36 ms·

Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech

238 points by altras 4y ago

tacoopcurious 4y ago
I'm happily employed but I still want to keep an eye out for interesting developments in the tech coop space for AI. The field being what it is these days, N people sharing knowledge, code, and (as permitted) data could handle N similar applied AI projects much more easily than 1 person could handle 1. Are there successful examples of this model anywhere?
- timinou 4y ago
  Not in the tech field but in the consulting space, both Crisp https://dna.crisp.se https://dna.crisp.se and Enspiral https://enspiral.com https://enspiral.com came up with interesting organisational structures that they've extensively documented.
  - black_puppydog 4y ago
    The fact that enspiral keeps coming up as an example tells me that doing this right is really hard; if it were easy there would be more examples people would mention, no? edit: I hope it's clear I'm not trying to diminish the efforts, to the contrary! Here's also an interview with Richard Bartlett on the matter: https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on-decentralised-organising/ https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on... And an episode from the General Intellect Unit podcast relating to this: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/068-common-knowledge/ http://generalintellectunit.net/e/068-common-knowledge/
    - evolve2k 4y ago
      There’s a big online event on these types of collaborations happening later this week run by enspiral people. People from many different organisations are attending, this stuff is definitely spreading. https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/ https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/ A pop up digital village for building equitable, collaborative, distributed organisations
    - timinou 4y ago
      I think the difficulty in finding other examples is reflective of the "emergent"/"meta modern"/"systems thinking" space being extremely heady to this day. The people there are good at conceptualizing how to maintain a well running group horizontally, but growing one anew requires a different set of skills and traits. Chiefly knowing what's important right now, whereas the emergent thinkers seem to get lost in the weeds of their thoughts and big words. That field is also, in my humble experience, in a bind. Very few people outside of the coach/consulting sphere seem to talk about this as fervently as they do. I think mass adoption will require the concepts to be attractive and simple to people who may not be ardent supporters of the cause quite yet. There's also a whole contingent of people who have built orgs that already do this, they just don't advertise themselves and do their work. I think the next step is to deeply integrate the concepts of Enspiral and such into organisational design tools. Something like murmur.com but with a super low conceptual barrier to entry, that makes it obvious what the next distributed leadership shift is for a given group. That's what I'm developing, if you're curious contact me :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 4y ago
  Eleuther and LAION are close to being tech coops for AI, and have helped open recent AI developments (LLM and diffusion). They aren't actually coops and really belong to just a few people, but they do show that an AI community can do good work.
- ankaAr 4y ago
  Here in HN someone posted a GitHub repo with thousands of coops. Search for it, maybe they are some as your model.
eddyfromtheblok 4y ago
I helped run a housing coop in the US several years ago, not something that I ever thought to put on my tech resume, but I'd be interested to hear if someone wants to start a digital coop near me, I suppose..
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Tried to found one 25+ years ago. In the end not enough people were left of those initially interested and we founded a startup. Should have gone through with the cooperative even with 5 people.
- jasfi 4y ago
  Why do you believe a cooperative would have been better?
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    The startup went bust during the dot com bubble bursting when our series B fell through (like everyone else). I think a cooperative would be more future proof and not having a binary result. In general I prefer cooperative work and have experienced too much antogonistic work in startups.
    - code_runner 4y ago
      But why would the cooperative have survive and why is it less prone to antagonistic work?
      - Shoue 4y ago
        Cooperatives have a higher survival rate, both in general and during crises. > A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises. > A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
    - 4y ago
Jensson 4y ago
Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?
- altras 4y ago
  There's no extensive research on this topic. I really doubt coops are paying more than FAANG and if the only thing that you're after is money then coops are surely not your thing and that's OK ;) In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Working at Google for a few years made me lots of money so now I don't need to work for many years. Working a lower paid job means I would need to waste more time working and less time doing what makes me happy.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      I think coops are meant to be the thing that makes you happy. Obviously it's not for everyone, but a lot of people really want that sense of community.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      I have the money and left the shitty organization that produced it, and now I don't have to work, and find after some time of happy relief, all my hobby interests do not provide enough sense of purpose. I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now. If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true. I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price) There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig. But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected. I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it. Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.
willbudd 4y ago
I've been interested in forming this kind of organizational structure for a while. However, I have doubts about how to ensure sufficient levels of trust between individuals involved, given the different dynamics in terms of monetary compensation and "hiring processes" compared to traditional top-down companies. In that light, I wonder if perhaps a better alternative is for each individual to remain independent as their own one-man company in a freelancer kind of way, and instead to focus on streamlining the process of establishing ad-hoc micro contracts whenever collaborative tasks are to be undertaken -- while still keeping the community aspect of a cooperative in place somehow. At the same time, I guess the reason this isn't done more extensively, is simply due to the overhead of having to reach a consensus of the worth of contributions on a task-by-task basis...
- akvadrako 4y ago
  I've worked on this idea too, except a little inverted. Everybody is a full member of the coop, but those who bring in more earn credits which can be used to fund new projects or bump up salaries to a point. You don't need to reach a consensus, you can just have an internal marketplace, like kickstarter. If you want something done, you can help fund it, perhaps getting some benefits in return, like a best-effort ROI.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store
  - Jensson 4y ago
    > those who bring in more earn credits which can be used to fund new projects or bump up salaries to a point. So the solution to the problems with cooperatives is to introduce capitalism? Why not just make a normal company with normal money instead?
    - akvadrako 4y ago
      One difference is the reduced friction of starting new projects. Starting a new company now is major task, from legal to funding starting salaries to developer setup, but in a company you have everything ready to go. Some other differences are: 1. Salaries are limited, so hopefully more money stays available for new projects. 2. All the source code, docs and databases are shared.
mypastself 4y ago
It’s high time I stopped reading Medium articles shared here. I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. It’s filled with vague, corporatey platitudes about ego and altruism, and there’s almost nothing in it about how this concept applies specifically to tech. The supposed “cons” sound like the ad equivalents of leading questions: > The relationships in a cooperative are adult-adult oriented > All of those might be very painful if you’re not used to vocalizing your inner thoughts in non-violent ways Well jeez, I guess I’ll skip it if I’m not allowed to respond to assigned Jira tickets with my fists.
- politelemon 4y ago
  A not insignificant portion of HN posts are selling something and not all are related to tech. It's worth having a similar skepticism for other posts, it's eye opening
- samtho 4y ago
  > I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party. Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically nil.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    The signal I’ve started looking for is an above the fold “minutes to read” stat. Sites, like Medium, that have it are practically all worth ignoring because it’s either astroturfing or just navel gazing.
    - yoz-y 4y ago
      Many static site generators add that stat. I find it useful.
stareatgoats 4y ago
> Decision-making in cooperatives can be very daunting for beginners. Having 13 years+ of experience in cooperatives I can tell you that it is daunting even for old-timers. We started off with most decisions being made in weekly meeting (that sometimes dragged on for most of the day), and ended up with having monthly meetings for the large decisions, but weekly meetings in smaller groups instead. In short, meetings everywhere, about all things large and small. Meetings about whether to have consensus or majority rule, about whether the principle that everyone needs to follow a decision is sound etc etc. Personality might have something to do with it. But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena. There are large cooperatives, but only in "solved" industries so there aren't many hard decisions left to make. Programming is not one of those fields yet.
  - adwn 4y ago
    You think that there are no hard business decisions to make in established – i.e., non-software – industries? It's just smooth sailing along predefined routes?
- dogma1138 4y ago
  This is a common mistake, actual functioning cooperatives operate like any other enterprise with an set executive structure a CEO and a board of directors. The big difference is the ownership model so shareholder meetings are basically employee meetings so a successful cooperative simply runs like any other business just one where the employees are treated as the shareholders they are when it comes to decision making the bad ones are the ones trying to run like a commune and reach a consensus on everything.
fimdomeio 4y ago
I'm currently part of the administration of a co-op. It's in Portugal and it's a Multisectorial co-op, meaning instead of being focused on one type of activity we do anything as long as we have a member with that skillset. We are an agregation of freelancers and small businesses that go from small scale farming, to web development or architecture. The coop serves as a way to have a lot of the nice things of a bigger corporation like someone to help you with burocratic processes while allowing people to keep their independence. People can be very involved in the decision making or just financially contribute to the central structure. We have both general assemblies where all members vote in a very horizontal process but the day to day work has hierarchies to keep processes going smoothly The biggest thing I've learned from being part of this process is that co-ops vastly destroys competition among peers and replace that we the mindset of "what's the best way to benefit the collective". Best thing to make it work is that it's not just altruism, benefiting the collective benefits yourself. Kind of like OSS works.
- ranguna 4y ago
  Hello! Mind sharing the co-op name? I'm living in Portugal right now and I'm thinking about switching careers, so I might give that a look.
  - fimdomeio 4y ago
    I'm part of Cooperativa Integral Minga in Montemor-o-Novo. We we're the first one in Portugal in the concept of Integral Cooperative (took some inspiration from Cooperativa Integral Catalana). In Portugal there's now a few coops based on the same general principles. Rizoma Coop In Lisbon, Regenerativa in S. Luís, Cooperativa da Terra in Aljezur, A Geradora in Trancoso, Coop. Cápsula in Leiria, Húmus in Madeira (in process of forming), Coop. AlmaOhana in Odemira and Estação Cooperativa also in Montemor. Feel free to get in contact if you want to know more.
    - ranguna 4y ago
      Awesome! Will look at all those, thanks for getting back to me!
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Weirdly most large companies are surprisingly similar to co-ops. No, seriously bear with me. hierarchies replace meetings - but there are still awful interminable meetings because agreement still needs to be reached because work is too complex to allow for total command and control because management will screw it up salaries are held down for the good of the organism (try outbidding one line of business for a really good person or team and see if that's allowed) the failure point is equitable sharing but if you took all fortune 500 companies and allocated shares to employees it would be hard to tell the difference. Especially as the managers would be up for election - you tend to get that when your employees own the company.
bjornsing 4y ago
Why a cooperative and not a partnership (that is typical for law firms or business consultancies)?
ankaAr 4y ago
The article is ok doing the questions if you wants this or this and if you would like to work or build a coop if you wants based on that.., and the situation that you has been fired. Anyway it is very naive at least. Where the clients come from? If you has been fired, look for another job. If you has been fired and you were working with other 10 people that are skilled, and you like to work together and you knows someone that want your skills or you know how to sell yourself and you wants to take your own decisions as a group (like in a pirate boat), then yes, a coop is a choice. It is not the panacea, it is hard, you will deal with things than never before faced, and is not like you are with people to face that together, you are alone together to face that. I talk for myself and coming form IT i hate bourocracy. And you must to deal with that every day, or at least you must to know that some people must to deal with that, someone. It is a must. Spoiler: you can hire people to do that for youyou, but the reason you build a coop is that you are a worker and you wants to participate in the board. Both. A coop is not the answer of your lack of employment. It is the answer to deal equally with a capitalist model, inside the capitalism.., something like that. Anyway, I love coops, the trustworthy level you needs, the equal vote for decisions you have, it is your company, you will take care of that. But everyone must to be in the same boat. No, if you has been fired look for another job. A coop needs more from you than that.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Some of the worst politics I ever saw were in nonprofit entities. Primarily, it was because some with dominant personalities made decisions that were not rational, informed, and or fair. The faithful talent tend to get hurt the most, as they invest more resources being driven by their ideals. I am all for profit sharing, but someone has to take responsibility for risk mitigation. The worst firms are ones where every narcissist thinks they are the CEO. The more money at stake... the quicker things tend to turn nasty. Best of luck =)
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  > Some of the worst politics I ever saw were in nonprofit entities. Same.
- Shoue 4y ago
  Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven. The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims: > Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404 Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.
  - Joel_Mckay 4y ago
    Many have taken issue with William Forster Lloyd's assertion: "tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources." Rule by consensus is messy, inefficient, and ultimately prone to failure in commercial settings without slave labor. I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature. Have a wonderful day =)
dontbenebby 4y ago
I've been looking for something like that for a long time. I still remember someone remarking to me at Schmoo that one day I'll need a "real bank" rather than a credit union, and how cold they got when I replied "Well, I've got savings, checking, they give a good rate on home loans, and while you can't beat the market I'm getting about 9% on my index funds. Other than help you cheat on your taxes, what specifically does Chase Manhattan do that [redacted] does not?" He replied "Things like that are why you'll never find a real job." and stormed off. (I was trying to escape my PhD at the time, but the world being what it was in the Summmer after Snowden, somehow the only offer I got was a K Street NGO, and absolutely zero companies that would pay me a fair wage for my labor.) Anyways, if anyone is looking for something with information security experience for their co-op feel free to reply -- I'd love to log out of this nym, which was supposed to only last for a weekend in Las Vegas, forever, but I can not do that until I complete my... mission.
ilyt 4y ago
But damn, "getting fired coz most of your coworkers wanted you gone" gonna hurt more than getting fired by some manager.
- davidjfelix 4y ago
  I'm going to counter this a bit -- if most of your coworkers want you gone, do you want to work there? Does it make sense to continue or would staying just mean continuing a toxic relationship for all parties? I think this just formalizes the quiet grumblings of people who who think "how is x person still here, they don't carry their weight" etc. I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > I'm going to counter this a bit -- if most of your coworkers want you gone, do you want to work there? There are two things here, "competent", and "nice to work with". I've met co-workers that are perfectly nice people, I thought they do shit work but I wasn't the one paying them so I didn't really cared if they stayed working. Yeah they are negative for the company but I personally don't care, more than that, working with pleasant people is worth more to me than company being that 0.5% more efficient by not employing them. That does shit a bit in coop as your share in profit grows when someone bad at the job gets fired. > I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat. Yeah I can imagine that being even harder the more interconnected the org structure is, people are naturally tribal
carapace 4y ago
FWIW I'm starting a Mutual Benefit Corporation. (It's non-profit, but not a charity.) It's not a coop, but the board works by a Quaker-inspired consensus model (rather than Robert's Rule of Order or something like that.) I realized that I didn't want to start a regular startup. I want to do business, but without the pressure of maximizing profits. We're going to do things like: create extremely simple and elegant computer systems; build robots to collect litter and clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; acquire land and create parks that double as agriculturally productive "food forests"; build fancy hich-tech ecologically-integrated homes and shops; etc... (If you were to trawl though my comment history you'd find me yammering on about all this for years now. I finally got my hands on a tiny bit of capital. In a rocket metaphor, this is ignition and liftoff. The engine is roaring and I'ma crack the sky.) Email in profile. :)
ransom1538 4y ago
Are there any examples? Can anyone post a url/domain of a cooperative? Page of comments no proof they exist.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Here is a small list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I like the idea of a co-op, but I'm always worried about "in a perfect world," not happening (like Communism sounds like a great idea, but human nature screws it all up). For myself, I'm not competitive. It's a life choice. When we compete, we win, and winning always means that someone else loses. I've spent my entire adult life, in an environment, where I help "losers" to get back on their feet, and it has had quite an impact on me.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  How do you help losers?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Long story, and one that I'm not really at liberty to share in public (press, radio and film, thing).
karaterobot 4y ago
Just my experience here, but: A badly run cooperative fails because the people involved don't take it seriously, or lose their alignment and break apart. A well run cooperative fails (or succeeds) for all the usual reasons any business does. A well run coop ends up feeling a lot like a small business with a traditional structure, and an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant. That's cool, but it's a lot of work to reproduce the performance characteristics of an existing technology. I've been involved in many sessions where we tried to experiment with the structure and mechanics of how a cooperative works, in order to address what seem to be persistent shortcomings in the model. Nobody has really cracked the code yet, in my opinion. When it comes down to it, having done both, I think I'd rather work for a good boss at a small company than be in another coop, even a good one. I want someone competent to do all the behind the scenes work, and make most of the decisions, asking me for my opinion on the things that affect me directly or for which my expertise can provide some direct insight. The advantages: If I don't like the company, I can leave without feeling like I've failed: there are no non-work relationships, or sense of ownership holding me there. I don't have to attend additional meetings. I don't have to look at budgets. I don't have to be on a committee or working group. I don't have to pick a side and convince the other side of anything. If the company makes a bad decision, I say "ha ha, those morons did it again" and keep on doing my job. In short, as I have come to identify less with work, I have become less interested in the cooperative model because the value of ownership has gone down.
- psyfi 4y ago
  > an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant Until a multi-billion company aquires the corporate
satisfice 4y ago
I have worked in a consensus environment and I know it can work. The concern I have is when it doesn’t work. It doesn’t take many sneaky sociopaths or psychopaths to subvert a system built on assumptions of good faith and good will. And even among good people, strong visions arise which may clash with other strong visions. I need to know there is a clear method of resolving conflict, otherwise I am confident that all those smiling people are going to be carrying concealed knives.
tenarshins 4y ago
I'm actually part of a founding team of a for-profit tech & other consulting cooperative. Not because of any altruistic or idealistic thing, but because we have a good team that has fantastic ability and wants to try doing some independent work, but having shared systems, and a centralized umbrella to do C2C under is nice.

238 points by altras 4y ago

I'm happily employed but I still want to keep an eye out for interesting developments in the tech coop space for AI. The field being what it is these days, N people sharing knowledge, code, and (as permitted) data could handle N similar applied AI projects much more easily than 1 person could handle 1. Are there successful examples of this model anywhere?

timinou 4y ago
Not in the tech field but in the consulting space, both Crisp https://dna.crisp.se https://dna.crisp.se and Enspiral https://enspiral.com https://enspiral.com came up with interesting organisational structures that they've extensively documented.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  The fact that enspiral keeps coming up as an example tells me that doing this right is really hard; if it were easy there would be more examples people would mention, no? edit: I hope it's clear I'm not trying to diminish the efforts, to the contrary! Here's also an interview with Richard Bartlett on the matter: https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on-decentralised-organising/ https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on... And an episode from the General Intellect Unit podcast relating to this: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/068-common-knowledge/ http://generalintellectunit.net/e/068-common-knowledge/
  - evolve2k 4y ago
    There’s a big online event on these types of collaborations happening later this week run by enspiral people. People from many different organisations are attending, this stuff is definitely spreading. https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/ https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/ A pop up digital village for building equitable, collaborative, distributed organisations
  - timinou 4y ago
    I think the difficulty in finding other examples is reflective of the "emergent"/"meta modern"/"systems thinking" space being extremely heady to this day. The people there are good at conceptualizing how to maintain a well running group horizontally, but growing one anew requires a different set of skills and traits. Chiefly knowing what's important right now, whereas the emergent thinkers seem to get lost in the weeds of their thoughts and big words. That field is also, in my humble experience, in a bind. Very few people outside of the coach/consulting sphere seem to talk about this as fervently as they do. I think mass adoption will require the concepts to be attractive and simple to people who may not be ardent supporters of the cause quite yet. There's also a whole contingent of people who have built orgs that already do this, they just don't advertise themselves and do their work. I think the next step is to deeply integrate the concepts of Enspiral and such into organisational design tools. Something like murmur.com but with a super low conceptual barrier to entry, that makes it obvious what the next distributed leadership shift is for a given group. That's what I'm developing, if you're curious contact me :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
leereeves 4y ago
Eleuther and LAION are close to being tech coops for AI, and have helped open recent AI developments (LLM and diffusion). They aren't actually coops and really belong to just a few people, but they do show that an AI community can do good work.
ankaAr 4y ago
Here in HN someone posted a GitHub repo with thousands of coops. Search for it, maybe they are some as your model.

eddyfromtheblok 4y ago

I helped run a housing coop in the US several years ago, not something that I ever thought to put on my tech resume, but I'd be interested to hear if someone wants to start a digital coop near me, I suppose..

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Tried to found one 25+ years ago. In the end not enough people were left of those initially interested and we founded a startup. Should have gone through with the cooperative even with 5 people.

jasfi 4y ago
Why do you believe a cooperative would have been better?
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  The startup went bust during the dot com bubble bursting when our series B fell through (like everyone else). I think a cooperative would be more future proof and not having a binary result. In general I prefer cooperative work and have experienced too much antogonistic work in startups.
  - code_runner 4y ago
    But why would the cooperative have survive and why is it less prone to antagonistic work?
    - Shoue 4y ago
      Cooperatives have a higher survival rate, both in general and during crises. > A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises. > A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
  - 4y ago

Jensson 4y ago

Nowhere did he mention salary levels. The main reason we work is to make money, if worker cooperatives makes you less money then that would be the biggest reason to not join one. I really doubt there are many cooperatives paying more than FAANG, so why not just join one of those instead?

altras 4y ago
There's no extensive research on this topic. I really doubt coops are paying more than FAANG and if the only thing that you're after is money then coops are surely not your thing and that's OK ;) In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE
- Jensson 4y ago
  Working at Google for a few years made me lots of money so now I don't need to work for many years. Working a lower paid job means I would need to waste more time working and less time doing what makes me happy.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    I think coops are meant to be the thing that makes you happy. Obviously it's not for everyone, but a lot of people really want that sense of community.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    I have the money and left the shitty organization that produced it, and now I don't have to work, and find after some time of happy relief, all my hobby interests do not provide enough sense of purpose. I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now. If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true. I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price) There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig. But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected. I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it. Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.

willbudd 4y ago

I've been interested in forming this kind of organizational structure for a while. However, I have doubts about how to ensure sufficient levels of trust between individuals involved, given the different dynamics in terms of monetary compensation and "hiring processes" compared to traditional top-down companies. In that light, I wonder if perhaps a better alternative is for each individual to remain independent as their own one-man company in a freelancer kind of way, and instead to focus on streamlining the process of establishing ad-hoc micro contracts whenever collaborative tasks are to be undertaken -- while still keeping the community aspect of a cooperative in place somehow. At the same time, I guess the reason this isn't done more extensively, is simply due to the overhead of having to reach a consensus of the worth of contributions on a task-by-task basis...

akvadrako 4y ago
I've worked on this idea too, except a little inverted. Everybody is a full member of the coop, but those who bring in more earn credits which can be used to fund new projects or bump up salaries to a point. You don't need to reach a consensus, you can just have an internal marketplace, like kickstarter. If you want something done, you can help fund it, perhaps getting some benefits in return, like a best-effort ROI.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store
- Jensson 4y ago
  > those who bring in more earn credits which can be used to fund new projects or bump up salaries to a point. So the solution to the problems with cooperatives is to introduce capitalism? Why not just make a normal company with normal money instead?
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    One difference is the reduced friction of starting new projects. Starting a new company now is major task, from legal to funding starting salaries to developer setup, but in a company you have everything ready to go. Some other differences are: 1. Salaries are limited, so hopefully more money stays available for new projects. 2. All the source code, docs and databases are shared.

mypastself 4y ago

It’s high time I stopped reading Medium articles shared here. I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. It’s filled with vague, corporatey platitudes about ego and altruism, and there’s almost nothing in it about how this concept applies specifically to tech. The supposed “cons” sound like the ad equivalents of leading questions: > The relationships in a cooperative are adult-adult oriented > All of those might be very painful if you’re not used to vocalizing your inner thoughts in non-violent ways Well jeez, I guess I’ll skip it if I’m not allowed to respond to assigned Jira tickets with my fists.

politelemon 4y ago
A not insignificant portion of HN posts are selling something and not all are related to tech. It's worth having a similar skepticism for other posts, it's eye opening
samtho 4y ago
> I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party. Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically nil.
- TylerE 4y ago
  The signal I’ve started looking for is an above the fold “minutes to read” stat. Sites, like Medium, that have it are practically all worth ignoring because it’s either astroturfing or just navel gazing.
  - yoz-y 4y ago
    Many static site generators add that stat. I find it useful.

stareatgoats 4y ago

> Decision-making in cooperatives can be very daunting for beginners. Having 13 years+ of experience in cooperatives I can tell you that it is daunting even for old-timers. We started off with most decisions being made in weekly meeting (that sometimes dragged on for most of the day), and ended up with having monthly meetings for the large decisions, but weekly meetings in smaller groups instead. In short, meetings everywhere, about all things large and small. Meetings about whether to have consensus or majority rule, about whether the principle that everyone needs to follow a decision is sound etc etc. Personality might have something to do with it. But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena.

Jensson 4y ago
> But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena. There are large cooperatives, but only in "solved" industries so there aren't many hard decisions left to make. Programming is not one of those fields yet.
- adwn 4y ago
  You think that there are no hard business decisions to make in established – i.e., non-software – industries? It's just smooth sailing along predefined routes?
dogma1138 4y ago
This is a common mistake, actual functioning cooperatives operate like any other enterprise with an set executive structure a CEO and a board of directors. The big difference is the ownership model so shareholder meetings are basically employee meetings so a successful cooperative simply runs like any other business just one where the employees are treated as the shareholders they are when it comes to decision making the bad ones are the ones trying to run like a commune and reach a consensus on everything.

fimdomeio 4y ago

I'm currently part of the administration of a co-op. It's in Portugal and it's a Multisectorial co-op, meaning instead of being focused on one type of activity we do anything as long as we have a member with that skillset. We are an agregation of freelancers and small businesses that go from small scale farming, to web development or architecture. The coop serves as a way to have a lot of the nice things of a bigger corporation like someone to help you with burocratic processes while allowing people to keep their independence. People can be very involved in the decision making or just financially contribute to the central structure. We have both general assemblies where all members vote in a very horizontal process but the day to day work has hierarchies to keep processes going smoothly The biggest thing I've learned from being part of this process is that co-ops vastly destroys competition among peers and replace that we the mindset of "what's the best way to benefit the collective". Best thing to make it work is that it's not just altruism, benefiting the collective benefits yourself. Kind of like OSS works.

ranguna 4y ago
Hello! Mind sharing the co-op name? I'm living in Portugal right now and I'm thinking about switching careers, so I might give that a look.
- fimdomeio 4y ago
  I'm part of Cooperativa Integral Minga in Montemor-o-Novo. We we're the first one in Portugal in the concept of Integral Cooperative (took some inspiration from Cooperativa Integral Catalana). In Portugal there's now a few coops based on the same general principles. Rizoma Coop In Lisbon, Regenerativa in S. Luís, Cooperativa da Terra in Aljezur, A Geradora in Trancoso, Coop. Cápsula in Leiria, Húmus in Madeira (in process of forming), Coop. AlmaOhana in Odemira and Estação Cooperativa also in Montemor. Feel free to get in contact if you want to know more.
  - ranguna 4y ago
    Awesome! Will look at all those, thanks for getting back to me!

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

Weirdly most large companies are surprisingly similar to co-ops. No, seriously bear with me. hierarchies replace meetings - but there are still awful interminable meetings because agreement still needs to be reached because work is too complex to allow for total command and control because management will screw it up salaries are held down for the good of the organism (try outbidding one line of business for a really good person or team and see if that's allowed) the failure point is equitable sharing but if you took all fortune 500 companies and allocated shares to employees it would be hard to tell the difference. Especially as the managers would be up for election - you tend to get that when your employees own the company.

bjornsing 4y ago

Why a cooperative and not a partnership (that is typical for law firms or business consultancies)?

ankaAr 4y ago

The article is ok doing the questions if you wants this or this and if you would like to work or build a coop if you wants based on that.., and the situation that you has been fired. Anyway it is very naive at least. Where the clients come from? If you has been fired, look for another job. If you has been fired and you were working with other 10 people that are skilled, and you like to work together and you knows someone that want your skills or you know how to sell yourself and you wants to take your own decisions as a group (like in a pirate boat), then yes, a coop is a choice. It is not the panacea, it is hard, you will deal with things than never before faced, and is not like you are with people to face that together, you are alone together to face that. I talk for myself and coming form IT i hate bourocracy. And you must to deal with that every day, or at least you must to know that some people must to deal with that, someone. It is a must. Spoiler: you can hire people to do that for youyou, but the reason you build a coop is that you are a worker and you wants to participate in the board. Both. A coop is not the answer of your lack of employment. It is the answer to deal equally with a capitalist model, inside the capitalism.., something like that. Anyway, I love coops, the trustworthy level you needs, the equal vote for decisions you have, it is your company, you will take care of that. But everyone must to be in the same boat. No, if you has been fired look for another job. A coop needs more from you than that.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Some of the worst politics I ever saw were in nonprofit entities. Primarily, it was because some with dominant personalities made decisions that were not rational, informed, and or fair. The faithful talent tend to get hurt the most, as they invest more resources being driven by their ideals. I am all for profit sharing, but someone has to take responsibility for risk mitigation. The worst firms are ones where every narcissist thinks they are the CEO. The more money at stake... the quicker things tend to turn nasty. Best of luck =)

dontbenebby 4y ago
> Some of the worst politics I ever saw were in nonprofit entities. Same.
Shoue 4y ago
Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven. The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims: > Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404 Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Many have taken issue with William Forster Lloyd's assertion: "tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources." Rule by consensus is messy, inefficient, and ultimately prone to failure in commercial settings without slave labor. I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature. Have a wonderful day =)

dontbenebby 4y ago

I've been looking for something like that for a long time. I still remember someone remarking to me at Schmoo that one day I'll need a "real bank" rather than a credit union, and how cold they got when I replied "Well, I've got savings, checking, they give a good rate on home loans, and while you can't beat the market I'm getting about 9% on my index funds. Other than help you cheat on your taxes, what specifically does Chase Manhattan do that [redacted] does not?" He replied "Things like that are why you'll never find a real job." and stormed off. (I was trying to escape my PhD at the time, but the world being what it was in the Summmer after Snowden, somehow the only offer I got was a K Street NGO, and absolutely zero companies that would pay me a fair wage for my labor.) Anyways, if anyone is looking for something with information security experience for their co-op feel free to reply -- I'd love to log out of this nym, which was supposed to only last for a weekend in Las Vegas, forever, but I can not do that until I complete my... mission.

ilyt 4y ago

But damn, "getting fired coz most of your coworkers wanted you gone" gonna hurt more than getting fired by some manager.

davidjfelix 4y ago
I'm going to counter this a bit -- if most of your coworkers want you gone, do you want to work there? Does it make sense to continue or would staying just mean continuing a toxic relationship for all parties? I think this just formalizes the quiet grumblings of people who who think "how is x person still here, they don't carry their weight" etc. I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > I'm going to counter this a bit -- if most of your coworkers want you gone, do you want to work there? There are two things here, "competent", and "nice to work with". I've met co-workers that are perfectly nice people, I thought they do shit work but I wasn't the one paying them so I didn't really cared if they stayed working. Yeah they are negative for the company but I personally don't care, more than that, working with pleasant people is worth more to me than company being that 0.5% more efficient by not employing them. That does shit a bit in coop as your share in profit grows when someone bad at the job gets fired. > I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat. Yeah I can imagine that being even harder the more interconnected the org structure is, people are naturally tribal

carapace 4y ago

FWIW I'm starting a Mutual Benefit Corporation. (It's non-profit, but not a charity.) It's not a coop, but the board works by a Quaker-inspired consensus model (rather than Robert's Rule of Order or something like that.) I realized that I didn't want to start a regular startup. I want to do business, but without the pressure of maximizing profits. We're going to do things like: create extremely simple and elegant computer systems; build robots to collect litter and clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; acquire land and create parks that double as agriculturally productive "food forests"; build fancy hich-tech ecologically-integrated homes and shops; etc... (If you were to trawl though my comment history you'd find me yammering on about all this for years now. I finally got my hands on a tiny bit of capital. In a rocket metaphor, this is ignition and liftoff. The engine is roaring and I'ma crack the sky.) Email in profile. :)

ransom1538 4y ago

Are there any examples? Can anyone post a url/domain of a cooperative? Page of comments no proof they exist.

timbit42 4y ago
Here is a small list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I like the idea of a co-op, but I'm always worried about "in a perfect world," not happening (like Communism sounds like a great idea, but human nature screws it all up). For myself, I'm not competitive. It's a life choice. When we compete, we win, and winning always means that someone else loses. I've spent my entire adult life, in an environment, where I help "losers" to get back on their feet, and it has had quite an impact on me.

therealdrag0 4y ago
How do you help losers?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Long story, and one that I'm not really at liberty to share in public (press, radio and film, thing).

karaterobot 4y ago

Just my experience here, but: A badly run cooperative fails because the people involved don't take it seriously, or lose their alignment and break apart. A well run cooperative fails (or succeeds) for all the usual reasons any business does. A well run coop ends up feeling a lot like a small business with a traditional structure, and an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant. That's cool, but it's a lot of work to reproduce the performance characteristics of an existing technology. I've been involved in many sessions where we tried to experiment with the structure and mechanics of how a cooperative works, in order to address what seem to be persistent shortcomings in the model. Nobody has really cracked the code yet, in my opinion. When it comes down to it, having done both, I think I'd rather work for a good boss at a small company than be in another coop, even a good one. I want someone competent to do all the behind the scenes work, and make most of the decisions, asking me for my opinion on the things that affect me directly or for which my expertise can provide some direct insight. The advantages: If I don't like the company, I can leave without feeling like I've failed: there are no non-work relationships, or sense of ownership holding me there. I don't have to attend additional meetings. I don't have to look at budgets. I don't have to be on a committee or working group. I don't have to pick a side and convince the other side of anything. If the company makes a bad decision, I say "ha ha, those morons did it again" and keep on doing my job. In short, as I have come to identify less with work, I have become less interested in the cooperative model because the value of ownership has gone down.

psyfi 4y ago
> an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant Until a multi-billion company aquires the corporate

satisfice 4y ago

I have worked in a consensus environment and I know it can work. The concern I have is when it doesn’t work. It doesn’t take many sneaky sociopaths or psychopaths to subvert a system built on assumptions of good faith and good will. And even among good people, strong visions arise which may clash with other strong visions. I need to know there is a clear method of resolving conflict, otherwise I am confident that all those smiling people are going to be carrying concealed knives.

tenarshins 4y ago

I'm actually part of a founding team of a for-profit tech & other consulting cooperative. Not because of any altruistic or idealistic thing, but because we have a good team that has fantastic ability and wants to try doing some independent work, but having shared systems, and a centralized umbrella to do C2C under is nice.