What does HackerNews think of tech-coops?
A list of tech coops and resources concerning tech coops and worker owned cooperatives in general.
Some existing tech co-ops: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
The only one I'm personally familiar with there was Electric Embers. A nonprofit I was volunteering for used them for years, but they were way overcharging. I moved the nonprofit to Wix instead and they saved a lot of money and time that way. I met someone who used to work for that co-op and they told me it'd basically been taken over by one or two long time partners and the newcomers became second class citizens.
At the end of the day, a lot of these agencies just look like generic web boutiques, selling commoditized labor on someone else's infra. If that's the scale you want, it's probably doable, but with a lot of management and time spent teaching employees. If you're looking to scale it up to an international provider, I don't think it will be easy.
Still, if you want help, I'd love to pitch in. Best of luck!
> Similarly, law firms are organized very differently from tech companies and it's a function of their products / markets / business models / stakeholders / general situations.
It's hard to disagree there, purely from a historical perspective. Google was started by a bunch of developers and it looks like a traditional corporation now with layers and layers of middle management. Perhaps this is the most efficient type of an organization for a large software maker. One interesting alternative are tech coops [0]:
> Worker-owned cooperatives are business enterprises that are owned and governed by their employees. All worker cooperatives have two common characteristics: 1) member-owners invest in and own the business together, and share the enterprise’s profits, and 2) decision-making is democratic, with each member having one vote.
Other examples: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456918
There are many others: - https://github.com/hng/tech-coops - https://patio.ica.coop/ - https://community.coops.tech/
And there are many more private and other active channels! Contact me for more info +81 90 6523 2640 [email protected]
There's a list of coops here that I just found: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
I found a repo with a lot of information and companies here: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
It's really unclear to me how you would go about joining an existing studio like this. At least in North America, there are so few, I think the answer is to start one yourself.
Yanis Varoufakis, who wrote the post during his tenure as "Chief Economist" at Valve, went on to serve as the finance minister of Greece during its financial crisis and negotiations with the EU.
Relevant today in light of the many attempts being made at creating tech coops (https://github.com/hng/tech-coops), and decentralizing organizations with blockchain systems.
Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.
Also, there's a significant tax advantage for shareholders (long-term capital gains) vs. income you receive as a worker.