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. :-)
Because of that such company will either stay small (probably leaving ambitious people with unfulfilled ambitions) or change along the way, because you simply will not find enough people to make it grow.
And that is true even if the group is the best people possible. The only way would be to have no disagreement, but then you would probably be creatively dead.
To put another way, i suspect communication scales quasi linearly with managers, but at least quadratically without.
Somehow that works, so maybe that suggests ~50% of employees at a business could be in self-organising units of less than 10 people?
Realistically, you may as well talk about it as something that can't be done. If anything, it's probably easier to stack eggs than to get more than 4 people to work collaboratively without the current incentives and rules making it all hold together.
Nice verb, is this an original coinage?
On the one side, you'll have a normal company where the workers own the company (well, most employed engineers own some shares in FB, Google etc, too), on the other hand you have anarcho-syndicalist groups that are super hard into the process and THE PLENUM is paramount.
Presumably in a smaller private company with 100% insider ownership, it could be arranged that employees have more influence. For example, the employees could vote on board seats or raise and discuss issues at a General Meeting of the company’s shareholders.
This would presumably not be the case in VC-funded startups where the founders and VCs would choose the board and retain the lion’s share of equity and all nominal control.
In practice, in most companies that are not agency-style partnerships the insider ownership doesn’t really matter in terms of influence from what I’ve seen. In agency partnerships there is a dual class issue of partners and regular employees.
A private company with a BDFL who retains 50% + 1 control but has the minority stake dispersed among the rest of the employees seems like an interesting approach. The “B” comes into play in how the majority owner supports decision making. The “D” acts as a forcing function and guardrail to limit the effect of internal politics.
today? checks created date.
I mean, lol, this place was basically blasting anyone who dared say GPT Bing was going to be less than the revolution of our lifetimes. Right before it went off the rails.
