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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

This is a major problem with the “one guy is in charge” model of running a business. All these employees care about how the company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk and not apologize and now all these employees have little recourse but to quit.

Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.

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I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in software. It seems like the industry would be particularly well-suited for it.

I think most importantly they are paid decently. The ambitious career developer on coke or medication became more common recently, but is still an outlier and not the type to start worker rebellions either.

Smaller developers work in very cooperative endeavours. While some form of work councils don't need to be antagonistic to management, there often is simply no need of something like this in smaller studios.

Game development is an extremely high risk endeavour in any case. A large developer like Ubisoft can dampen that risk a bit, but insecurity remains. This is a large driver while they will use established formulas much more often than smaller indie devs. A union does make sense in some industries, but tariffs would probably lead to worse conditions and leave the individual dev with less choice. Currently many employers do quite a lot to accommodate devs.

The two primary motivations for building a startup are money and independence/freedom. Why would someone with that priority go and constrain themselves with the whims of others?

Dont forget ego: "why would I give control over _my_ idea, over _my_ company that _I_ created to simpletons without ideas, without ability or will to execute?" This ego is also why software devs are allergic to unions.

Depends on your definition of startup but a lot of people want to solve a problem that is important to them and they are smart enough to set their ego aside and recognize that they will produce a better solution if they collaborate with others and ensure those people have an equal stake.

Silicon Valley has deep roots in individualist capitalism. You don’t get big US government contracts to design transistors in the 1950’s and 1960’s if you’re a worker cooperative. Silicon Valley was created under McCarthyism and anti-communism which also opposes labor rights movements. Since the 1980’s worker cooperatives have not been very popular in the USA, but they do seem like they would present an antidote to the worker-abusing poverty-wage paying mega corps we have today.

Union. If you can set wages and benefits you can also set business direction and other working conditions that effect company health. The history of business regulation is strewn with arbitrary policies examples set by "the guy in charge."

Unions are one solution but to me they seem inferior to cooperatives if we’re talking about ideals. A union has a somewhat adversarial relationship with management. Why not just have the workers be the management? Of course unions serve a purpose in that workers can’t own an Amazon warehouse but they could unionize one. But I seem them as transitional rather than the ideal.

> Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed.

So, when has that ever worked, apart maybe a small startup between friends?

I mean if it works for 82,000 people in the 65 year old Mondragon Corporation in Spain, I’m sure it could work for Ubisoft.

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

Maybe what you mean is “if it works why isn’t it common” which is a much more nuanced question. I would say that McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the USA had a huge negative impact on the labor movement, and there has been a big propaganda push for individualist capitalism (which benefits the powerful) since then. People seem to think that if an idea isn’t common today, it’s not a good idea. But that ignores the possibility of an idea whose time as come, or a new good idea that hasn’t been tried yet.

Of course cooperatives are not new. Credit unions are member owned cooperatives. And of course there are many individually owned worker cooperatives. I’ll leave that for you to research but do see this directory of Bay Area cooperatives.

https://nobawc.org/

And then those friends are in charge and the new employees are just grunts.

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