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It just occurred to me that so many people were laid off, we could start the world's largest software co-op (and arguably one of the largest tech orgs, period).

It just occurred to me that so many people were laid off, we could start the world's largest software co-op (and arguably one of the largest tech orgs, period). We could build software products that every industry needs, that every worker owns a part of and can vote on org-wide decisions. Literally everyone you need was laid off... Tech people, business people, marketing, sales, etc. We just need a forum and some volunteers to organize. We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. (there are lots of different kinds of co-ops, and I'm not suggesting any particular model other than a worker owned organization where the workers own and control the company)

pipeline_peak 4y ago
> Literally everyone you need was laid off... All the least valuable people were laid off…
janalsncm 4y ago
What products would companies/individuals pay for?
- quacked 4y ago
  Yeah the difficulty isn't even thinking of a good idea, it's reconstructing the enormous legal barriers, government contracts, and relationships with private capital that the existing tech companies have cemented over decades.
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    The larger barrier will be coming up with products that people are willing to pay for.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Thats one way to market yourself, but not the only way. For example, consultancies don't come up with products people are willing to pay for. They are hired as a service to do work on a project, but they aren't selling things off the shelf. A software "consultancy" could operate in a similar way, where customers say "we need engineering labor to achieve our goals" and this agency comes in with the labor that develops the product to meet the companies needs.
- nanomonkey 4y ago
  Creating an open market for compute, labor and goods that would compete with AWS, Amazon and the gig economy would be a good place to start. These groups skim a large portion of companies/individual's profit.
- hankish 4y ago
  My org is starting with B2B SaaS products. If you can move these into a cooperatively managed framework you drive long term value while also building networks with successful businesses. It's a major opportunity because so many B2B SaaS platforms are super overpriced. The client companies are basically overpaying in order to pay back the VC investors. If you start out without any of that overhead you can offer a completely different funding model.
icapybara 4y ago
Why should they all do this?
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Because it’s there.
powera 4y ago
Isn't this more-or-less what the GNU Project and Apache are?
asim 4y ago
I always surmised that this was the only way to compete with Google and others. Even if you had 10k engineers, heck 1000 engineers who did it, it would be a formidable force. But actually doing it. That's the hard part.
- sahila 4y ago
  The number of engineers isn’t the limiting factor competing against google, it’s the innovation/talent. While most engineers even at google aren’t working on hard problems, there’s a few who’re solving distributed computing/gfs/page rank/etc and those individuals are definitely not being laid off. The others use their tools to solve business problems.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I don't think it's the number of engineers or the innovation/talent. I think it's the sheer economic advantage of being a huge multinational corporation.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >economic advantage of being a huge multinational corporation I just left a huge multinational corporation that despite its economic power was wasting millions/billions and not achieving anything in the tech space due to huge mismanagement, as everyone at the top was completely clueless but well connected and good at bullshitting and too busy fighting private wars just so they can climb the corporate ladder to coast for massive paychecks. Basically very wealthy crabs in a bucket. Money and talent aren't everything. You also need competent leadership who can steer the ship in the right direction and are motivated to bring value to the company not just to themselves.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Right. That sort of thing is why I don't think their advantage is the number of engineers or innovation/talent.
    - 4y ago
DicIfTEx 4y ago
We have CoTech in the UK, and they have a decent forum: https://www.coops.tech/ https://www.coops.tech/
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  £10.3m of revenue for 211 workers is absolutely terrible though.
revskill 4y ago
Cool idea. Let's use technologies to beat "sharks". In my ideal world, those who only have money, should work for highly skilled techies.
nanomonkey 4y ago
Loomio [https://www.loomio.com/ https://www.loomio.com/] would be a great forum, cooperative decision making tool for running such a group. The next step would be building out any tools that are not covered by loomio and the likes.
- inadequatespace 4y ago
  Do you have experience with this tool?
  - hankish 4y ago
    Loomio is a great tool. It works great for certain types of things but I've struggled to really build an effective worker community with it multiple times. At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance.
    - testTED 4y ago
      > At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance. What isn't effective enough? What do you envision going better?
      - hankish 4y ago
        This is admittedly a complex subject to boil down into HN replies. And I do not claim to have all of the answers. But here's an attempt to share some parts of the vision. There's nothing wrong with voting as a concept. But most organizations implement voting such that it happens fairly infrequently on somewhat complex proposals which are fully understood by few and have been heavily guided by leadership. Those proposals tend to be necessarily high-level since voting on all of the little details is impractical. As such, the overall "choice bandwidth" of these traditional voting paradigms are quite low. Also the level of thoughtfulness, engagement, and participation are often low as well (ask anyone who's been involved in an old school coop and they'll confirm this). Also these paradigms are not very agile and do not adapt well to projects which evolve and change over time. There are lots of potential solutions, but the high level guiding principle is to design structures which are able to support and incentivize more choices being made more thoughtfully by more people more frequently. So, governance which functions more like a (well-designed) video game and less like a city council meeting. At Quorum1 we focus very heavily on using stigmergy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy) as a design principle. The idea is to use internal marketplace structures to (a) gamify the process of building consensus and (b) break what could be large/episodic/top-down/waterfall/boolean decision making processes into smaller more spectrum-based decisions. So instead of voting Yes/No on a big proposal and going with whatever got 51%, you run a participatory budgeting process to simultaneously fund multiple potential solutions which then evolve and cross-pollinate until consensus emerges over time. The strategy is to encourage ongoing experimentation and continuous decision-making able to adapt and evolve as new information comes in over time.
harshalizee 4y ago
I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers. Of course, it wouldn't be 1:1 mapping, but a collective tech union-like open institution would go far in leveraging against hostile employers. CEOs get golden parachutes on signing. It's time tech workers start demanding what their exit package looks like in case of layoffs/reductions against their will. I know a lot of this is wishful thinking, but in the face of an increasingly bleak economic landscape, we may need something like this sooner than later.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers. Maybe. But remember that the Hollywood guild system also acts as gatekeepers keeping people out of the system.
  - booi 4y ago
    Would AI be allies or scabs?
    - r2_pilot 4y ago
      Why not both? GANN vs LLM, an eternal cat and mouse game even more pointless than cryptocurrency mining
  - asdff 4y ago
    Software development has arguably more gatekeeping even without any guild. Got a CS degree from a university that isn't R1 and didn't score a summer internship? Need a visa sponsor? I don't envy how painful your early career will be. Luck out with the Stanford admission and a summer internship? You are playing on easy mode.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      It depends on what part of the industry you're working in. If you're looking at FAANG-style companies, that's absolutely true. But there's much more to the industry than that.
xwdv 4y ago
This is a pipe dream. The only thing laid off workers care about is making money, not wasting time working for free.
- hankish 4y ago
  It's not a pipe dream! We've got a collective structured in exactly this manner with over 100 people, growing by ~1 person per day and things are going great! Join us and see, if you're interested. :)
Chyzwar 4y ago
Sounds like Anarcho-syndicalism[1]. I am rooting for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#:~:text=Anarcho%2Dsyndicalism%20is%20a%20political,control%20influence%20in%20broader%20society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#:~:text=An....
- lucidguppy 4y ago
  We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--
  - bradwood 4y ago
    ... King Arthur: I am your king. Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you. King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then? King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cos some watery tart threw a sword at you!
    - itronitron 4y ago
      Randall: Look, do you want to be leader of this gang? Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader! Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say.
    - roguecoder 4y ago
      That scene was based on an actual historical village communities, such as those in Castile, and the later medieval conflict between the historically self-governing communities and the centralized order that had previously tolerated them: https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/220237/1/06_CommunityMeetings.pdf https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/220237/1/06_Communit...
matchagaucho 4y ago
Tech Co-ops backed by crypto contracts representing fractional equity ownership are emerging. They are a logical evolution of the Digital Nomad movement from years past (some emerged from Upwork). However, each member is expected to be an independent LLC and handle their own country-specific revenue withholdings and taxes.
- hankish 4y ago
  Yep, this is definitely happening, I'm part of one such group. There's a whole community of decentralized worker collectives working on doing the hard work of getting these models to function.
twblalock 4y ago
> We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. Why wouldn't the traditional approach of starting a company to sell those things work? Co-ops have never been a successful software business model. Not even once that I can think of. That model seems to work ok for open source, but since you are talking about building things people will pay for, I'm not seeing how it would succeed.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  A co-op can mean a lot of things, but in particular it means an employee-owned business. For all of the reasons not to get behind the idea of a company without a billionaire at the top, the Hobbesian faith in the monarch could be the worst one. The functional difference between a co-op and a normal business could be as small as having a board that is informed (because the shareholders are employees and naturally very informed), and that doesn't go for the usual extreme comp levels at the top.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Ok, show me a single example of this model working for a software business that makes a profit. Just one. I honestly can't find any.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      My point is that pretty much every business is an example of what a co-op could do, because the differences are small on an operational level. It's an ownership structure, not a management structure.
    - aaomidi 4y ago
      Companies in new areas of technology generally started with a concentration of power and after a while that concentration of power goes away. Every new tech has effectively had this. Anyway our economic model is toxic to cooperative businesses. So yeah it’s gonna be hard to find examples of successful coops.
robswc 4y ago
I just don't understand the incentive and it seems like it would end up as a race to the bottom, no? Perhaps maybe its a good starting point for developers or those just wanting smooth sailing... but for others... why stay in a "system" with a low ceiling? They could take a risk and create a startup and earn much more. >We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. Regarding this. I _wish_ it were that easy. If it were, I would just spin up a consulting business, lol. Its probably the case SDEs know more about what the client needs than the client itself does... but getting them to pay for something new is incredibly difficult. I guess at the end of the day, I don't believe you could throw 100 talented people in a room and just expect results to start happening. I would love to join this as an experiment though.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  With the way investors handle things these days the ceiling for founders is a lot lower than you think.
  - robswc 4y ago
    How would you achieve similar comp in the system OP describes?
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      I didn't think the OP described a comp structure. The org-wide decisions being put to a vote already happens in a lot of public companies, and it would be the employees voting if they were the shareholders. It's a really straightforward idea.
      - robswc 4y ago
        Well, I know there's more to life than comp but when it comes to deciding what to do for work, its a huge factor. I'm just wondering how you would get a similar comp in OPs system.
marcusverus 4y ago
It's hard to imagine such an organization working out over the long term. The incentives are all wonky! The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. I for one can't think of a less attractive idea than taking a product idea that I love and turning ownership and creative control over to a group of strangers. And that's probably why these things are so rare. After all, it would take a helluva lot of drive and energy to bring such a thing to life--probably much more than it would take to start a company in the usual way. If you were capable of building such an organization, why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time? Making millions doesn't have to be a selfish act, by the way. If you want to help people, money affords you the opportunity to do so in any way you please. Horray, effective altruism! Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? Software developers, who get a chunk of profits instead of a measly 150K? Software consumers, who're likely business owners? Folks who have money to pay for software?
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. 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. :-)
  - robust-cactus 4y ago
    Interesting fact - valve no longer works this way because it didn't work.
    - asveikau 4y ago
      I've always been curious about claims that such an approach inevitably doesn't work. I feel like my intuition tells me it could with the right people and variation on the concept. But it's probably difficult. Even the best managers I've seen usually have blind spots on how the team is running.
moremetadata 4y ago
>we could start the world's largest software co-op How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself? Would the judiciary in that part of the world uphold them or strike them out like the judiciary of other parts of the world have done. Tip, if you are female and married a rich bloke, move to the UK, prove your British citizenship and then get divorced in UK law courts! Amber Heard knew the British law courts are biased against men!
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself? You sign them with the co-op as the other party, same as any other business.
  - moremetadata 4y ago
    But are they ethically or morally correct clauses to have in a contract? I know lawyers let you put WTF into business contracts because its a business to business contract anything goes, but business to human contracts are different and this is what amazes me about the ethical nature of lawyers & law firms knowing some of those lawyers will go on to become judges of all things. Been There, Seen it, Done it!
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      I think you can find a lot of unreasonable ones out there, but at its core the idea of not taking a company's trade secrets to a competitor is a reasonable thing to agree on. It turns into a bad thing when companies abuse their bargaining power to stop you from working on totally unrelated projects in your personal time, or when they stop people from practicing their profession for a period of time after they part ways with no compensation for lost income. In industries where they really care about trade secrets but are also dealing with people who know how to negotiate, you see a lot of contracts where you get paid your full salary for say a year to sit at home and do nothing, as compensation for not working for a competitor during that time.
andrewmutz 4y ago
> We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. I disagree. Knowing what to build is the hardest part of the tech industry. It's why the industry funds a constant stream of failing startups: it's the trial and error process of finding out what the world actually needs built. Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those?
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those? The people who invested to start them. A co-op is just when the stakeholders get together to buy something (shares in the startup, in this case) instead of having a handful of not-so-informed and partially disinterested investors provide liquidity.
  - andrewmutz 4y ago
    So in this example, are the laid-off workers investing money to the coop? Are they getting paid? Who contributes the money for the marketing budget, for example? And if the people investing aren't the workers, how is it different than the VC model?
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      The people investing are the workers, and (I am including all co-ops here, not just the one that we're discussing) sometimes the customers.
      - andrewmutz 4y ago
        So this model only works if the laid-off employees can self-fund the new company, right? and they can afford to lose the invested capital if the startup fails?
        4y ago
2devnull 4y ago
Wow, you just invented open source software.
zapataband1 4y ago
Can I contract for the co-op?
berkle4455 4y ago
Teaming up with a bunch of recruiters, product managers, and rest-and-vest engineers sounds like a winning strategy.
roguecoder 4y ago
This is how some of the trade unions started, back in the day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hankish 4y ago
What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent. It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got 105 members at the moment and are growing every day. We've got more info here if you're interested >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1 https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1
- andrewjmg 4y ago
  quorum honestly looks fantastic. thanks for this!
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first? We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs. Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart. Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.
  - hankish 4y ago
    I think you're absolutely right that not everyone is equally employable right off the bat (though most folks can, with time and effort, become super valuable team members). It's very important to be up-front with that somewhat harsh reality and to bake that directly into your organizational design. When done correctly it becomes a benefit rather than a weakness. Our group is 18 months in and going strong. However, the structure is based on a decade of thought work from some of the founding folks, so we've been very intentional with the design. Some of the keys to our approach have been: 1. Our main focus is on "professional empowerment" (learning, networking, experience building, etc) not getting people paid work. We do happen to get people paid work, but we set the expectation up front that it's a network first and a consultancy second. We can guarantee professional growth but not necessarily immediate employment. Of course, the bigger the network grows & the more brand awareness we build, the easier it gets to staff people quickly. 2. We use gamified incentivization mechanics to recognize and reward anything that benefits the collective with actual cash and longterm passive income: mentoring/coaching, bringing in business, building internal tools, working on products we're incubating, etc. 3. We're very focused on membership diversity in terms of role type, career stage and interest. We've got members with full time roles who are only in the group to coach & mentor, long term consultants looking to staff juniors on projects, juniors looking to get their first experience, entrepreneurs looking to exchange mentorship for help with their startups, etc. There's a network effect that starts to kick in when there's enough different sorts of folks involved. That is absolutely critical to longterm success. But it also requires a lot of patience. --- As you say, this is definitely an extremely hard nut to crack. That's part of the reason why we're putting a lot of effort into developing the model and offering it to other community-centric organizations to incorporate into their own orgs. The more orgs which adopt these sorts of models, the more data we'll have on what works and what doesn't.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Yes! Happy to support. This is the only workable way to organize in the long run and is exciting to see this as the top comment. Please let me know how I can help via the email in my profile. FWIW I'm starting a residential trash/recycling cooperative to roll back the capitalistic accretion of all public works, so anything anarchic-syndicalist I will support however I can.
christkv 4y ago
Co-ops can work however they bring a lot of problems. My kids are in a co-op run school where I'm the treasurer (all families are co-op members). Only the teachers are paid. There is so much drama and you always have a share of people who don't pull their weight and the resentment that comes with that. Another thing people never remember is that depending on your country you are on the hook for your share of the looses incurred if the co-op runs with a loss. Your are not insulated from the losses in the same was as if you are just a shareholder.
bequanna 4y ago
I think that org might end up quite heavy with Product and HR Managers.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
they could call themselves the Loper Formers
elamje 4y ago
I think this is an interesting idea, but the reality is that most people want jobs, not a new model for how to make a living. In tech, or startups, or interesting problem spaces. Right now, the biggest problem is discovery, i.e. who is still hiring vs who just has stale jobs listed on their website. I'm working on making this list so it's much easier to discover the (literally thousands of Seed to Series B companies still hiring!) See companies that are hiring: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hYrBGZbHIevAZydN7YN6SuUeE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hY... If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends' Seed and Series A companies. VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight. email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)
bawolff 4y ago
You have everything you need except a business plan and willing participants.
Kalium 4y ago
I suspect you may quickly run into the basic problem that your worker-owners like getting paid. Which will be challenging to start with, given a lack of products and a sharply limited ability to raise funds.
epicureanideal 4y ago
I think most people are scrambling to find a stable source of income. Unless they have a quarter million dollars in cash, or a paid off house, the cost of living in major metro areas means they don't have the time and capital to start a startup with any reasonable chance of becoming profitable or raising money before they go bankrupt. I can imagine the news will say "aha, see, there weren't really that many who were capable of being entrepreneurs who were working at FAANG", but really it's just the same old lack of access to capital, and if they did have capital many of them certainly would and could.
poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
An organization of B and C players with socialist leanings will have a hard time competing in a free market. See any "worker owned co-op" coffee shop.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  This is pretty rude. The people who were laid off were certainly not "B and C players". When large companies cut, it's often entire business units, so no performance or talent considerations are made. Plenty of worker-owned coffee shops, book stores, grocery stores, etc are famously successful. Be more open-minded, ya scrooge.
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Just gonna throw this out there... perhaps those who were "let go" were not all let go because they were the best of the bunch? Not that such a thing should stop you, we all love a good rag-tag band of outcasts overcoming the evil empire story, but, you know.
- conductr 4y ago
  I think you’re overestimating the average complexity of software. Low-medium skills folks can probably build functional clones to 90%+ of the software people use daily. They could build a new product of similar complexity. Most enterprise software is a UI for CRUD operations. I doubt they’ll be developing firmware for space X or any type of advanced/mission critical systems. But there’s a lot of room to operate. I say this as someone that regularly employs <$15/hr freelance talent. You have to manage them differently but they can produce just the same on the majority of tasks I need of them.
stevefan1999 4y ago
That's exactly how it worked for Brotherhood without Banners in A Song of Ice and Fire series. Except it doesn't work
gnramires 4y ago
Here's what I think can be more important than co-op (although I think co-ops seem like a good idea and I'd like to see more): (a) Open governance model: the companies decisions has input from employees and users, even the general public (with care taken not to suffer attacks e.g. sybil attacks from false users) (b) Ethical goal model: have a non-modifiable set of goals and ethical standards (improve the lives of everyone). Not maximizing revenue, but genuinely improving wellbeing of everyone. (this should have the benefit of attracting ESG investors) (c) Cross-industry cooperation: open sourcing as much as feasible, and asking users and other collaborators for donations to maintain the project. Likewise, contribute financially to projects that are useful for the company. Basically, establish cooperation networks among open source, open governance and ethical companies.
- kortilla 4y ago
  >improve the lives of everyone This is a really naive goal. It’s super trivial to twist almost anything into “improving the lives of everyone”.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

> Literally everyone you need was laid off... All the least valuable people were laid off…

janalsncm 4y ago

What products would companies/individuals pay for?

quacked 4y ago
Yeah the difficulty isn't even thinking of a good idea, it's reconstructing the enormous legal barriers, government contracts, and relationships with private capital that the existing tech companies have cemented over decades.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  The larger barrier will be coming up with products that people are willing to pay for.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Thats one way to market yourself, but not the only way. For example, consultancies don't come up with products people are willing to pay for. They are hired as a service to do work on a project, but they aren't selling things off the shelf. A software "consultancy" could operate in a similar way, where customers say "we need engineering labor to achieve our goals" and this agency comes in with the labor that develops the product to meet the companies needs.
nanomonkey 4y ago
Creating an open market for compute, labor and goods that would compete with AWS, Amazon and the gig economy would be a good place to start. These groups skim a large portion of companies/individual's profit.
hankish 4y ago
My org is starting with B2B SaaS products. If you can move these into a cooperatively managed framework you drive long term value while also building networks with successful businesses. It's a major opportunity because so many B2B SaaS platforms are super overpriced. The client companies are basically overpaying in order to pay back the VC investors. If you start out without any of that overhead you can offer a completely different funding model.

icapybara 4y ago

Why should they all do this?

Apocryphon 4y ago
Because it’s there.

powera 4y ago

Isn't this more-or-less what the GNU Project and Apache are?

asim 4y ago

I always surmised that this was the only way to compete with Google and others. Even if you had 10k engineers, heck 1000 engineers who did it, it would be a formidable force. But actually doing it. That's the hard part.

sahila 4y ago
The number of engineers isn’t the limiting factor competing against google, it’s the innovation/talent. While most engineers even at google aren’t working on hard problems, there’s a few who’re solving distributed computing/gfs/page rank/etc and those individuals are definitely not being laid off. The others use their tools to solve business problems.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I don't think it's the number of engineers or the innovation/talent. I think it's the sheer economic advantage of being a huge multinational corporation.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >economic advantage of being a huge multinational corporation I just left a huge multinational corporation that despite its economic power was wasting millions/billions and not achieving anything in the tech space due to huge mismanagement, as everyone at the top was completely clueless but well connected and good at bullshitting and too busy fighting private wars just so they can climb the corporate ladder to coast for massive paychecks. Basically very wealthy crabs in a bucket. Money and talent aren't everything. You also need competent leadership who can steer the ship in the right direction and are motivated to bring value to the company not just to themselves.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Right. That sort of thing is why I don't think their advantage is the number of engineers or innovation/talent.
  - 4y ago

DicIfTEx 4y ago

We have CoTech in the UK, and they have a decent forum: https://www.coops.tech/ https://www.coops.tech/

iLoveOncall 4y ago
£10.3m of revenue for 211 workers is absolutely terrible though.

revskill 4y ago

Cool idea. Let's use technologies to beat "sharks". In my ideal world, those who only have money, should work for highly skilled techies.

nanomonkey 4y ago

Loomio [https://www.loomio.com/ https://www.loomio.com/] would be a great forum, cooperative decision making tool for running such a group. The next step would be building out any tools that are not covered by loomio and the likes.

inadequatespace 4y ago
Do you have experience with this tool?
- hankish 4y ago
  Loomio is a great tool. It works great for certain types of things but I've struggled to really build an effective worker community with it multiple times. At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance.
  - testTED 4y ago
    > At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance. What isn't effective enough? What do you envision going better?
    - hankish 4y ago
      This is admittedly a complex subject to boil down into HN replies. And I do not claim to have all of the answers. But here's an attempt to share some parts of the vision. There's nothing wrong with voting as a concept. But most organizations implement voting such that it happens fairly infrequently on somewhat complex proposals which are fully understood by few and have been heavily guided by leadership. Those proposals tend to be necessarily high-level since voting on all of the little details is impractical. As such, the overall "choice bandwidth" of these traditional voting paradigms are quite low. Also the level of thoughtfulness, engagement, and participation are often low as well (ask anyone who's been involved in an old school coop and they'll confirm this). Also these paradigms are not very agile and do not adapt well to projects which evolve and change over time. There are lots of potential solutions, but the high level guiding principle is to design structures which are able to support and incentivize more choices being made more thoughtfully by more people more frequently. So, governance which functions more like a (well-designed) video game and less like a city council meeting. At Quorum1 we focus very heavily on using stigmergy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy) as a design principle. The idea is to use internal marketplace structures to (a) gamify the process of building consensus and (b) break what could be large/episodic/top-down/waterfall/boolean decision making processes into smaller more spectrum-based decisions. So instead of voting Yes/No on a big proposal and going with whatever got 51%, you run a participatory budgeting process to simultaneously fund multiple potential solutions which then evolve and cross-pollinate until consensus emerges over time. The strategy is to encourage ongoing experimentation and continuous decision-making able to adapt and evolve as new information comes in over time.

harshalizee 4y ago

I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers. Of course, it wouldn't be 1:1 mapping, but a collective tech union-like open institution would go far in leveraging against hostile employers. CEOs get golden parachutes on signing. It's time tech workers start demanding what their exit package looks like in case of layoffs/reductions against their will. I know a lot of this is wishful thinking, but in the face of an increasingly bleak economic landscape, we may need something like this sooner than later.

JohnFen 4y ago
> I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers. Maybe. But remember that the Hollywood guild system also acts as gatekeepers keeping people out of the system.
- booi 4y ago
  Would AI be allies or scabs?
  - r2_pilot 4y ago
    Why not both? GANN vs LLM, an eternal cat and mouse game even more pointless than cryptocurrency mining
- asdff 4y ago
  Software development has arguably more gatekeeping even without any guild. Got a CS degree from a university that isn't R1 and didn't score a summer internship? Need a visa sponsor? I don't envy how painful your early career will be. Luck out with the Stanford admission and a summer internship? You are playing on easy mode.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It depends on what part of the industry you're working in. If you're looking at FAANG-style companies, that's absolutely true. But there's much more to the industry than that.

xwdv 4y ago

This is a pipe dream. The only thing laid off workers care about is making money, not wasting time working for free.

hankish 4y ago
It's not a pipe dream! We've got a collective structured in exactly this manner with over 100 people, growing by ~1 person per day and things are going great! Join us and see, if you're interested. :)

Chyzwar 4y ago

Sounds like Anarcho-syndicalism[1]. I am rooting for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#:~:text=Anarcho%2Dsyndicalism%20is%20a%20political,control%20influence%20in%20broader%20society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#:~:text=An....

lucidguppy 4y ago
We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--
- bradwood 4y ago
  ... King Arthur: I am your king. Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you. King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then? King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cos some watery tart threw a sword at you!
  - itronitron 4y ago
    Randall: Look, do you want to be leader of this gang? Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader! Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    That scene was based on an actual historical village communities, such as those in Castile, and the later medieval conflict between the historically self-governing communities and the centralized order that had previously tolerated them: https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/220237/1/06_CommunityMeetings.pdf https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/220237/1/06_Communit...

matchagaucho 4y ago

Tech Co-ops backed by crypto contracts representing fractional equity ownership are emerging. They are a logical evolution of the Digital Nomad movement from years past (some emerged from Upwork). However, each member is expected to be an independent LLC and handle their own country-specific revenue withholdings and taxes.

hankish 4y ago
Yep, this is definitely happening, I'm part of one such group. There's a whole community of decentralized worker collectives working on doing the hard work of getting these models to function.

twblalock 4y ago

> We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. Why wouldn't the traditional approach of starting a company to sell those things work? Co-ops have never been a successful software business model. Not even once that I can think of. That model seems to work ok for open source, but since you are talking about building things people will pay for, I'm not seeing how it would succeed.

whatshisface 4y ago
A co-op can mean a lot of things, but in particular it means an employee-owned business. For all of the reasons not to get behind the idea of a company without a billionaire at the top, the Hobbesian faith in the monarch could be the worst one. The functional difference between a co-op and a normal business could be as small as having a board that is informed (because the shareholders are employees and naturally very informed), and that doesn't go for the usual extreme comp levels at the top.
- twblalock 4y ago
  Ok, show me a single example of this model working for a software business that makes a profit. Just one. I honestly can't find any.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    My point is that pretty much every business is an example of what a co-op could do, because the differences are small on an operational level. It's an ownership structure, not a management structure.
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    Companies in new areas of technology generally started with a concentration of power and after a while that concentration of power goes away. Every new tech has effectively had this. Anyway our economic model is toxic to cooperative businesses. So yeah it’s gonna be hard to find examples of successful coops.

robswc 4y ago

I just don't understand the incentive and it seems like it would end up as a race to the bottom, no? Perhaps maybe its a good starting point for developers or those just wanting smooth sailing... but for others... why stay in a "system" with a low ceiling? They could take a risk and create a startup and earn much more. >We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. Regarding this. I _wish_ it were that easy. If it were, I would just spin up a consulting business, lol. Its probably the case SDEs know more about what the client needs than the client itself does... but getting them to pay for something new is incredibly difficult. I guess at the end of the day, I don't believe you could throw 100 talented people in a room and just expect results to start happening. I would love to join this as an experiment though.

whatshisface 4y ago
With the way investors handle things these days the ceiling for founders is a lot lower than you think.
- robswc 4y ago
  How would you achieve similar comp in the system OP describes?
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    I didn't think the OP described a comp structure. The org-wide decisions being put to a vote already happens in a lot of public companies, and it would be the employees voting if they were the shareholders. It's a really straightforward idea.
    - robswc 4y ago
      Well, I know there's more to life than comp but when it comes to deciding what to do for work, its a huge factor. I'm just wondering how you would get a similar comp in OPs system.

marcusverus 4y ago

It's hard to imagine such an organization working out over the long term. The incentives are all wonky! The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. I for one can't think of a less attractive idea than taking a product idea that I love and turning ownership and creative control over to a group of strangers. And that's probably why these things are so rare. After all, it would take a helluva lot of drive and energy to bring such a thing to life--probably much more than it would take to start a company in the usual way. If you were capable of building such an organization, why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time? Making millions doesn't have to be a selfish act, by the way. If you want to help people, money affords you the opportunity to do so in any way you please. Horray, effective altruism! Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? Software developers, who get a chunk of profits instead of a measly 150K? Software consumers, who're likely business owners? Folks who have money to pay for software?

whatshisface 4y ago
>The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. 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. :-)
- robust-cactus 4y ago
  Interesting fact - valve no longer works this way because it didn't work.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    I've always been curious about claims that such an approach inevitably doesn't work. I feel like my intuition tells me it could with the right people and variation on the concept. But it's probably difficult. Even the best managers I've seen usually have blind spots on how the team is running.

moremetadata 4y ago

>we could start the world's largest software co-op How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself? Would the judiciary in that part of the world uphold them or strike them out like the judiciary of other parts of the world have done. Tip, if you are female and married a rich bloke, move to the UK, prove your British citizenship and then get divorced in UK law courts! Amber Heard knew the British law courts are biased against men!

whatshisface 4y ago
>How would non-compete, confidentially clause contracts when when you work for yourself? You sign them with the co-op as the other party, same as any other business.
- moremetadata 4y ago
  But are they ethically or morally correct clauses to have in a contract? I know lawyers let you put WTF into business contracts because its a business to business contract anything goes, but business to human contracts are different and this is what amazes me about the ethical nature of lawyers & law firms knowing some of those lawyers will go on to become judges of all things. Been There, Seen it, Done it!
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    I think you can find a lot of unreasonable ones out there, but at its core the idea of not taking a company's trade secrets to a competitor is a reasonable thing to agree on. It turns into a bad thing when companies abuse their bargaining power to stop you from working on totally unrelated projects in your personal time, or when they stop people from practicing their profession for a period of time after they part ways with no compensation for lost income. In industries where they really care about trade secrets but are also dealing with people who know how to negotiate, you see a lot of contracts where you get paid your full salary for say a year to sit at home and do nothing, as compensation for not working for a competitor during that time.

andrewmutz 4y ago

> We all know what products companies/individuals would pay for, because we used to build/buy them. I disagree. Knowing what to build is the hardest part of the tech industry. It's why the industry funds a constant stream of failing startups: it's the trial and error process of finding out what the world actually needs built. Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those?

whatshisface 4y ago
>Worker coops will work great for the successful products, but most are failures. Who pays for those? The people who invested to start them. A co-op is just when the stakeholders get together to buy something (shares in the startup, in this case) instead of having a handful of not-so-informed and partially disinterested investors provide liquidity.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  So in this example, are the laid-off workers investing money to the coop? Are they getting paid? Who contributes the money for the marketing budget, for example? And if the people investing aren't the workers, how is it different than the VC model?
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    The people investing are the workers, and (I am including all co-ops here, not just the one that we're discussing) sometimes the customers.
    - andrewmutz 4y ago
      So this model only works if the laid-off employees can self-fund the new company, right? and they can afford to lose the invested capital if the startup fails?
      - 4y ago

2devnull 4y ago

Wow, you just invented open source software.

zapataband1 4y ago

Can I contract for the co-op?

berkle4455 4y ago

Teaming up with a bunch of recruiters, product managers, and rest-and-vest engineers sounds like a winning strategy.

roguecoder 4y ago

This is how some of the trade unions started, back in the day.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hankish 4y ago

What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent. It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got 105 members at the moment and are growing every day. We've got more info here if you're interested >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1 https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1

andrewjmg 4y ago
quorum honestly looks fantastic. thanks for this!
huhtenberg 4y ago
To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first? We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs. Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart. Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.
- hankish 4y ago
  I think you're absolutely right that not everyone is equally employable right off the bat (though most folks can, with time and effort, become super valuable team members). It's very important to be up-front with that somewhat harsh reality and to bake that directly into your organizational design. When done correctly it becomes a benefit rather than a weakness. Our group is 18 months in and going strong. However, the structure is based on a decade of thought work from some of the founding folks, so we've been very intentional with the design. Some of the keys to our approach have been: 1. Our main focus is on "professional empowerment" (learning, networking, experience building, etc) not getting people paid work. We do happen to get people paid work, but we set the expectation up front that it's a network first and a consultancy second. We can guarantee professional growth but not necessarily immediate employment. Of course, the bigger the network grows & the more brand awareness we build, the easier it gets to staff people quickly. 2. We use gamified incentivization mechanics to recognize and reward anything that benefits the collective with actual cash and longterm passive income: mentoring/coaching, bringing in business, building internal tools, working on products we're incubating, etc. 3. We're very focused on membership diversity in terms of role type, career stage and interest. We've got members with full time roles who are only in the group to coach & mentor, long term consultants looking to staff juniors on projects, juniors looking to get their first experience, entrepreneurs looking to exchange mentorship for help with their startups, etc. There's a network effect that starts to kick in when there's enough different sorts of folks involved. That is absolutely critical to longterm success. But it also requires a lot of patience. --- As you say, this is definitely an extremely hard nut to crack. That's part of the reason why we're putting a lot of effort into developing the model and offering it to other community-centric organizations to incorporate into their own orgs. The more orgs which adopt these sorts of models, the more data we'll have on what works and what doesn't.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

Yes! Happy to support. This is the only workable way to organize in the long run and is exciting to see this as the top comment. Please let me know how I can help via the email in my profile. FWIW I'm starting a residential trash/recycling cooperative to roll back the capitalistic accretion of all public works, so anything anarchic-syndicalist I will support however I can.

christkv 4y ago

Co-ops can work however they bring a lot of problems. My kids are in a co-op run school where I'm the treasurer (all families are co-op members). Only the teachers are paid. There is so much drama and you always have a share of people who don't pull their weight and the resentment that comes with that. Another thing people never remember is that depending on your country you are on the hook for your share of the looses incurred if the co-op runs with a loss. Your are not insulated from the losses in the same was as if you are just a shareholder.

bequanna 4y ago

I think that org might end up quite heavy with Product and HR Managers.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

they could call themselves the Loper Formers

elamje 4y ago

I think this is an interesting idea, but the reality is that most people want jobs, not a new model for how to make a living. In tech, or startups, or interesting problem spaces. Right now, the biggest problem is discovery, i.e. who is still hiring vs who just has stale jobs listed on their website. I'm working on making this list so it's much easier to discover the (literally thousands of Seed to Series B companies still hiring!) See companies that are hiring: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hYrBGZbHIevAZydN7YN6SuUeE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hY... If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends' Seed and Series A companies. VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight. email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)

bawolff 4y ago

You have everything you need except a business plan and willing participants.

Kalium 4y ago

I suspect you may quickly run into the basic problem that your worker-owners like getting paid. Which will be challenging to start with, given a lack of products and a sharply limited ability to raise funds.

epicureanideal 4y ago

I think most people are scrambling to find a stable source of income. Unless they have a quarter million dollars in cash, or a paid off house, the cost of living in major metro areas means they don't have the time and capital to start a startup with any reasonable chance of becoming profitable or raising money before they go bankrupt. I can imagine the news will say "aha, see, there weren't really that many who were capable of being entrepreneurs who were working at FAANG", but really it's just the same old lack of access to capital, and if they did have capital many of them certainly would and could.

poorbutdebtfree 4y ago

An organization of B and C players with socialist leanings will have a hard time competing in a free market. See any "worker owned co-op" coffee shop.

flappyeagle 4y ago
This is pretty rude. The people who were laid off were certainly not "B and C players". When large companies cut, it's often entire business units, so no performance or talent considerations are made. Plenty of worker-owned coffee shops, book stores, grocery stores, etc are famously successful. Be more open-minded, ya scrooge.

jimmygrapes 4y ago

Just gonna throw this out there... perhaps those who were "let go" were not all let go because they were the best of the bunch? Not that such a thing should stop you, we all love a good rag-tag band of outcasts overcoming the evil empire story, but, you know.

conductr 4y ago
I think you’re overestimating the average complexity of software. Low-medium skills folks can probably build functional clones to 90%+ of the software people use daily. They could build a new product of similar complexity. Most enterprise software is a UI for CRUD operations. I doubt they’ll be developing firmware for space X or any type of advanced/mission critical systems. But there’s a lot of room to operate. I say this as someone that regularly employs <$15/hr freelance talent. You have to manage them differently but they can produce just the same on the majority of tasks I need of them.

stevefan1999 4y ago

That's exactly how it worked for Brotherhood without Banners in A Song of Ice and Fire series. Except it doesn't work

gnramires 4y ago

Here's what I think can be more important than co-op (although I think co-ops seem like a good idea and I'd like to see more): (a) Open governance model: the companies decisions has input from employees and users, even the general public (with care taken not to suffer attacks e.g. sybil attacks from false users) (b) Ethical goal model: have a non-modifiable set of goals and ethical standards (improve the lives of everyone). Not maximizing revenue, but genuinely improving wellbeing of everyone. (this should have the benefit of attracting ESG investors) (c) Cross-industry cooperation: open sourcing as much as feasible, and asking users and other collaborators for donations to maintain the project. Likewise, contribute financially to projects that are useful for the company. Basically, establish cooperation networks among open source, open governance and ethical companies.

kortilla 4y ago
>improve the lives of everyone This is a really naive goal. It’s super trivial to twist almost anything into “improving the lives of everyone”.