I am looking for examples of companies that consist of an ensemble of mainly software engineers (could be mixed skills with hardware, graphic, architecture), that work in a guild like fashion.
- They work mostly on internal products, mostly on a project-basis
- Are relatively small (<15-20 people) and are primarily a flat, partnership structure
Do you have any good examples?
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.
Poptel was also a very early ISP / ADMD (x.400) mail provider
I answered an advert in the Guardian. COOP's tend to be liberal if not left wing and attract members/workers with liberal or Left wing politics - the USA coops are not as strongly Left wing compared the the US ones.
I am using UK/EURO definitions here
What would you like to know?
I have a few questions:
-How does your team get motivated and compensated?
-Is there a code of conduct?
-How do you decide what to build?
- How does someone join the Engineering Guild?
What line of business is your company in? Who is your guild accountable to? What metrics are you measured by?
The guild, not beholden to the enterprise itself we are INFINITELY better about scope creep and velocity for the projects originating from and ultimately brought into maturity by us-without that outside influence of the rest of the business.
Metrics was actually the topic of our most recent congregation, looking into new and creative ways of establishing both performance and delivery metrics aligned with the DevOps way for our own "pet projects" as a guild, which we (hope) translate back up and into what we do for the day-to-day business objectives. So none. Yet :)
I'll bring it up in our next congregation and see about getting some of the writers in the group together and collaborate with our marketing team about maybe publishing a blog series.
They'll ususaly do anything from helping you claim/manage your Google Maps listing to publishing your restaurant's menu online to creating your Shopify store or Wordpress marketing site, alongside your print media or whatever other needs.
Businesses like this are really flexible, and seek to serve their local customers with whatever IT needs they have.
In your example, setting up a Shopify instance isn't much of a programming task, but consider the ongoing support. Once the instance is up, who updates the listings? Makes changes? Who's on call for support? Eventually you're just running a services business to cater to customers who don't want to get their hands dirty.
Even for problems that can be solved by writing a lot of code, the overhead of dealing with sales, payments, hosting, licensing, ongoing support, and maintenance can easily overshadow the effort required to write the original code.
In general, it's hard to write software solutions that can be handed off to customers without ongoing support. This model might work for people who can dive into old codebases and fix things, but that's miserable work as soon as you see what real-world code looks like at companies without permanent developers.
We have greater freedom in our lives today and lack the institution of bondage to the company/craft (remember that a guild effectively represented both things). It might be that trusts are an effective way to reintroduce meaningful ownership. Any IP a developer generates, they retain a certain residual interest in and right to; but it is administered by the guild (a trust management company) and on favorable terms since it is assumed to be the result of use of other IP managed by the guild.
All the work for this type of an environment will be innovation on IP and revenue structures. So far nobody has done anything novel here that Ive been able to find. Most coop and not for profit references seem like inappropriate proxies.
They shipped Dead Cells, which is rated as "Overwhelmingly Positive" "96% of 50,435 reviews" on steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/
The HaXe programming language originally came out of Motion Twin, although Nicolas Cannasse has since left to do his own thing.
It's actually called the-guild.dev, they just don't promote much I think.
They're the creators of GraphQL Modules, graphql-tools, graphql-code-generator etc...
I'm also a small contributor to an Authentication/User management library called AccountsJS https://www.accountsjs.com/ (Which uses gql-modules) under the hood, and the-guild members are active contributors too (although not exclusively)
I would love to some day become a good enough developer to be part of that team/org/guild!
if you need a partner hit me up : patrickwcurl - gmail. I'm a laravel / vue / inertia / livewire / alpinejs dev mostly.
I'm probably missing something here.
I'd love to see someone find a way to make it work, though.
If you're interested, code is here: https://github.com/xr3ngine/xr3ngine
Happy to discuss more about structure on Discord or w/e
This article I read recently talks a bit about some of these less-traditional setups: https://www.instapaper.com/read/1341389477
At least, that's how it's been in my career. Prove me wrong!
Edit: here's a classic from Spotify, which is much larger but potentially relevant: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal...
At a prior employer (~1000 person company) we used the word "guild" for a cross organizational team that are tackling a short term, low-medium value problem - with the notion you go back to your existing team when you're done. Or you handle 2x load while the guild work is necessary. These are similar to "tiger teams", but those are generally top down endeavors vs guilds are bottom up.
Zappos tried this out a few years ago, so did some other well known tech co. though the name is escaping me right now. It seems to be called Holacracy and there's this webpage about it: https://www.holacracy.org/
Like, what are the logistics? Their handbook talks about the stack ranking, but it doesn't talk about how that translates into an actual salary.
Who actually sets the salaries? If they have no bosses, who actually hands you the memo that says "this will be your salary next year". Who fills that out and writes down the number?
I assume someone somewhere has to attache numbers to the rankings, I'm curious about that process in a bossless environment.
The handbook offers a hint:
> Once the intra-group ranking is done, the information gets pooled to be company-wide. We won’t go into that methodology here. There is a wiki page about peer feedback and stack ranking with some more detail on each process.
Naively I imagine a pool of money representing what the company has available this year to allocate to raises, bonuses, compensation adjustments, etc.. Those ranked higher get a larger percentage of that pool once the math is done.
Think you're underpaid vs. your peers? Talk to HR and ask. There's no need for a manager to be involved in this process at all.
I guess what I'm getting at is, who has the subjective power over your salary?
The only interesting things in it are whether you set firmwide/regional minimums/maximums, and how far you allow the ranking to move your numbers from everyone getting the same increase - eg, does the top ranked employee get 5% more than the median employee, or 50% more?
Many of us worked on internal products, but never got to a level of flat partnership structure.