6 ms·

Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?

Aurornis 5mo ago
> Can’t we demand a piece of this? You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted. The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less. Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages. There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale. There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
- bwhiting2356 5mo ago
  I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town. Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership. If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
  - komali2 5mo ago
    > If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed. In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less... Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations. Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too! Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on. Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory. That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.
    - 5mo ago
throw0101a 5mo ago
> Can’t we demand a piece of this? If your company is publicly traded, you can buy its stock.

> Can’t we demand a piece of this? You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted. The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less. Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages. There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale. There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.

bwhiting2356 5mo ago
I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town. Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership. If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
- komali2 5mo ago
  > If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed. In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less... Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations. Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too! Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on. Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory. That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.
  - 5mo ago

throw0101a 5mo ago

> Can’t we demand a piece of this? If your company is publicly traded, you can buy its stock.