Fired? Why cooperatives might be your next career choice in tech
medium.com
medium.com
The biggest thing I've learned from being part of this process is that co-ops vastly destroys competition among peers and replace that we the mindset of "what's the best way to benefit the collective". Best thing to make it work is that it's not just altruism, benefiting the collective benefits yourself. Kind of like OSS works.
Mind sharing the co-op name?
I'm living in Portugal right now and I'm thinking about switching careers, so I might give that a look.
Will look at all those, thanks for getting back to me!
We take 5% from goods and services sold through the cooperative to the outside world and that's what mantains the whole central structure.
People directly earn the money they generate so they choose how much they want to work.
My contact details are in the profile, alternatively feel free to come and say hi: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it. It’s filled with vague, corporatey platitudes about ego and altruism, and there’s almost nothing in it about how this concept applies specifically to tech.
The supposed “cons” sound like the ad equivalents of leading questions:
> The relationships in a cooperative are adult-adult oriented
> All of those might be very painful if you’re not used to vocalizing your inner thoughts in non-violent ways
Well jeez, I guess I’ll skip it if I’m not allowed to respond to assigned Jira tickets with my fists.
I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party.
Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically nil.
You mean the last paragraph where they _volunteer_ to have coaching sessions with people? "Selling" usually implies an exchange of money or an expectation of something in return, but there's no product here – the author is offering their time for free to help others start or join cooperatives. Is it fair to dismiss that as "being sold" something?
Sure, but a startup using VC money to offer you something for free is very different from "I will personally volunteer to help you".
Also the entire point of sharing articles is that they're being read, so there isn't any way to avoid implying they're doing "self-promotion" – should people just stop writing and sharing articles?
Sometimes people aren't after some self-serving goal, and I think it's a little dangerous to think everyone is – charities exist. Cooperatives are more ethical businesses because they build democracy into their structure unlike traditional businesses, why would I assume whoever is talking about them isn't just hoping to see more of that in the world? Or do we reduce that to "that's just the author being selfish again"?
Perhaps the article is devoid of insightful content to such an extent that we were both forced to interpret its author’s motivations based on our preconceived notions of the idea they’re discussing. You believe they’re genuinely seeking to improve worker’s rights, and it just looks like another hustle to me.
One thing I can say for certain is that I did not get much from the article, and I suspect there will be comments that are shorter yet far more insightful than the article a few hours from now.
Many of the engineering blogs shared on HN have a "by the way, we are hiring"[0] stinger, or a promotion of the author's startup's product as a solution to the engineering problem described by the post, or if its a benchmark, then the entire post would be promoting their product as the superior product. This article no worse than others wrt self promotion.
0. Maybe not so much now, but perhaps we'll see an uptick of "I'm looking for my next move, if you're hiring, contact me."
If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on. If they are a part of your cooperative then it comes out of the businesses own funds pretax. There are also incentives to share in other resources, such as buildings, child care and other invisible labor that we normally place little value on.
Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.
Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.
Clients find me, not the other way around. Documentation and implementation are my own lines of work.
I have an accountant, tax advisor and lawyer as subscriptions. I also have a coworking pass. These cost me about 1.5% of my annual income.
Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.
> If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on.
No. As a contractor, all of the above are my business expenses (also including conference passes, trainings/certifications, driving to/from the client, all my hardware I use to work etc). Companies and contractors pay tax on profit, not turnover.
> Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.
Yeah indeed there's a coop like that where I live. They pay like half of what I make to their top guys (I myself am not a top guy; they offered me even less). Not encouraging.
> Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.
I have this at the coworking space - and we don't share any money so there's no chance of any bad feelings whatsoever. I have very bad experience with that, it ends friendships.
No one said anything about training for free. This was an example of work that needs to be done for a client that you may not want to do yourself. A junior level member of your coop could travel to the client's site and train them on how to use your software, learn from the experience and make valuable ties, while you stay at home and work on more appropriate tasks.
Because that way you can finance a bunch of useless moochers who "administer your coop". Smells like typical rent seeking.
On the other hand, in a coop the profit is shared fairly amongst the people actually doing the work. It's frankly incredibly that somebody thinks this is a worse model of compensation.
My point is that value is actually not determined by "socially necessary labor" but by supply and demand, even within a commune. The food you produce will rot if you and others produce too much of it = it has no value, and nobody collects profit (not even in the form of social capital) because everybody lost any possibility of selling for a good price by producing too much.
On the other hand during a shortage people will start valuing food much more than they previously did, gradually paying higher price as they have less of it - again totally disconnected from the "socially necessary labor" required to produce it.
Most importantly - the value of most if not all things is subjective and different based on time, place, etc. Even within a commune - some people simply don't like peppers, so even though you put a lot of work into them they have no value to these people (which will quickly change once there's a food shortage).
Labour theory of value is not in anyway at odds with the idea of supply and demand. In fact, the whole idea of value in Kapital is derived from supply and demand.
The labour theory of value states that the inherent value of a commodity is directly related to the combination of labour and cost of the machinery needed to produce the commodity. This is what acts as the foundation for the value that the market assigns to the commodities. The market value doesn't just appear out of thin air, it's rooted in material costs of production.
To put it bluntly, you have an infantile understanding of the subject you're attempting to debate here.
(I bet I read the book more times than you. It's sitting right there on a shelf next to my desk :-))
The people who say that the rest live in shit in my experience have never been to a third world country and actually lived there. If they did, they'd realize just how shit the first world is.
As long as we have scarcity of goods that must be distributed somehow, communism only works in theory, not in practice.
Edit: Ah, I see, so you're a tankie who grew up in the USSR yet still supports them. Thanks, I have no need to speak to you further.
I find non-monetized content generally to have higher quality than monetized ones. The author is intrinsically motivated to produce quality and there is no other goal other than to share what they have with the world.
Having 13 years+ of experience in cooperatives I can tell you that it is daunting even for old-timers. We started off with most decisions being made in weekly meeting (that sometimes dragged on for most of the day), and ended up with having monthly meetings for the large decisions, but weekly meetings in smaller groups instead. In short, meetings everywhere, about all things large and small. Meetings about whether to have consensus or majority rule, about whether the principle that everyone needs to follow a decision is sound etc etc.
Personality might have something to do with it. But making fast about turns that you sometimes need to do in a business setting is nigh impossible, which is actually hazardous to everyone in the cooperative. This might even be the primary reason cooperatives (being an old idea) hasn't survived other than as a fringe phenomena.
There are large cooperatives, but only in "solved" industries so there aren't many hard decisions left to make. Programming is not one of those fields yet.
Especially when you consider all the union busting tactics used by leadership at traditional businesses – how are you even supposed to form a union when they won't let you? Coops come at that from a different angle: you get democratic control, straight up. Don't like your leadership if you choose to structure the business that way? You can actually vote them out of their role.
If you have broad support from the employee base, “they” can’t block a union certification election. If you’re having trouble forming a union, you’re probably struggling at the “get employees to want your union” step in the process.
Firing pro-union employees also obviously directly reduces the number of employees who are pro-union.
Even when you manage to form a union, companies have ways of screwing you over.
Case in point was the recent successful unionization of a Starbucks location in Seattle you might have heard about on the news. Starbucks' reaction? They just closed that location.[1]
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/business/starbucks-closure-un...
Thats why I commented union done good from the beginning.
Most startup employee recipients of options never get to exercise them for various reasons, often unable to due to cash flow or restrictive timing reasons, or because they aren't profitable (the employee would take a large financial loss). Many of those who do exercise the options get their shares after leaving the company or they're about to leave. And finally, of the small subset of employees who have shares as a result of exercising while still employed, the number of shares they have is a tiny percentage even in aggregate, so they have effectively no influence at shareholder meetings, if they choose to attend, and if their shares have voting rights which they don't always have.
In co-operatives, the majority of shares as well as voting rights are usually held by a high proportion of employees, so that's a completely different dynamic. As well as voting rights, it means any profit distributed as a dividend tends to go to employees as well.
But the rest is more or less correct even when the options mature and you can exercise them you usually do not get voting rights it’s nearly always restricted shares.
Also note that unlike cooperatives there is also quite often restrictions on how much stock you can own as a regular employee in a public or even private company the employee shares in cooperatives usually have a different legal framework than regular company shares.
One of the key differences is quite often as someone already mentioned is that shares in cooperative grant a single voting right to a shareholder rather than per share.
You can also have some more complex tiered holding structures such as where all the employee held company shares are issued to a single entity that represents the employee shareholding collective and that entity then grants a single share to each employee, alternatively other models than direct shareholding can be used such as trusts where the trust holds the company shares and the trustees get voting rights.
Also, there's some significant differences in how shares work between cooperatives and corporations (at least in Germany, where I live). In a corporation, you get one vote per share, and shares can be freely traded once given out. In a cooperative, you only one vote per shareholder, no matter how many shares you hold, and shares cannot be traded. You can invest into the cooperative to get shares, and you can return your shares to get your capital back, but the cooperative gets final say in who gets to hold shares.
A employee stockholder plan is one dollar one vote.
The only semi-valid reason to have a hierarchy in a cooperative is to optimize voting and reduce meetings. That would be less necessary if your cooperative runs in a more digital way and concerns of various members are known ahead of time.
Otherwise hierarchical cooperatives can be literally corrupted by the hierarchy or sold out, turning them into an almost regular company with board of shareholders.
Often very political - seen as a good thing but can add conflict (ie divesting/not stocking/opposing apartheid Israel while some members are Jewish). No x because y etc - repeat for many topics.
Decision making - both hard and strong feelings internally- can lead to claims around “violent” communication, micro aggression, privilege, disrespect etc etc when there are disagreements. Coops will say a good thing, but I think can wear people out sometimes.
Accountability/performance mgmt. not always, but sometimes difficult to take action in this area - maybe a good thing - goal is to work together.
One interesting variant are employee owned businesses that do not run as co-ops. ESOPS etc. I’m not an expert at all, but I think there are a number of really industrial scale businesses that have this structure successfully.
Decisions are not easy when it affects lots of people and that's why those should be made as carefully as possible in the settings available and we know from social studies, it is proven, that individual decision making is quick, group decision making is accurate, in overall. For the group of people in the long run group decisions was better. As a side effect it was not making life unbearably quick by themselves and may eliminate the need for some of the quick decisions (some, as there are aspects outside of human groups that mandate actions, those cannot be eliminated).
Mostly philosophizing above.
He does not understand that Twitter is an ad driven business which also means PR is critical or you don't get advertisers.
Most businesses that tried to pivot from ad driven to subscribers have failed. One that tried to do so in so dramatic a way? Never heard of it.
Elon is not doing a simple management style change, he's changing everything with next to zero money. Unlike a startup, a company the size of Twitter cannot compromise what is feeding them without failing quickly. A startup can survive on small VC funding for a pivot, Twitter eats millions of dollars to just operate.
If they’ll succeed that’s a whole different matter. Not only because they were “wrong” but also because “reality” will have a say in that.
You invest all you money building a nuclear reactor in 1929, you’ll be not wrong but the timing was off.
So you're right, Elon came in and is making changes quite rapidly but that doesn't mean this is standard for large businesses.
Maybe like how pure hierarchical capitalists need a fairly large financial industry to handle the movement of wagers and prizes between investors and producers, a flatter system might need a big and active enough group of secretaries/reporters to keep everybody so informed about internal decision-making and events that normal members don't feel like they have to attend meetings.
It's really a privilege of power not to have to explain yourself. A flatter system might have to dedicate a standing portion of its efforts to explaining itself.
A badly run cooperative fails because the people involved don't take it seriously, or lose their alignment and break apart. A well run cooperative fails (or succeeds) for all the usual reasons any business does. A well run coop ends up feeling a lot like a small business with a traditional structure, and an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant. That's cool, but it's a lot of work to reproduce the performance characteristics of an existing technology.
I've been involved in many sessions where we tried to experiment with the structure and mechanics of how a cooperative works, in order to address what seem to be persistent shortcomings in the model. Nobody has really cracked the code yet, in my opinion.
When it comes down to it, having done both, I think I'd rather work for a good boss at a small company than be in another coop, even a good one. I want someone competent to do all the behind the scenes work, and make most of the decisions, asking me for my opinion on the things that affect me directly or for which my expertise can provide some direct insight.
The advantages: If I don't like the company, I can leave without feeling like I've failed: there are no non-work relationships, or sense of ownership holding me there. I don't have to attend additional meetings. I don't have to look at budgets. I don't have to be on a committee or working group. I don't have to pick a side and convince the other side of anything. If the company makes a bad decision, I say "ha ha, those morons did it again" and keep on doing my job.
In short, as I have come to identify less with work, I have become less interested in the cooperative model because the value of ownership has gone down.
Until a multi-billion company aquires the corporate
Primarily, it was because some with dominant personalities made decisions that were not rational, informed, and or fair. The faithful talent tend to get hurt the most, as they invest more resources being driven by their ideals.
I am all for profit sharing, but someone has to take responsibility for risk mitigation. The worst firms are ones where every narcissist thinks they are the CEO. The more money at stake... the quicker things tend to turn nasty.
Best of luck =)
Same.
The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims:
> Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales
Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404
Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.
Rule by consensus is messy, inefficient, and ultimately prone to failure in commercial settings without slave labor.
I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature.
Have a wonderful day =)
I find that comment odd, given that they cited papers that directly spoke about the functioning of coops. Conversely, your comment mentioning the tragedy of the commons seems very off topic. Could you explain more how it relates?
Best of luck =)
Again, if you have specific examples of functional firms outside subsidized communist regimes, it would be more relevant.
Have a glorious day =)
I'm afraid I don't follow. The commenter above cited papers concerning the topic (coops/labor managed companies). You made a comment about personal experience (nonprofit politics) and then also equated it with the tragedy of the commons (which seems as if you conflated nonprofits with coops and the commons- i.e., three things that appear adverse to private profit). It seems as if you are shifting the goal posts now in a way that means we aren't going to understand each other, which is a shame.
You have failed to provide data to explain the context of your input. Thus, still remain off-topic, and orthogonal to the line of observations corroborated with other members experiences.
As initially inferred, unaccountable individuals that normally get away with cowing people tend to destroy shared environments which should be otherwise sustainable in theory.
I agree without relevant data your perspective may be beyond comprehension.
May you find a path to happiness =)
Talented people with options tend to identify such situations, become disenchanted with being exploited, and eventually leave.
Enhance your calm =)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U
I have yet to see anything significantly differentiating in populations of Homo sapiens.
Be well, be happy, and be wise... =)
That is the surprising part... it is not that simple. It does however allude to an inevitable decline under theoretically ideal living conditions, as rates of aggression and stupification increase.
You may be amused by the highlights from the paper, and how it closely resembles numerous punitive subcultures. =)
A tech consultancy cooperative works exactly like most non-profits: they don't post a profit and distribute everything as salaries. The "non-profit" part is for the entity, not the people running it.
In that light, I wonder if perhaps a better alternative is for each individual to remain independent as their own one-man company in a freelancer kind of way, and instead to focus on streamlining the process of establishing ad-hoc micro contracts whenever collaborative tasks are to be undertaken -- while still keeping the community aspect of a cooperative in place somehow. At the same time, I guess the reason this isn't done more extensively, is simply due to the overhead of having to reach a consensus of the worth of contributions on a task-by-task basis...
You don't need to reach a consensus, you can just have an internal marketplace, like kickstarter. If you want something done, you can help fund it, perhaps getting some benefits in return, like a best-effort ROI.
So the solution to the problems with cooperatives is to introduce capitalism? Why not just make a normal company with normal money instead?
Some other differences are:
1. Salaries are limited, so hopefully more money stays available for new projects.
2. All the source code, docs and databases are shared.
So maybe you can be more specific and avoid trigger terms like that. What’s wrong with having a coop that still rewards for performance?
In general I prefer cooperative work and have experienced too much antogonistic work in startups.
> A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
> A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
As just another data point, I've had fantastic experiences in startups.
It really depends a lot on the people you're working with, and if you're a good fit.
hierarchies replace meetings - but there are still awful interminable meetings because agreement still needs to be reached because work is too complex to allow for total command and control because management will screw it up
salaries are held down for the good of the organism (try outbidding one line of business for a really good person or team and see if that's allowed)
the failure point is equitable sharing but if you took all fortune 500 companies and allocated shares to employees it would be hard to tell the difference. Especially as the managers would be up for election - you tend to get that when your employees own the company.
He replied "Things like that are why you'll never find a real job." and stormed off.
(I was trying to escape my PhD at the time, but the world being what it was in the Summmer after Snowden, somehow the only offer I got was a K Street NGO, and absolutely zero companies that would pay me a fair wage for my labor.)
Anyways, if anyone is looking for something with information security experience for their co-op feel free to reply -- I'd love to log out of this nym, which was supposed to only last for a weekend in Las Vegas, forever, but I can not do that until I complete my... mission.
edit: I hope it's clear I'm not trying to diminish the efforts, to the contrary!
Here's also an interview with Richard Bartlett on the matter:
https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on...
And an episode from the General Intellect Unit podcast relating to this:
People from many different organisations are attending, this stuff is definitely spreading.
https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/
A pop up digital village for building equitable, collaborative, distributed organisations
That field is also, in my humble experience, in a bind. Very few people outside of the coach/consulting sphere seem to talk about this as fervently as they do. I think mass adoption will require the concepts to be attractive and simple to people who may not be ardent supporters of the cause quite yet.
There's also a whole contingent of people who have built orgs that already do this, they just don't advertise themselves and do their work.
I think the next step is to deeply integrate the concepts of Enspiral and such into organisational design tools. Something like murmur.com but with a super low conceptual barrier to entry, that makes it obvious what the next distributed leadership shift is for a given group. That's what I'm developing, if you're curious contact me :)
They aren't actually coops and really belong to just a few people, but they do show that an AI community can do good work.
I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat.
There are two things here, "competent", and "nice to work with". I've met co-workers that are perfectly nice people, I thought they do shit work but I wasn't the one paying them so I didn't really cared if they stayed working. Yeah they are negative for the company but I personally don't care, more than that, working with pleasant people is worth more to me than company being that 0.5% more efficient by not employing them.
That does shit a bit in coop as your share in profit grows when someone bad at the job gets fired.
> I think a more important concern is how does an org ensure that people remain tolerant and accommodating (both in legally required ways and in ways that expand your views and ideas) of people that may not mesh perfectly? I don't think a "divorce" of the org should be frowned upon and I think many orgs ought to codify how they sever to account for the possibility that people don't agree. I don't, however, believe that it's good to avoid conflict and sever every org over every meaningless spat.
Yeah I can imagine that being even harder the more interconnected the org structure is, people are naturally tribal
For your second point, maybe that's okay? I think you're right with the tribal nature of people -- so if teams disagree, maybe the org isn't healthy and it's time to form two healthy orgs as part of a codified severance that doesn't result in layoffs or bankruptcy. I think the reason they don't is its expensive and difficult because you have to hire lawyers to figure it out after something is wrong. If tribes are mature enough to disagree and coexist, I'd call that healthy and worthy of continuing if both sides value each other.
I'm not sure many orgs codify severance. Typically this is something that partnerships account for but not corporations - corporations just fire people.
I realized that I didn't want to start a regular startup. I want to do business, but without the pressure of maximizing profits.
We're going to do things like: create extremely simple and elegant computer systems; build robots to collect litter and clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; acquire land and create parks that double as agriculturally productive "food forests"; build fancy hich-tech ecologically-integrated homes and shops; etc...
(If you were to trawl though my comment history you'd find me yammering on about all this for years now. I finally got my hands on a tiny bit of capital. In a rocket metaphor, this is ignition and liftoff. The engine is roaring and I'ma crack the sky.)
Email in profile. :)
Anyway it is very naive at least.
Where the clients come from?
If you has been fired, look for another job.
If you has been fired and you were working with other 10 people that are skilled, and you like to work together and you knows someone that want your skills or you know how to sell yourself and you wants to take your own decisions as a group (like in a pirate boat), then yes, a coop is a choice.
It is not the panacea, it is hard, you will deal with things than never before faced, and is not like you are with people to face that together, you are alone together to face that. I talk for myself and coming form IT i hate bourocracy. And you must to deal with that every day, or at least you must to know that some people must to deal with that, someone. It is a must. Spoiler: you can hire people to do that for youyou, but the reason you build a coop is that you are a worker and you wants to participate in the board. Both.
A coop is not the answer of your lack of employment. It is the answer to deal equally with a capitalist model, inside the capitalism.., something like that.
Anyway, I love coops, the trustworthy level you needs, the equal vote for decisions you have, it is your company, you will take care of that. But everyone must to be in the same boat.
No, if you has been fired look for another job. A coop needs more from you than that.
It doesn’t take many sneaky sociopaths or psychopaths to subvert a system built on assumptions of good faith and good will. And even among good people, strong visions arise which may clash with other strong visions.
I need to know there is a clear method of resolving conflict, otherwise I am confident that all those smiling people are going to be carrying concealed knives.
For myself, I'm not competitive. It's a life choice. When we compete, we win, and winning always means that someone else loses. I've spent my entire adult life, in an environment, where I help "losers" to get back on their feet, and it has had quite an impact on me.
In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNZk-N6uDcg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTGGyQS1fZE
I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now.
If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true.
I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price)
There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig.
But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected.
I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it.
Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.
Google and Goldman have no trouble hiring.
So from a statistical perspective you can say that paying well means they have a lot of people to choose from. But some types of mission are greatly affected by the few particular people who are really specialised or inspired in some area or another, and those people aren't always willing to give up their personal dreams to work for an unattractive company just for a larger pay packet.
It cannot talk about everyone, because there are many different kinds of people and work sectors. I'd expect the motivational priorities to exist on a continuum, on which some people are more motivated by money than others. Also, the "adequate compensation" varies from person to person; some are happy with some level, some are never happy.
I mean, I find it extremely hard to believe that things like, say, "respect from co-workers" and "interesting work tasks" would factor in as the primary source of motivation for e.g. anyone working a low-paying job and living from paycheck to paycheck, regardless of who exactly (worker, employer, state, someone else) thinks the compensation is adequate. In contrast, for someone who already possesses a hefty surplus of money, obtaining more money probably plays a smaller role in the overall motivation.
However, none of this means that it's generalizeable to say all working people are not primarily motivated by money (or are primarily motivated, for that matter). One could just as well argue the opposite: (for some people) money turns out to be really high on the list of things which motivates them. Whichever way, it still is weird to claim this as an absolute, applying to everyone.
To put this into a more concrete context: a C-suite executive of a Fortune 500 company might say "money is not my primary motivation, energizing coffee machine discussions, personal fulfillment, yada yada" -- they already are on a level with plenty of material wealth and opportunities for recreation. In contrast, a single parent sanitary worker is unlikely to claim motivation comes from "I'm energized by the interesting work tasks" or something else than money; certainly they are motivated by being able to pay rent and buy food for their children and would rather have more money than less.
Of course if you don't have enough to live by, the main goal is going to be to earn more or just to survive
Past that, more money helps remove day-to-day problems in life, at various levels. But it becomes less important than other factors like having a healthy and meaningful life. I think it's assumed that the generalization applies to that level.
For C-suites I imagine money is more of a symbol for power and prestige, though I know little about it.
And yes, everybody is unique and all that, but also probably not as special as they like to think. Social research is never generalizable to a point where you can say: all people are like this or that, nor does it have to be to make an interesting point. I also didn't qualify the statement in that way, because I don't know the numbers by heart. But I remember reading from the actual research that there was a large difference in what motivates people (it was not equal as you seem the suggest) and salary was quite low on the list.
Some people will be perfectly happy working in a team with manager shielding them from most of the office politics vs pretty much having to take part in politics in coop
If FAANGs* remove themselves from the equation due to hiring freezes or redundancies a lot of people will be left earning below FAANG pay in a non co-operative environment.
It is proposing joining a co-operative as a possible alternative to that.
That, and it's not always about the money. It's surprisingly rewarding working outside of monetisation of attention.
*Or whatever the latest acronym is
As an employee, you are at the whims of your employers when it comes to something as important as the way you're able to support yourself and your family.