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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

The problem, which I worry is unfixable, is that managers are the people who decide which jobs are most stable and paid the most. Unsurprisingly, they give themselves the majority of the spoils.

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It's interesting too that democracy is lauded in the west but companies are never run that way.

Democracy isn't democratic either. Why else would concepts like seniority exist in the US Senate? Or sub committees... How is the US Senate in line with the concept of one person one vote? If we want our vote to count more, we should move to Wyoming (which gets two senators the same as California)?

If we have each employee one share each, I'm sure many would simply turn around and see if they can sell it. How can we retain one person one vote in a company? Make shares non transferable? Do we allow proxy voting?

I'd do it just the opposite - folks don't all want to be involved, but want somebody who they respect to do it for them. Freely allow proxies to be assigned, to anybody, not just to 'elected officials'. Those with proxies could reassign the whole wad to another person, and so on.

Is it ok to be reimbursed for giving someone proxy?

In a free society, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

That's because the US government is not organized as a democracy, but rather as a republic. The Senate is not intended to be democratic, it is intended to be a deliberative body of representatives who come to consensus on legislative questions. It's quite a large deliberative body, so its method of consensus is superficially akin to democracy in that many questions are answered through voting, but it isn't, and was never intended, to be democratic in the pure sense. Along the same lines, it is only recently that we began democratically electing Senators.

None of this is by accident, and was done this way for similar reasons as companies have for running themselves un-democratically.

> That's because the US government is not organized as a democracy, but rather as a republic. The Senate is not intended to be democratic, it is intended to be a deliberative body of representatives who come to consensus on legislative questions. It's quite a large deliberative body, so its method of consensus is superficially akin to democracy in that many questions are answered through voting, but it isn't, and was never intended, to be democratic in the pure sense. Along the same lines, it is only recently that we began democratically electing Senators.

How often is there a consensus in the Senate? It seems like almost everything happens along party lines. Who are senators supposed to represent?

I've heard this "a republic, not a democracy" so many times. Don't get me wrong. I am very grateful for a nation of laws. However, it doesn't seem that being a republic, not a democracy is what is protecting the rights of the minority or the rule of the law.

It just feels like the purpose was to prevent wild swings but I'm afraid what is supposed to protect us from abrupt, wild swings will make it near impossible to correct a slow swing.

Party line votes were historically more rare (under 50%). That has changed dramatically over the last few years and is a belleweather of the deep divisions in the country.

There were always divisive issues but there are also a lot of boring and mundane work. 90% party line votes are evidence the parties feel it's not politically safe to be seen agreeing with others on any issue regardless of how mundane. That isn't something you'll fix short of changing the electorate or getting rid of elections.

In the period between the New Deal and now they were usually rarer because the New Deal Coalition broke the old party alignment and it took a long time before the parties each had a coherent ideological position again; that was a naturally unstable position.

It had little to do with boring, mundane work, it has to do with the fact that liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats—when neither of those meant centrist, they meant more to the left or right than the center of the other partt—used to exist, significantly, in both the electorate and elected office.

This was always an unstable condition, and the trigger for accelerating it's inevitable Denise was Johnson's civil rights position. But it still took a few decades after that for the realignment to complete.

Except that the current increase in partisan voting began in the 2000s. The 50s were closer in the mid 70% but for the period since partisan voting was under 50%

It's a democracy and a republic. The UK is a democracy but not a republic.

The administration of the US government has no elements of direct democracy (that I can think of). It is a republic with democratically elected representatives.

Representative democracies are democracies as well. Everybody voting on everything isn't the only way to organise a democracy.

We've entered pretty pedantic territory now IMO, but I think it's much more useful to consider the US government itself a republic because that's how its day to day operation is conducted. Thinking of it as a democracy leads to questions like the thread starter, for instance about un-democratic committee and leadership structures, which are actually non sequiturs because it's not a democratic system.

“A republic with democratically elected representatives” (like “a monarchy in which practical authority is durably assigned to a body of democratically elected representatives”) is an example of a representative democracy, which is not only a kind of democracy, it's by far the most common kind of democracy.

Bah, this part of the thread is stuck in the weeds debating definitions; my real point is in my initial comment.

Try to start a democratic company (or run a thought experiment about doing so) and you will probably find the reasons why democracy works better as a way to manage a society than a single company.

It's not like it's unheard of, but it doesn't fill the pockets of the selected elite.

There are worker cooperatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Workers' self management: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management

And serious economists who advocate for such a system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branko_Horvat

We did. And though I am not sure it would work for every line of work, so far it has been extremely successful for us.

https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...

It does happen. Both the largest supermarket chains in Switzerland are cooperatives.

However, small competing firms in a market where people vote with their wallets is already pretty democratic. The voting takes place at a different level - people choose companies rather than leaders or direct policies, but it works well enough.

But... aren't they? It's one share one vote, not one employee one vote, but I think that still qualifies as democratic. Then, there are elected board members (the representatives) who hire the CEO (the prime minister?), etc.

That wouldn't fit most definitions of democracy (which would be variations of "every person gets a single equal vote"). Most companies are more of an oligarchy.

Neither is the US. The US is a democratic republic: we vote in congress, the senate, and the president who then make decisions for us on our behalf. Public companies are similar: shareholders vote in board members, who then elect a CEO for the company on our behalf.

That is assuming that there's only one share class. Companies often have different classes of membership/shareholder which have different voting powers (or none).

Also capitalism ends once you’re in a company. It becomes a miniature command economy with all the same inefficiencies.

Companies in the west are democratic, but the voting rights are held by the owners of the company. If you are a citizen, it is your country and you get a vote. If you are an employee, it is not your company.

Not necessarily true. Many companies including Google have different classes of shares where they have more voting rights than thier share of ownership.

That's not many companies actually but rather a tiny minority of firms that are exploiting their ability to make unusually huge profits to get investors despite poor and risky terms.

Not many public companies are structured like this, and for a while it was a requirement of some exchanges that one share be one vote. I know that people on Hacker News (high concentration of founders) like the idea of a public listing without one share one vote, but I think it is better for companies in the long run to have their board seats elected by the shareholders. It may seem good now to have Mark Zuckerberg to have total control of FB, but will it seem like a good idea for his children to have more control than the actual owners? This is the kind of trouble companies like Viacom have gotten into by giving their founders too much control.

If you're curious to hear postulated explanations then a good search keyphrase is "The theory of the Firm"

I work at a company where at least on the technical side, this is not true. ICs and managers are on similar pay scales. And manager jobs are certainly less stable than IC positions. Additionally, "failure" as a manager often means returning to an IC role.

Can ICs fire managers?

Directly? No. By definition firing people isn't in an IC job description.

Can an IC get a manager fired? Yes. Skip-level reviews and 1:1s usually paint a clear enough picture for upper management that the correct course of action is to fire the manager. The more senior the IC, the more weight their review carries.

Can a manager fire an IC? Not unilaterally. Again, skip-level reviews and 1:1s are there to help upper management evaluate how well the manager is doing their job. Feedback from other ICs is also a big part of it. Senior ICs are generally involved not just in the decision but as part of ensuring the underperforming IC is getting sufficient support so they can be fairly evaluated.

I'm sure systems like this have broken down at other companies, but it seems to work well enough where I've worked.

That's not true where I am. HR decide pay scales based on market pay levels in our sector.

Okay, so your company delegates the decision to managers in other companies. The effect is the same.

I'm sure this is how it looks from the outside, but it's very much not the way things actually work. Except in very limited cases (like, owner of a small private company), your boss does not set his own salary without oversight. And even then, the best way to increase his own salary is for the company to grow, so he's incentivized to run a proper business and not a sweatshop.

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