10 ms·

Ask HN: Guild/Studio structure for Software Engineers?

126 points by szemy2 6y ago

Hi HN, I am looking for examples of companies that consist of an ensemble of mainly software engineers (could be mixed skills with hardware, graphic, architecture), that work in a guild like fashion. - They work mostly on internal products, mostly on a project-basis - Are relatively small (<15-20 people) and are primarily a flat, partnership structure Do you have any good examples?

gremlinsinc 6y ago
No good examples, but I want to start one of these myself. The hard part is finding team members who are in sync w/ the concept, though I consider it more like a unified worker-coop-style agency. Than a 'guild'. if you need a partner hit me up : patrickwcurl - gmail. I'm a laravel / vue / inertia / livewire / alpinejs dev mostly.
- phtrivier 6y ago
  I would have assumed the "hard part" would be funding in such a structure, since you're not going to be able to operate at the desired level of autonomy with investors, and you're probably not going to sustain yourself without a product to sell - which would be at odd with "working mostly on internal products" as opposed to "selling something that the market wants". I'm probably missing something here.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    My understanding is that most organizations that operate this way start off effectively as a consultancy. They do paid work for others in order to fund day-to-day operations, and support work on the projects that they "own" (want to do personally). Once you get enough smaller projects off the ground, with enough income/MRR to support the business, you can start focussing full time on internal product development (and drop the consulting)
    - phtrivier 6y ago
      I have mixed expérience with this kind of company (even as private ones) where the consultancy part sucks the time and life of everyone, before - if you're lucky - some of the customer becomes dependant on your work enough that they buy you. But it's just my experience, I'm sure others managed to build companies out of side projects.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    Funding is a problem for tech COOPS its what killed poptel
LegoFan 6y ago
What is going on?
cpach 6y ago
Seems like Igalia might fit that description https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
- szemy2 6y ago
  Yes, this looks good! Thanks, I'll read about them
jaredandrews 6y ago
I joined a mailing list recently that discusses tech coops: https://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coop https://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coop Some interesting discussion. I found a repo with a lot of information and companies here: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops It's really unclear to me how you would go about joining an existing studio like this. At least in North America, there are so few, I think the answer is to start one yourself.
- walshemj 6y ago
  You join a coop the same way you do any other company as well as the joining the cooperative normally after a probation
  - jaredandrews 6y ago
    I understand that. But I find the diversity of positions available to be low in the collective space. I'm curious, do you work in a collectively owned setting? What is your tech stack and customer base? Do you ever hire new people from outside your network?
    - walshemj 6y ago
      I Used to work at Poptel back in the early 2000's and back then I was mostly on the ASP side we also use LAMP. Poptel was also a very early ISP / ADMD (x.400) mail provider I answered an advert in the Guardian. COOP's tend to be liberal if not left wing and attract members/workers with liberal or Left wing politics - the USA coops are not as strongly Left wing compared the the US ones. I am using UK/EURO definitions here
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  https://electricembers.coop//pubs/TechCoopHOWTO.pdf https://electricembers.coop//pubs/TechCoopHOWTO.pdf
  - jaredandrews 6y ago
jarofgreen 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by Guild, but for tech co-ops mainly in the UK try https://www.coops.tech/ https://www.coops.tech/
- dayjah 6y ago
  My understanding of "guilds" is the notion of people coalescing around projects based on needs and interest vs a top down hierarchy. Like Valve vs Amazon, etc. At a prior employer (~1000 person company) we used the word "guild" for a cross organizational team that are tackling a short term, low-medium value problem - with the notion you go back to your existing team when you're done. Or you handle 2x load while the guild work is necessary. These are similar to "tiger teams", but those are generally top down endeavors vs guilds are bottom up. Zappos tried this out a few years ago, so did some other well known tech co. though the name is escaping me right now. It seems to be called Holacracy and there's this webpage about it: https://www.holacracy.org/ https://www.holacracy.org/
theoretick 6y ago
Holacracy might work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
- szemy2 6y ago
  Oh the structure has a name, thanks!
juancn 6y ago
Valve uses a holacracy. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
- jedberg 6y ago
  Here's a question I've been trying to get an answer to for years. How does compensation at Valve work? Like, what are the logistics? Their handbook talks about the stack ranking, but it doesn't talk about how that translates into an actual salary. Who actually sets the salaries? If they have no bosses, who actually hands you the memo that says "this will be your salary next year". Who fills that out and writes down the number? I assume someone somewhere has to attache numbers to the rankings, I'm curious about that process in a bossless environment.
  - ctvo 6y ago
    There's no doubt an HR and finance department. Why do you need a "boss" to hand you your bonus / raise? The handbook offers a hint: > Once the intra-group ranking is done, the information gets pooled to be company-wide. We won’t go into that methodology here. There is a wiki page about peer feedback and stack ranking with some more detail on each process. Naively I imagine a pool of money representing what the company has available this year to allocate to raises, bonuses, compensation adjustments, etc.. Those ranked higher get a larger percentage of that pool once the math is done. Think you're underpaid vs. your peers? Talk to HR and ask. There's no need for a manager to be involved in this process at all.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Unless there is an objective formula to translate ranks into money, that still leaves some subjective power with someone. I guess what I'm getting at is, who has the subjective power over your salary?
      - insomniacity 6y ago
        There could very easily be such a formula. The only interesting things in it are whether you set firmwide/regional minimums/maximums, and how far you allow the ranking to move your numbers from everyone getting the same increase - eg, does the top ranked employee get 5% more than the median employee, or 50% more?
mjewkes 6y ago
Motion Twin is the classic example in the games space http://motion-twin.com/en/ http://motion-twin.com/en/ They shipped Dead Cells, which is rated as "Overwhelmingly Positive" "96% of 50,435 reviews" on steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/ The HaXe programming language originally came out of Motion Twin, although Nicolas Cannasse has since left to do his own thing.
jpgleeson 6y ago
Motion Twin are a worker's co-op in France that have worked like this for the past 20 years. They are back down to 6 people now but had been a bit bigger until recently when a group spun off to make a more commercial structure to support their big game. http://motion-twin.com/en/ http://motion-twin.com/en/
jdmichal 6y ago
I saw Andrés Angelani of Cognizant Softvision speak about the model employeed there. There's guilds, which are centered around professional skills. And then pods, which are teams of blended skills to get projects done. https://www.cognizantsoftvision.com/our-approach/ https://www.cognizantsoftvision.com/our-approach/
- konstantinentia 6y ago
  although not a small company, reminds me of the spotify approach [1] https://youtu.be/4GK1NDTWbkY https://youtu.be/4GK1NDTWbkY
seibelj 6y ago
I know of some highly profitable software businesses that operate like law firms with partners. Think along the lines of gambling and similar “on the edge” industries that won’t receive VC for what they do.
achileas 6y ago
Different from co-ops, but a lot of small funds (micro-VCs, etc.) have this kind of structure to help their portfolio companies - I actually interviewed at one earlier this summer. There are also similar places like Betaworks (https://betaworks.com https://betaworks.com). A small few operate as a true collective, but there aren't many. This article I read recently talks a bit about some of these less-traditional setups: https://www.instapaper.com/read/1341389477 https://www.instapaper.com/read/1341389477
Pfhreak 6y ago
I've really wanted to be a part of a tech co-op, and I wish more existed. There are several in most major cities that I've found, but they tend to spin up and down after a while, so I'm not sure what's current.
cheriot 6y ago
Seems like the challenge is that software is rarely and end goal in itself. Either it's for end users and needs design, marketing, etc or it's for businesses and needs sales people, account management, etc. I'd love to see someone find a way to make it work, though.
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
I don't know the inner working of them but seems to match http://motion-twin.com/en/team http://motion-twin.com/en/team
- szemy2 6y ago
  Sounds like a really nice place to work!
brudgers 6y ago
Might be worth looking at "programmer anarchy."
taurath 6y ago
I’ve often thought of the idea of a “town programmer” that could solve problems for businesses/people in the town. It feels like the biggest problem with that is people don’t know what a generalist programmer can do. I think just setting up Shopify instances and inventory/online ordering systems would be a good use case.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  This kind of work is what keeps most of the small, local marketing agencies you've never heard of afloat. The town programmer, town UI designer, etc all generally work at a place like that with the town's small-business salesperson. They'll ususaly do anything from helping you claim/manage your Google Maps listing to publishing your restaurant's menu online to creating your Shopify store or Wordpress marketing site, alongside your print media or whatever other needs.
  - colonelxc 6y ago
    Yes. I interned at a local ISP (DSL provider on AT&T lines), but most of their business was essentially just this type of stuff. Building simple static websites, running some software package for a business (doing the admin+hosting work), and fixing/configuring computers and such at the local businesses. Businesses like this are really flexible, and seek to serve their local customers with whatever IT needs they have.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The problem is that writing code is a much smaller percentage of most business problems than those of us with software backgrounds assume. In your example, setting up a Shopify instance isn't much of a programming task, but consider the ongoing support. Once the instance is up, who updates the listings? Makes changes? Who's on call for support? Eventually you're just running a services business to cater to customers who don't want to get their hands dirty. Even for problems that can be solved by writing a lot of code, the overhead of dealing with sales, payments, hosting, licensing, ongoing support, and maintenance can easily overshadow the effort required to write the original code. In general, it's hard to write software solutions that can be handed off to customers without ongoing support. This model might work for people who can dive into old codebases and fix things, but that's miserable work as soon as you see what real-world code looks like at companies without permanent developers.
orta 6y ago
Plausible Labs has always been one I've looked up to: https://plausible.coop/about https://plausible.coop/about
- szemy2 6y ago
  This is an interesting case, where it says that they have external investors. Wonder how they manage ownership.
mzzter 6y ago
Does Latacora count? Though I don’t know how big they are at the moment. https://latacora.com/ https://latacora.com/
- chc 6y ago
  Aren't Latacora just a security consultancy?
  - lvh 6y ago
    We are, but we also largely a bunch of software engineers working on project-based work and delivering software, so I don't think GP's completely off the mark :)
- lvh 6y ago
  I'm not sure if we're exactly what they're looking for, but FWIW we're about two dozen folks these days.
walshemj 6y ago
Poptel in the UK was a worker COOP that was about 45-50 ISP / Web
agustif 6y ago
I don't know of a company doing this, but a group of awesome developers does this in the GraphQL + TypeScript Open Source Libraries space with great success (As in useful libs, I don't know how they do economically but prob great or fine!) It's actually called the-guild.dev, they just don't promote much I think. They're the creators of GraphQL Modules, graphql-tools, graphql-code-generator etc... I'm also a small contributor to an Authentication/User management library called AccountsJS https://www.accountsjs.com/ https://www.accountsjs.com/ (Which uses gql-modules) under the hood, and the-guild members are active contributors too (although not exclusively) I would love to some day become a good enough developer to be part of that team/org/guild!
dvtrn 6y ago
My org has an Engineering Guild that I am a "leader" of [in the sense that I just organize calendars and "officiate" the call, it's completely flat otherwise]-the guild itself doesn't make up the company, but rather just exists as a small little "coven" within the larger enterprise, there's about 12 of us, though we don't publish anything out publicly for other teams to emulate. Probably not a bad idea now that you bring it up. We've written code for things that went to local non-profits, and written code that became a fully-funded line of business for the company as a service offering (but wasn't-at the time-part of any scoped or planned work, just an idea one of our SREs had to improve an existing business product, built it, deployed it, showed it to the executives). What would you like to know?
- bloudermilk 6y ago
  This is fascinating! What line of business is your company in? Who is your guild accountable to? What metrics are you measured by?
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Public health accounting/medical billing software. Right now we are "sponsored" by the CTO, but he's quite hands off and leaves us a lot of autonomy. Our charter is heavily influenced by the scientific method and intense, rigorous study, which is paradoxically not as regimented in the business-level work we do because ever changing priorities and customer influenced decision making by our project managers and enterprise leaders. The guild, not beholden to the enterprise itself we are INFINITELY better about scope creep and velocity for the projects originating from and ultimately brought into maturity by us-without that outside influence of the rest of the business. Metrics was actually the topic of our most recent congregation, looking into new and creative ways of establishing both performance and delivery metrics aligned with the DevOps way for our own "pet projects" as a guild, which we (hope) translate back up and into what we do for the day-to-day business objectives. So none. Yet :)
    - bostonvaulter2 6y ago
      Please write some more about this, I think it would be very interesting to hear more about how you are still able to provide value to the business while being able to push back on scope creep and velocity. Does the guild encompass all of the programmers in the company?
axaxs 6y ago
Where would you draw the line between Guild and contractors? I once worked with an extremely talented closeknit small contract company in Canada. When offered jobs at my company, they basically laughed and said they are well compensated. So not generally what you think of when you hear 'outsourced contractors.'
- szemy2 6y ago
  Maybe it's just a specific type of guild/org I am looking for in which it is different from contractors: they work on homebew products on a project basis.
endlessvoid94 6y ago
It can be difficult to do the guild structure in such a small organization. Not impossible but difficult, as many different people tend to play a diverse set of roles. At least, that's how it's been in my career. Prove me wrong! Edit: here's a classic from Spotify, which is much larger but potentially relevant: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal...
solidsnack9000 6y ago
I suspect what we are missing is has to do with IP ownership. To greatly simplify, guilds had a straightforward way of handling the IP of the trade or craft -- it was secret and you couldn't tell outsiders anything and every tradesman was committed to a considerable term of service (decades) dedicated to the trade. Trades were fairly closed communities. You couldn't steal the IP, the IP you generated couldn't be stolen from you. We have greater freedom in our lives today and lack the institution of bondage to the company/craft (remember that a guild effectively represented both things). It might be that trusts are an effective way to reintroduce meaningful ownership. Any IP a developer generates, they retain a certain residual interest in and right to; but it is administered by the guild (a trust management company) and on favorable terms since it is assumed to be the result of use of other IP managed by the guild.
- thinkingkong 6y ago
  Yes. All the work for this type of an environment will be innovation on IP and revenue structures. So far nobody has done anything novel here that Ive been able to find. Most coop and not for profit references seem like inappropriate proxies.
  - solidsnack9000 6y ago
    This is our chance to innovate by introducing tiny trusts on the block chain.
shawticus 6y ago
We've started a co-op like this to build cross platform spatial web apps (MMOs, metaverses, online virtual storefronts, etc). The project is MIT licensed but we're going after big contracts, especially trying to fill voids in the events and retail space. While things are being developed, everyone is living on a bit of runway contributed by one of the partners to make the project a reality. If you're interested, code is here: https://github.com/xr3ngine/xr3ngine https://github.com/xr3ngine/xr3ngine Happy to discuss more about structure on Discord or w/e
JamesAdir 6y ago
Wix employs guild structure for all it's teams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpeY_jahjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpeY_jahjI
pabs3 6y ago
Igalia are a co-operative of engineers and others working on Free Software & Open Source projects: https://www.igalia.com/ https://www.igalia.com/
yasuakikudo 6y ago
Some useful links, I hope https://agaric.coop/show-and-tell https://agaric.coop/show-and-tell https://community.coops.tech/ https://community.coops.tech/ https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://patio.ica.coop/ https://patio.ica.coop/ https://facttic.org.ar/ https://facttic.org.ar/
0xfaded 6y ago
I can't name names, but if you look at some of the security/exploit dev shops, a lot of them have this structure. Small number of engineers, lots of internal tooling, and good money
casi 6y ago
Tech co-ops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
2rsf 6y ago
My, now decommissioned, Microsoft branch tried to move to the Spotify model. Many of us worked on internal products, but never got to a level of flat partnership structure.