The biggest thing I've learned from being part of this process is that co-ops vastly destroys competition among peers and replace that we the mindset of "what's the best way to benefit the collective". Best thing to make it work is that it's not just altruism, benefiting the collective benefits yourself. Kind of like OSS works.
My contact details are in the profile, alternatively feel free to come and say hi: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
Mind sharing the co-op name?
I'm living in Portugal right now and I'm thinking about switching careers, so I might give that a look.
We take 5% from goods and services sold through the cooperative to the outside world and that's what mantains the whole central structure.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
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.
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 nil.
You mean the last paragraph where they _volunteer_ to have coaching sessions with people? "Selling" usually implies an exchange of money or an expectation of something in return, but there's no product here – the author is offering their time for free to help others start or join cooperatives. Is it fair to dismiss that as "being sold" something?
I find non-monetized content generally to have higher quality than monetized ones. The author is intrinsically motivated to produce quality and there is no other goal other than to share what they have with the world.
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.
The only semi-valid reason to have a hierarchy in a cooperative is to optimize voting and reduce meetings. That would be less necessary if your cooperative runs in a more digital way and concerns of various members are known ahead of time.
Otherwise hierarchical cooperatives can be literally corrupted by the hierarchy or sold out, turning them into an almost regular company with board of shareholders.
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.
There are large cooperatives, but only in "solved" industries so there aren't many hard decisions left to make. Programming is not one of those fields yet.
Often very political - seen as a good thing but can add conflict (ie divesting/not stocking/opposing apartheid Israel while some members are Jewish). No x because y etc - repeat for many topics.
Decision making - both hard and strong feelings internally- can lead to claims around “violent” communication, micro aggression, privilege, disrespect etc etc when there are disagreements. Coops will say a good thing, but I think can wear people out sometimes.
Accountability/performance mgmt. not always, but sometimes difficult to take action in this area - maybe a good thing - goal is to work together.
One interesting variant are employee owned businesses that do not run as co-ops. ESOPS etc. I’m not an expert at all, but I think there are a number of really industrial scale businesses that have this structure successfully.
Decisions are not easy when it affects lots of people and that's why those should be made as carefully as possible in the settings available and we know from social studies, it is proven, that individual decision making is quick, group decision making is accurate, in overall. For the group of people in the long run group decisions was better. As a side effect it was not making life unbearably quick by themselves and may eliminate the need for some of the quick decisions (some, as there are aspects outside of human groups that mandate actions, those cannot be eliminated).
Mostly philosophizing above.
A badly run cooperative fails because the people involved don't take it seriously, or lose their alignment and break apart. A well run cooperative fails (or succeeds) for all the usual reasons any business does. A well run coop ends up feeling a lot like a small business with a traditional structure, and an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant. That's cool, but it's a lot of work to reproduce the performance characteristics of an existing technology.
I've been involved in many sessions where we tried to experiment with the structure and mechanics of how a cooperative works, in order to address what seem to be persistent shortcomings in the model. Nobody has really cracked the code yet, in my opinion.
When it comes down to it, having done both, I think I'd rather work for a good boss at a small company than be in another coop, even a good one. I want someone competent to do all the behind the scenes work, and make most of the decisions, asking me for my opinion on the things that affect me directly or for which my expertise can provide some direct insight.
The advantages: If I don't like the company, I can leave without feeling like I've failed: there are no non-work relationships, or sense of ownership holding me there. I don't have to attend additional meetings. I don't have to look at budgets. I don't have to be on a committee or working group. I don't have to pick a side and convince the other side of anything. If the company makes a bad decision, I say "ha ha, those morons did it again" and keep on doing my job.
In short, as I have come to identify less with work, I have become less interested in the cooperative model because the value of ownership has gone down.
Until a multi-billion company aquires the corporate
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 narcissist thinks they are the CEO. The more money at stake... the quicker things tend to turn nasty.
Best of luck =)
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.
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.
Rule by consensus is messy, inefficient, and ultimately prone to failure in commercial settings without slave labor.
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.
Have a wonderful day =)
Same.
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...
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.
So the solution to the problems with cooperatives is to introduce capitalism? Why not just make a normal company with normal money instead?
In general I prefer cooperative work and have experienced too much antogonistic work in startups.
hierarchies replace meetings - but there are still awful interminable meetings because agreement still needs to be reached because work is too complex to allow for total command and control because management will screw it up
salaries are held down for the good of the organism (try outbidding one line of business for a really good person or team and see if that's allowed)
the failure point is equitable sharing but if you took all fortune 500 companies and allocated shares to employees it would be hard to tell the difference. Especially as the managers would be up for election - you tend to get that when your employees own the company.
He replied "Things like that are why you'll never find a real job." and stormed off.
(I was trying to escape my PhD at the time, but the world being what it was in the Summmer after Snowden, somehow the only offer I got was a K Street NGO, and absolutely zero companies that would pay me a fair wage for my labor.)
Anyways, if anyone is looking for something with information security experience for their co-op feel free to reply -- I'd love to log out of this nym, which was supposed to only last for a weekend in Las Vegas, forever, but I can not do that until I complete my... mission.
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:
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.
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.
There are two things here, "competent", and "nice to work with". I've met co-workers that are perfectly nice people, I thought they do shit work but I wasn't the one paying them so I didn't really cared if they stayed working. Yeah they are negative for the company but I personally don't care, more than that, working with pleasant people is worth more to me than company being that 0.5% more efficient by not employing them.
That does shit a bit in coop as your share in profit grows when someone bad at the job gets fired.
> 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.
Yeah I can imagine that being even harder the more interconnected the org structure is, people are naturally tribal
I realized that I didn't want to start a regular startup. I want to do business, but without the pressure of maximizing profits.
We're going to do things like: create extremely simple and elegant computer systems; build robots to collect litter and clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; acquire land and create parks that double as agriculturally productive "food forests"; build fancy hich-tech ecologically-integrated homes and shops; etc...
(If you were to trawl though my comment history you'd find me yammering on about all this for years now. I finally got my hands on a tiny bit of capital. In a rocket metaphor, this is ignition and liftoff. The engine is roaring and I'ma crack the sky.)
Email in profile. :)
Anyway it is very naive at least.
Where the clients come from?
If you has been fired, look for another job.
If you has been fired and you were working with other 10 people that are skilled, and you like to work together and you knows someone that want your skills or you know how to sell yourself and you wants to take your own decisions as a group (like in a pirate boat), then yes, a coop is a choice.
It is not the panacea, it is hard, you will deal with things than never before faced, and is not like you are with people to face that together, you are alone together to face that. I talk for myself and coming form IT i hate bourocracy. And you must to deal with that every day, or at least you must to know that some people must to deal with that, someone. It is a must. Spoiler: you can hire people to do that for youyou, but the reason you build a coop is that you are a worker and you wants to participate in the board. Both.
A coop is not the answer of your lack of employment. It is the answer to deal equally with a capitalist model, inside the capitalism.., something like that.
Anyway, I love coops, the trustworthy level you needs, the equal vote for decisions you have, it is your company, you will take care of that. But everyone must to be in the same boat.
No, if you has been fired look for another job. A coop needs more from you than that.
It doesn’t take many sneaky sociopaths or psychopaths to subvert a system built on assumptions of good faith and good will. And even among good people, strong visions arise which may clash with other strong visions.
I need to know there is a clear method of resolving conflict, otherwise I am confident that all those smiling people are going to be carrying concealed knives.
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.
It cannot talk about everyone, because there are many different kinds of people and work sectors. I'd expect the motivational priorities to exist on a continuum, on which some people are more motivated by money than others. Also, the "adequate compensation" varies from person to person; some are happy with some level, some are never happy.
I mean, I find it extremely hard to believe that things like, say, "respect from co-workers" and "interesting work tasks" would factor in as the primary source of motivation for e.g. anyone working a low-paying job and living from paycheck to paycheck, regardless of who exactly (worker, employer, state, someone else) thinks the compensation is adequate. In contrast, for someone who already possesses a hefty surplus of money, obtaining more money probably plays a smaller role in the overall motivation.
However, none of this means that it's generalizeable to say all working people are not primarily motivated by money (or are primarily motivated, for that matter). One could just as well argue the opposite: (for some people) money turns out to be really high on the list of things which motivates them. Whichever way, it still is weird to claim this as an absolute, applying to everyone.
To put this into a more concrete context: a C-suite executive of a Fortune 500 company might say "money is not my primary motivation, energizing coffee machine discussions, personal fulfillment, yada yada" -- they already are on a level with plenty of material wealth and opportunities for recreation. In contrast, a single parent sanitary worker is unlikely to claim motivation comes from "I'm energized by the interesting work tasks" or something else than money; certainly they are motivated by being able to pay rent and buy food for their children and would rather have more money than less.
Some people will be perfectly happy working in a team with manager shielding them from most of the office politics vs pretty much having to take part in politics in coop
Google and Goldman have no trouble hiring.
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
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
As an employee, you are at the whims of your employers when it comes to something as important as the way you're able to support yourself and your family.
