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Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense. Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their

Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense. Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their bosses don't care even enough to set up a direct reward to bus performance and some way for them to have agency over that reward? Though it would be cool if there was a bus service that had direct, fine-grained association between curteous behavior and reward in the form of immediate payment and future business, possibly mediated via ratings - I was making a joking reference to Uber here, but "Uber for busses" is genuinely something that I want to exist. Ie. not "Uber Bus", but the standard Uber model of engaging a driver directly, only this time applied to longer timespans to allow better schedule coordination. For instance, some way to say "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?" would allow for some pretty cool optimizations in routing. Possibly combined with a Kickstarter-like model where a bunch of people can express prospective interest.

scarface74 5y ago
If I’m working for a private company. Guess how much I care about “equity” that will statistically be meaningless? On the other hand, I did implementations as a Senior Develop/de facto “cloud architect” that moved the needle meaningfully at a company with $5 million in revenue. Those same types of implementations happen multiple times daily at a company worth over $1 trillion. Nothing I’m going to ever do will ever have a meaningful affect on the stock price of the company I work at now.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Kind of sounds like the company share price is too coarse-grained. That sort of thing might work better if the company was split into separately traded sub-units, of which the parent company owns some controlling fraction of voting shares. Admittedly the bureaucratic overhead starts being awkward.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    There are four companies worth over 1 trillion. How could you split any of them in a way that my small implementations by their standards would make a difference? I purposefully focus on the “nose of the camel in the tent” type work. I like smaller proof of concept + training type projects.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      I agree there is not necessarily a good way to do this in any given company structure. However, if a company can figure out how to do it, other things being equal I would expect it to eat its competitors' lunch. (As with how Uber doesn't need to mandate that drivers should be nice; it just falls naturally out of the incentive structure.)
amelius 5y ago
> "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?" They could even make it so that the people who actually take the bus negotiate the time and place. This would be great for events outside the city.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 - regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the municipal authority and Transport for London are still ongoing...
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  “Imagine if you could hire a bus”? You can; groups of people hire a mini bus or coach and negotiate where and when it travels all the time for social events, work parties, school trips, etc.
hinkley 5y ago
BTW, this sort of smugness is why Detroit is a shattered husk of what it used to be. When Deming still had all of his hair, he had trouble getting traction in the states. Japan, on the other hand, was intrigued by his ideas and wanted some quality time from him. If you look at the history of the Toyota Production System, they usually credit Taiichi Ohno and Toyoda, with the origin story sometime in the 80’s, after Detroit was already in flames, but before that was Deming, and for some reason he is usually not mentioned.

scarface74 5y ago

If I’m working for a private company. Guess how much I care about “equity” that will statistically be meaningless? On the other hand, I did implementations as a Senior Develop/de facto “cloud architect” that moved the needle meaningfully at a company with $5 million in revenue. Those same types of implementations happen multiple times daily at a company worth over $1 trillion. Nothing I’m going to ever do will ever have a meaningful affect on the stock price of the company I work at now.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
Kind of sounds like the company share price is too coarse-grained. That sort of thing might work better if the company was split into separately traded sub-units, of which the parent company owns some controlling fraction of voting shares. Admittedly the bureaucratic overhead starts being awkward.
- scarface74 5y ago
  There are four companies worth over 1 trillion. How could you split any of them in a way that my small implementations by their standards would make a difference? I purposefully focus on the “nose of the camel in the tent” type work. I like smaller proof of concept + training type projects.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    I agree there is not necessarily a good way to do this in any given company structure. However, if a company can figure out how to do it, other things being equal I would expect it to eat its competitors' lunch. (As with how Uber doesn't need to mandate that drivers should be nice; it just falls naturally out of the incentive structure.)

amelius 5y ago

> "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?" They could even make it so that the people who actually take the bus negotiate the time and place. This would be great for events outside the city.

MagnumOpus 5y ago
This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 - regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the municipal authority and Transport for London are still ongoing...
jodrellblank 5y ago
“Imagine if you could hire a bus”? You can; groups of people hire a mini bus or coach and negotiate where and when it travels all the time for social events, work parties, school trips, etc.

hinkley 5y ago

BTW, this sort of smugness is why Detroit is a shattered husk of what it used to be. When Deming still had all of his hair, he had trouble getting traction in the states. Japan, on the other hand, was intrigued by his ideas and wanted some quality time from him. If you look at the history of the Toyota Production System, they usually credit Taiichi Ohno and Toyoda, with the origin story sometime in the 80’s, after Detroit was already in flames, but before that was Deming, and for some reason he is usually not mentioned.