freelancer kind of way, and instead to focus on streamlining the process of establishing ad-hoc micro contracts whenever collaborative tasks are to be undertaken -- while still keeping the community aspect of a cooperative in place somehow. At the same time, I guess the reason this isn't done more extensively, is simply due to the overhead of having to reach a consensus of the worth of contributions on a task-by-task basis...
Re: Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
#10I'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?
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