Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

>The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain.

How do you think co-ops work? Are you imagining a flat organizational structure like Valve Software? An open source project plus invoices? Those are all interesting ideas, but co-ops presently work like employee-owned business and usually have managers and compensation structures that fit the obvious way those things work. HN's tendency to GPT whenever exposed to something it doesn't know about is driving me nuts today. :-)

The coop that I'm a part of (Quorum1) has been using game theory to play out just those scenarios. We've been at it for two years and you're right it's been like 10x as difficult as starting a normal company (I'm a serial entrepreneur and have started lots of traditional companies too). But we think the payoff is worth it, plus doing things differently is just straight up more fun, so there's that.

What we're finding is that if you start with the right culture and balance the incentives very carefully you can basically create a magnet-like mechanism where the more people join the network/coop, the greater the value derived for all members and the greater the opportunity cost for the remaining hold outs to not join.

> It's hard to imagine such an organization working out over the long term. The incentives are all wonky! The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain.

If that were true, there would be no successful co-ops anywhere in any field of work. That's obviously not the case. Just look at this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives#United_St... if you're from the USA, I'm sure you'll be able to recognize a name or two.

> The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain.

You could say the same thing to describe working for any corporation.

Not sure of the co-operatives in software. I am from state of Kerala, India. We have a number of very successful and long running co-operatives.

1. Milma - Kerala Co-operative Milk Marketing federation. Virtually every household uses and trusts milma. It has been around for 53 years.

2. Indian Coffee House - It is a worker co-operative restaurant chain. Very successful and is around since 1958.

3. ULCCS - India's oldest worker co-operative. Operating from 1925, mainly in construction sector. It also has an IT wing.

The company Torchbox (creators of Wagtail CMS) are an interesting example of an employee owned company. In their case it was a matter of the founders selling/moving most of their ownership to an Employee Owned Trust (as opposed to starting as a coop from scratch) - EOT is an interesting option in the UK with tax incentives to make it work.

https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust

https://baxendaleownership.co.uk/torchbox-digital-agency-mov...

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> Horray, effective altruism!

Yup, there we go

It's 10x harder because you are doing something counter-cultural and pro-social. The global economic system is structured to prevent you from doing precisely that.

The systems and processes for running a psychopathic corporation are laid out like the Netflix Paved Path for anyone who wants to play the game of "get as much as you can." This path will push you to build the most exploitative thing there is possible in order create maximum returns for capital (even if that becomes you). The end result is what you see: GE, Exxon, Amazon, Wal-Mart, BP Google, etc... an organization with no long term goal other than making money for investors. Is that your definition of "Working out over the long term?"

How about we build a real strong community where we're all owners and we have a say in how the process works, we share in the wins and the losses and don't screw anyone over ever. It's possible, yet somehow all of my fellow geniuses - despite all our ingeniousness - can't unpack this super simple problem that cooperatives around the world have been solving forever. Oh sorry, a few anecdotes about some failed ones and some old hippies that fight yet retain amazingly robust communities, means it will never work.

The systems and processes for "share everything from the beginning" - while working within the economic system that exists today - that's severely underdeveloped and needs thousands of former-capitalists like you and me to start putting the work in to change it.

Or you can build yet another private dictatorship cause it's "easier" for you.

A co-op doesn't mean everyone must share profits equally.

How about an internal market where people bid for tickets?

There are crypto projects facilitating governance of organizations. They could help both enforce and simplify keeping records. Example: https://aragon.org/

Edit: Earlier I suggested hiring people for internal-money, but that might be tax evasion. Don't do it without consulting lawyers in your country.

Have you actually ever seen a co-op work?

> why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time?

Because there are (a lot!) of people who are more interested in an equitable work than extracting fortunes for themselves.

Because you "make millions" on the backs of the people you string along, and not everybody wants that.

> Horray, effective altruism! You mean the thing that allows you to ignore any current problem in favor of pretend problems a hundred years out? And conveniently includes making yourself rich, which is of course only happening to fix said pretend problem. And, well, your life really pleasant on the backs of others, but that's a rounding error.

> Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? One option here is helping an industry that's currently setting itself up for a marvellous collapse because it treats open source as an opportunity to extract only. (Until the maintainers give up, and then there'll wailing and gnashing of teeth)

Another side is helping people live a more sustainable live. There's nothing wrong with a co-op to e.g. ensure health care and pensions. While working reasonable hours.

Could this fail? Probably. Maybe even likely, because co-op folks tend to be a bit more idealist, which makes business survival a bit harder.

But let's not pretend there aren't a lot of people who wouldn't be willing to join a co-op, or that it generates absolutely no benefit.

Like quite a lot of guilds and unions, the actor's guild started out by defending workers rights against a restrictive system (in that case, the Hollywood studio system) but has evolved into a gatekeeping and rent-seeking organization that primarily enriches its senior members and hurts everyone else.

We really, really don't want that in tech. Tech is one of the few segments of the economy where skill trumps credentials and connections for people entering the field. As a result, tech benefits from a lot of talent that would be ignored by more traditional methods of filtering candidates.

And what would tech workers gain? Unions don't stop layoffs -- look at the past few decades in the auto industry for proof. Unions would also negotiate standard pay packages that might be attractive to low performers, but would hold high performers back. Plus, severance packages are already legally mandated for layoffs in the places where the majority of tech workers live.

> I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers.

Maybe. But remember that the Hollywood guild system also acts as gatekeepers keeping people out of the system.

I don’t think the production guild system works in tech. In Hollywood, guilds and unions are necessary and work, in part because most people in the guild are independent contractors. Each production is its own thing. And that assignment could last a day, a few weeks, a few months, or years (depending on your contract/position), but it’s not an ongoing concern.

Whereas in tech, that isn’t the case for the majority of the employees at large companies. Yes, you have consultants and contractors, hit the vast majority of people at Google or Microsoft or Facebook are full-time employees, not hired on a project by project basis.

And that changes both the incentive structure and the organizing power. There are other unions that could be better parallels to trying to organize tech — but I don’t think the Hollywood guild system is the one to try to copy. You’d need to have specific unions covering each company (even if many companies were still affiliated with the same umbrella union) and carve outs and contracts for each company or even subgroup of workers inside a company. You couldn’t just do a blanket SAG-AFTRA style guild for everyone at every company when most of the employees are not on contract but full-time. It just wouldn’t work.

I've been thinking about how IT union would look like, because IMO the reason it still hasn't materialized is that it needs to be dramatically different from the unions every other industry has. For one, I think it should be remote only, highly automated and the main offer would be to create a platform to discuss problems that arise, collectively make a choice and then enforce it through the hands of union members, if people sabotage the process they get kicked away. Have a way to prove that you are indeed a current member, things like that.

But a guild minus the dues, bureaucracy, political infighting, barriers to entry, and corruption.

The biggest barrier to unionizing in tech is immigration. A union is able to collectively bargain by restricting labor supply. If outside workers are able to work the same job, the biggest weapon a union has is taken away.

We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--

To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first?

We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs.

Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart.

Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.

quorum honestly looks fantastic. thanks for this!

>Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those?

The people who invested to start them. A co-op is just when the stakeholders get together to buy something (shares in the startup, in this case) instead of having a handful of not-so-informed and partially disinterested investors provide liquidity.

The number of engineers isn’t the limiting factor competing against google, it’s the innovation/talent. While most engineers even at google aren’t working on hard problems, there’s a few who’re solving distributed computing/gfs/page rank/etc and those individuals are definitely not being laid off. The others use their tools to solve business problems.

We're actually doing it right now at Quorum1, fwiw. It has been hard, but it's working. Maybe join us and help make it work even better? >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1

With the way investors handle things these days the ceiling for founders is a lot lower than you think.

Because you get to set the pace for whatever you are doing as a group instead of someone else setting the pace for you

That's the difference

Do you want to work for the desires of wall street or do you want to work for the desires of your friends and community around you?

You can't do both and have investors unfortunately.

I had to go check and see if that was a basecamp product, style looked very similar on first glance

Do you have experience with this tool?

Because it’s there.

>improve the lives of everyone

This is a really naive goal. It’s super trivial to twist almost anything into “improving the lives of everyone”.

£10.3m of revenue for 211 workers is absolutely terrible though.

A co-op can mean a lot of things, but in particular it means an employee-owned business. For all of the reasons not to get behind the idea of a company without a billionaire at the top, the Hobbesian faith in the monarch could be the worst one.

The functional difference between a co-op and a normal business could be as small as having a board that is informed (because the shareholders are employees and naturally very informed), and that doesn't go for the usual extreme comp levels at the top.

>Co-ops have never been a successful software business model. Not even once that I can think of

Igalia is a co-op of software developers. Seems to work well for them.

Quite a few successful web3 companies are decentralized anonymous organizations (DAOs) which are essentially co-ops with more automation and anonymity.

Tessitura and NISC are successful.

I think you’re overestimating the average complexity of software. Low-medium skills folks can probably build functional clones to 90%+ of the software people use daily. They could build a new product of similar complexity. Most enterprise software is a UI for CRUD operations. I doubt they’ll be developing firmware for space X or any type of advanced/mission critical systems. But there’s a lot of room to operate.

I say this as someone that regularly employs <$15/hr freelance talent. You have to manage them differently but they can produce just the same on the majority of tasks I need of them.

My org is starting with B2B SaaS products. If you can move these into a cooperatively managed framework you drive long term value while also building networks with successful businesses. It's a major opportunity because so many B2B SaaS platforms are super overpriced. The client companies are basically overpaying in order to pay back the VC investors. If you start out without any of that overhead you can offer a completely different funding model.

Yeah the difficulty isn't even thinking of a good idea, it's reconstructing the enormous legal barriers, government contracts, and relationships with private capital that the existing tech companies have cemented over decades.

Creating an open market for compute, labor and goods that would compete with AWS, Amazon and the gig economy would be a good place to start. These groups skim a large portion of companies/individual's profit.

It's not a pipe dream! We've got a collective structured in exactly this manner with over 100 people, growing by ~1 person per day and things are going great! Join us and see, if you're interested. :)

Yep, this is definitely happening, I'm part of one such group. There's a whole community of decentralized worker collectives working on doing the hard work of getting these models to function.

This is pretty rude. The people who were laid off were certainly not "B and C players". When large companies cut, it's often entire business units, so no performance or talent considerations are made.

Plenty of worker-owned coffee shops, book stores, grocery stores, etc are famously successful. Be more open-minded, ya scrooge.

>How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself?

You sign them with the co-op as the other party, same as any other business.

The executives have already "suffered enough" with their stock compensation going down so much (eye roll)

Just a personal anecdote, but at my place of employment we had a wave of layoffs late last year. As part of the process 4 top-level execs "left", although I think saying they were "dismissed" is more accurate.

I am not certain, but it might have been nearly half the people at this level let go. And then there was a trail of layoffs all the way down the leadership chain. Of course the most people let go in absolute numbers are the individual contributors.

If you read between the lines it appears Eyal Manor maybe was laid off/fired?

https://archive.is/INZea

Or maybe they are not so talented after all.

On the other hand, when you are laid off and looking for people to socialize with, your other laid off friends will be the most available. Nothing like taking advantage of things like discount matinee rates, happy hours you never were able to make on time with a job, or speedy efficient trips through town without traffic when you are already generating no income.

Other people laid off are looking and might find something for you. They are looking for companies actively hiring.

People who have a job 1. don't have time during the day and 2. only know about their company since they aren't looking.

I would guess that even if someone had my exact skillset, I would be better off teaming up with them in the search than avoiding them. We could identify more jobs and there is a good chance one of those is looking for more than one person.

People have networks. It’s important to leverage different networks and get help.

Perhaps we should organize....

Being laid off does not equate to doing poorly. Some people just get cut because some people who wear suits to work seem to not care.

1m51s

Reminds me of the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' - https://youtu.be/GmlSSSN7C78?t=14

Careful. I hear the pigeons use the British Parliamentary style of debate rather than the American style.

I can second this.

I made the mistake of downloading it once big players started layoffs in hopes of getting in on the news before it hit. But that forum is toxic sludge for anyone’s mental health.

I don’t use it anymore. The only time I download the app is like glassdoor when figuring out if a company is ok or not.

They are discussing this thread here: https://www.teamblind.com/post/The-Hacker-News-community-vie...

Partial archive: https://archive.ph/npoh6

As you would expect, it's horrible. The moderation is quite bad too. They'll ban you for just saying you disagree with someone depending on the topic.

Everyone on Blind is a Principal Engineer making $750k TC while only working 8 hours a month

> I've come to realize I (we?) trust companies so little that many people would never even complain in a private direct message to a coworker

We claim to live in democracies, while in fact we spend good part of our adult life in parallel societies where we can't even express dissent in private.

This right here. Blind contains a lot of noise but also some signal. Internal corporate comms are 100% noise and unless you have a trusted and informed coworker the grapevine doesn’t tell you much.

>Cold application is fairly useless in today's age and time.

Really? 95% of the people I've been involved in hiring have been cold applicants or via a recruiter (where normally those connections aren't made by referrals either).

Gotta start somewhere - would love for anyone to add some more.

I am not a part of that community, but I believe the purpose of the community is to help colleagues. They even have a jobboard!