> perhaps California developers talk a big game but don't put their money where their mouth is? I would expect the same bootstrapping of cooperatives but it doe

> perhaps California developers talk a big game but don't put their money where their mouth is? I would expect the same bootstrapping of cooperatives but it doesn't really happen. I suspect a big factor in that is a lack of a safety net in the US. FAANG engineers with enough mileage to have some savings have families and mortgages that make it hard to give up their employee provided healthcare and risk their own savings on a new venture. I was foolish enough to go into startups as a new grad with huge student loans and though I have enjoyed it, it has not been good for my physical nor financial health. > I think cooperatives would struggle to gain a monopoly holding because they're not as ruthless as investor-driven companies. They tend to treat their workers fairly and focus on quality of life, over relentlessly pursuing high quarterly growth targets. That's a very good thing for the employees and probably the customers too, but makes the company less competitive. Biggest obstacle is not being able to burn billions of dollars on growth and expansion with no clear path to profitability like the Ubers and WeWorks of the world. A coop could probably get to monopoly scale through mergers with other coops in adjacent industries. In the case of gig work, there's no reason why a NYC based drivers coop couldn't slowly expand to food delivery, logistics, car rentals and etc, then jump to other major cities in through mergers with smaller coops in those markets. There would be a lot of benefits to having a single middleman platform with some sort of a social credit system (reviews) baked in and a large user base to launch new offerings to. > If that were the case then developers all over the US would make bank. They don't; only in startup-focused areas like the Bay Area and NYC. It's the same here in the UK, you can make a ton of money if you work in London for hyper-capitalist companies, but outside of London most developers are making 40-60k max. Which is still good for the UK, but not the 6 figure incomes that even shit-tier developers can make in California. I'm an immigrant who grew up in NYC and up until this year I would have never considered moving to a small town in middle america due to a lack of jobs and a shitty walmart and car centric lifestyle. In New York I can quit my job on Monday and have a choice of 4-5 job offers by Friday. Now that companies have been forced to be more open to remote work I can imagine people in the middle of nowhere having the same options and I anticipate that it will lead to a major repeat of the white flight, sending a ton of white collar workers out of the cities and into suburbia. Starting a tech company used to be a very expensive venture that required knocking on doors of VCs and racking servers. Now that we're starting to have the infrastructure in place to work remotely and can spin up machines on the fly for under $100/month things will probably change. The pandemic will accelerate this trend.