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Think about the level of executive stupid you're dealing with when a spinoff continues using the same literal playbook -- with identical terminology and resourc

by ncphil 3y ago

Think about the level of executive stupid you're dealing with when a spinoff continues using the same literal playbook -- with identical terminology and resources (linking to former parent company servers) -- in executing a painfully obvious employment discrimination strategy. Well, either stupid or lazy. Either way, it's a situation that screams out for punitive damages. Here's hoping these cases send at least some of IBM's top management to an early retirement themselves. Going to say it again: feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. If you're not an owner with a real decision-making vote, you're on the menu for these guys.

jdasdf 3y ago
Good thing there is nothing stopping you from starting up such companies. If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm. If they aren't, the only one harmed is you.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm. What do you mean by “better”?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Worker-coops would be great, but at a minimum I feel like we need, as a profession, a dues-funded professional association which can do things like: Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements, etc. Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations. Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use during negotiation. Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs. Analyze the severance packages and give advice. Help connect people in our profession with good employer / position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for professional association members only. And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this. (I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those are far more controversial.) I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would gladly pay a monthly fee into such an organization.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  But without the ability to withhold labor en masse, workers don’t have much leverage. I’m afraid some form of union with collective bargaining and the ability to coordinate strikes are unavoidable to achieve the laudable goals you lay out. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the good graces of employers, which employees may occasionally benefit from. However, when the rubber meets the road, the coercive law of competition will … coerce employers into favoring their own interests.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    This is all true except for the fact that our profession has the advantage of scarcity combined with high-demand, and therefore higher intrinsic bargaining power. At least for now.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    If you are right, everybody would be at minimum wage.
jasode 3y ago
>Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital. Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles: (1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much money themselves but have the ability to get funds from investors) -- are not interested in forming worker co-ops. The founders want to own the business and hire employees to pay them wages. (2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a co-op don't have the money to fund the business. Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't any alignment between the founders-with-money who want employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops. This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new startups) creating co-ops. Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs, etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job to pay the upcoming bills. That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is the workers just don't have the money.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  You are missing a massive blockers. Coops are often ostracized by private corporations. To the point that coops have to build coop networks to resist.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    Interesting. In what way ostracized? Can you give some examples?
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      It's well known that private corps are reluctant to engage and sign contracts with coops.
- MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
  People with money would like to control what they buy with that money? Interesting... The issue could be organizational, though. You, Bob, Mary, and I form a company legally. Then we work to get capital for that company, however anybody does that. But we decide beforehand that we are equal part owners, and when we need to find more people to help with the work, we sign them up as part owners instead of as conventional wage employees. I think that technically, stock options are a version of this, but the disparity in ownership between "founder" and "twentieth employee" might be so stark that the latter is better off taking a wage. Maybe the founders _could_ decide to give everybody a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak, with proportional increases in responsibility to those hired and difficulty in finding people. It would be a different kind of company.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Any good way for worker coop interested (not necessarily job seeking but even aspirationally aligned) HNers to coordinate/share resources? The topic often gets shut down here as controversial topics that smell like Marxist Leninist communism even when they are anything but get flagged out here in my experience
easytiger 3y ago
> Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. Go start one. Let us know how you get on
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bell-cot 3y ago
> ...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.
- eternalban 3y ago
  This empirical data was gathered in context of poor connectivity in society. So the 'default' that you propose, I assert, is a default for a specific societal regime. As an abstract model, I propose hierarchies of patronage & loyalties, capital & force, and service as the fundamental organizing principle of 'feudal' systems. We assume that there is -- it's an implicit in your stated view -- a natural system level emergent order that defaults to 'feudalism'. Looked at another way, we could ask the question as to why the substantial majority of people put up with crap all these centuries and in all these different places? I think PL-CF-S order optimizes for (information/)control in the 'super-organism' for long term viability. (This is simply focusing on society as a system, disregarding the subjective experience of individual members.) Why was hierarchical 'control' (think command and control) so fundamentally important to human societies (to date)? Per above sketch, I assert it has to do with marshalling of resources in a 'poor' energy, tech and i/o environments. You need a hierarchy if any significant action requires high level control of a huge mass of people. You need a huge mass of people if your making and killing tech requires 'hordes' of peasants, workers, and soldiers. You do -not- need a strict (and non-delegating) control hierarchy if significant societal action requires minimal human resources (the 'S' in PL-CF-S model), and operates in an environment of 'abundant' energy and amplifying technology. Two trends are now opposing each other in that model. Certain technologies seem to require centralization (thus the 'old' model will apply) and other tech is getting in the hand of the plebes (aka the people history ignores or forgets that is almost all of us). Now the 'old' order is resisting getting tech to the 'edge' of society. It is deemed "dangerous" and it fairly is that. IFF we assume that the hierarchical model is in fact a relic of a capability poor past of humanity, and that a new sort of 'human history' should begin, then we need to address the issue of technologies that tend to centralization. Possibly a combination of socialist ownership of those sectors and market enterprise at the 'distributed edge' could work.
rajin444 3y ago
> feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery. That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.
- BazookaMusic 3y ago
  Any citations for this broad statement? Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the single ruler model due to the available knowledge and resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler systems offer higher gains in modern societies?
  - wanttocomment 3y ago
    What kind of citation would satisfy you? A survey of organizational structures and success rates? That doesn't sound conclusive.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-leader feudal power structures are common in business because they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured businesses! Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in the West.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty cities. Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a good model though because though its centralized command and control at the business level, it's also distributed and experimental in aggregate.
tasubotadas 3y ago
How many coops have you started?
Aunche 3y ago
Even if you solve the problems that other people mentioned, there is simply very little incentive for a successful co-op to hire extra workers to share their prosperity. For example, say a co-op has ten people and sells 100 widgets at $100 a piece for a $20 profit. However, their widgets are constantly out of stock. If they hire 5 more workers and sell twice as many widgets at the same price assuming economies of scale, now each worker may make $30 of profit. However, it would be much easier and more profitable for them to simply raise their prices to $120, and make $40 of profit.
- bombcar 3y ago
  coops work best in cases where the product is relatively easy for competitors to start their own coops; things like farming, building, etc.
- indigochill 3y ago
  How's that a problem? Co-ops' purpose isn't job creation.
  - Aunche 3y ago
    It means that co-ops will usually lose out to traditional companies in economies of scale. If you somehow force all companies to be co-ops, then you simply end up with the same in-group out-group dynamics as capitalism except everyone is worse off.
wesapien 3y ago
When I read people on reddit say stupid shit like eat the rich, I always get downvoted for going against those coommie/anti-work types. But sometimes like now maybe they are right even if I know its wrong.
ravenstine 3y ago
> Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. Are there any known businesses that have engineering teams and work this way? I'm just curious. It's not something I've really thought about before.
- jlokier 3y ago
  Igalia comes to mind. They do quite a lot of work on all the big three browser engines, Blink, WebKit and Gecko, among other things. https://www.igalia.com/ https://www.igalia.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia

by ncphil 3y ago

jdasdf 3y ago

Good thing there is nothing stopping you from starting up such companies. If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm. If they aren't, the only one harmed is you.

wizzwizz4 3y ago
> If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm. What do you mean by “better”?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Worker-coops would be great, but at a minimum I feel like we need, as a profession, a dues-funded professional association which can do things like: Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements, etc. Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations. Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use during negotiation. Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs. Analyze the severance packages and give advice. Help connect people in our profession with good employer / position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for professional association members only. And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this. (I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those are far more controversial.) I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would gladly pay a monthly fee into such an organization.

avidphantasm 3y ago
But without the ability to withhold labor en masse, workers don’t have much leverage. I’m afraid some form of union with collective bargaining and the ability to coordinate strikes are unavoidable to achieve the laudable goals you lay out. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the good graces of employers, which employees may occasionally benefit from. However, when the rubber meets the road, the coercive law of competition will … coerce employers into favoring their own interests.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  This is all true except for the fact that our profession has the advantage of scarcity combined with high-demand, and therefore higher intrinsic bargaining power. At least for now.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  If you are right, everybody would be at minimum wage.

jasode 3y ago

>Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital. Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles: (1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much money themselves but have the ability to get funds from investors) -- are not interested in forming worker co-ops. The founders want to own the business and hire employees to pay them wages. (2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a co-op don't have the money to fund the business. Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't any alignment between the founders-with-money who want employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops. This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new startups) creating co-ops. Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs, etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job to pay the upcoming bills. That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is the workers just don't have the money.

goodpoint 3y ago
You are missing a massive blockers. Coops are often ostracized by private corporations. To the point that coops have to build coop networks to resist.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Interesting. In what way ostracized? Can you give some examples?
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    It's well known that private corps are reluctant to engage and sign contracts with coops.
MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
People with money would like to control what they buy with that money? Interesting... The issue could be organizational, though. You, Bob, Mary, and I form a company legally. Then we work to get capital for that company, however anybody does that. But we decide beforehand that we are equal part owners, and when we need to find more people to help with the work, we sign them up as part owners instead of as conventional wage employees. I think that technically, stock options are a version of this, but the disparity in ownership between "founder" and "twentieth employee" might be so stark that the latter is better off taking a wage. Maybe the founders _could_ decide to give everybody a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak, with proportional increases in responsibility to those hired and difficulty in finding people. It would be a different kind of company.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

Any good way for worker coop interested (not necessarily job seeking but even aspirationally aligned) HNers to coordinate/share resources? The topic often gets shut down here as controversial topics that smell like Marxist Leninist communism even when they are anything but get flagged out here in my experience

easytiger 3y ago

> Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. Go start one. Let us know how you get on

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bell-cot 3y ago

> ...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.

eternalban 3y ago
This empirical data was gathered in context of poor connectivity in society. So the 'default' that you propose, I assert, is a default for a specific societal regime. As an abstract model, I propose hierarchies of patronage & loyalties, capital & force, and service as the fundamental organizing principle of 'feudal' systems. We assume that there is -- it's an implicit in your stated view -- a natural system level emergent order that defaults to 'feudalism'. Looked at another way, we could ask the question as to why the substantial majority of people put up with crap all these centuries and in all these different places? I think PL-CF-S order optimizes for (information/)control in the 'super-organism' for long term viability. (This is simply focusing on society as a system, disregarding the subjective experience of individual members.) Why was hierarchical 'control' (think command and control) so fundamentally important to human societies (to date)? Per above sketch, I assert it has to do with marshalling of resources in a 'poor' energy, tech and i/o environments. You need a hierarchy if any significant action requires high level control of a huge mass of people. You need a huge mass of people if your making and killing tech requires 'hordes' of peasants, workers, and soldiers. You do -not- need a strict (and non-delegating) control hierarchy if significant societal action requires minimal human resources (the 'S' in PL-CF-S model), and operates in an environment of 'abundant' energy and amplifying technology. Two trends are now opposing each other in that model. Certain technologies seem to require centralization (thus the 'old' model will apply) and other tech is getting in the hand of the plebes (aka the people history ignores or forgets that is almost all of us). Now the 'old' order is resisting getting tech to the 'edge' of society. It is deemed "dangerous" and it fairly is that. IFF we assume that the hierarchical model is in fact a relic of a capability poor past of humanity, and that a new sort of 'human history' should begin, then we need to address the issue of technologies that tend to centralization. Possibly a combination of socialist ownership of those sectors and market enterprise at the 'distributed edge' could work.

rajin444 3y ago

> feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery. That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.

BazookaMusic 3y ago
Any citations for this broad statement? Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the single ruler model due to the available knowledge and resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler systems offer higher gains in modern societies?
- wanttocomment 3y ago
  What kind of citation would satisfy you? A survey of organizational structures and success rates? That doesn't sound conclusive.
kevingadd 3y ago
I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-leader feudal power structures are common in business because they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured businesses! Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in the West.
maerF0x0 3y ago
and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty cities. Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a good model though because though its centralized command and control at the business level, it's also distributed and experimental in aggregate.

tasubotadas 3y ago

How many coops have you started?

Aunche 3y ago

Even if you solve the problems that other people mentioned, there is simply very little incentive for a successful co-op to hire extra workers to share their prosperity. For example, say a co-op has ten people and sells 100 widgets at $100 a piece for a $20 profit. However, their widgets are constantly out of stock. If they hire 5 more workers and sell twice as many widgets at the same price assuming economies of scale, now each worker may make $30 of profit. However, it would be much easier and more profitable for them to simply raise their prices to $120, and make $40 of profit.

bombcar 3y ago
coops work best in cases where the product is relatively easy for competitors to start their own coops; things like farming, building, etc.
indigochill 3y ago
How's that a problem? Co-ops' purpose isn't job creation.
- Aunche 3y ago
  It means that co-ops will usually lose out to traditional companies in economies of scale. If you somehow force all companies to be co-ops, then you simply end up with the same in-group out-group dynamics as capitalism except everyone is worse off.

wesapien 3y ago

When I read people on reddit say stupid shit like eat the rich, I always get downvoted for going against those coommie/anti-work types. But sometimes like now maybe they are right even if I know its wrong.

ravenstine 3y ago

> Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. Are there any known businesses that have engineering teams and work this way? I'm just curious. It's not something I've really thought about before.

jlokier 3y ago
Igalia comes to mind. They do quite a lot of work on all the big three browser engines, Blink, WebKit and Gecko, among other things. https://www.igalia.com/ https://www.igalia.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia