Comment by fallinditch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fallinditch | Hacker News Reader

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The current state of the tech job market, as discussed here, highlights a significant opportunity for grassroots innovation. While we're focusing on the challenges, we might be overlooking the potential for creating new, more resilient models of work and business.

Consider the rise of digital cooperatives or platform co-ops. These could provide an alternative to the traditional tech company structure, offering workers more control and stability. Imagine a software development co-op where members collectively own the platform and share in its profits, or a data analysis cooperative that serves multiple industries while ensuring fair compensation and work-life balance for its members.

Another avenue could be the formation of tech guilds or collectives. These could function as support networks for freelancers and contract workers, providing shared resources, negotiating power, and continuous learning opportunities. This model could be particularly effective in emerging fields like AI ethics or sustainable tech, where collaboration and knowledge-sharing are crucial.

We might also see the emergence of "tech for good" startups focusing on solving social and environmental issues. These could attract talent disillusioned with Big Tech and looking for more meaningful work.

The key is to leverage the current market disruption to create structures that prioritize worker well-being, sustainable growth, and societal benefit. Instead of waiting for the next big company to hire us, maybe it's time we started building the future of work ourselves.

What do others think? Are there other innovative models we should be exploring in response to the current market conditions?

Except our entire sociopolitical system here doesn't incentivize lofty, crunchy-granola companies. The same reason why we're in this mess in the first place is, well... because we're in this mess in the first place. I.e. you have the causality backwards: we don't need alternative orgs to save us, we need to outlaw the more ruthless, race-to-the-bottom business practices that are not only legal, but encouraged. It's not a coincidence that it's getting harder and harder to complete with big, entrenched players, and a worker co-op can't do much when Google has more money than several small countries combined.

> we need to outlaw...

which is the process by which big entrenched players make it hard for others to compete with them. Consider this quote:

"I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators."

That's not a quote from Bernie Sanders; that's a quote from Mark Zuckerberg.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but my default assumption is that anything coming out of the political machine will benefit the big entrenched players at others' expense.

Yes! I was just thinking of this. My thinking started along the lines of tech workers getting together to apply for jobs, discussing who would be best for each role etc, so instead of each role getting 100 varying quality applications it gets just one reasonable application that the company can take or leave.

Then I made a couple of obvious leaps and realised I was quickly converging on existing ideas like unions, and then guilds.

Does anyone know why guilds stopped being a thing? One possibility that comes to mind is that having a third party (the guild) involved in the employer/employee relationship would make things awkward and it might eventually seem unnecessary as the relationship developed -- although this would be a pretense obviously, as the employee is ultimately disposable as far as the company is concerned.

Obviously unions are popular, but they don't seem to go very far in terms of being involved in the whole process of work -- deciding who is going to work where, what the terms will be, etc.

Guilds were anti-competitive and anti free market, in that they regulated the number of people who could enter a profession, and practice it in a particular town. As such, that's against the interest of employers and most people who want to enter the profession. I don't think guild members generally worked for employers, except for apprentices, who had to work for a guild member; they were business owners or self employed.

Arguably though, medicine and academia are guilds.

Early guilds probably used violence to restrict entry; later they needed the state to enforce guild restrictions, so when the state decided it didn't want to; that guild was over.

I suspect that cooperatives are a better model than guilds for the modern era.

I've thought about this a bit and have decided the main barrier to realizing a software development worker co-op is getting together the sufficient startup capital. A handful of regular tech workers probably lack the liquid capital to self-fund a company. And good luck convincing a VC to invest in a worker coop. The easiest business to build like this would be a software consultancy since it doesn't actually require a product (you could structure it almost like a law firm).

I agree unionization is a very good idea for software engineers and the industry should have tried to do it decades ago. I think it hasn't happened because of the overall weakness of US organized labor and prevailing ideological biases among software engineers which go against our own interests. If unions work well for other highly compensated professionals like athletes there's no reason they can't work for us.

The H1B visa is one reason. Unions function by constraining the supply of labor. If companies can simply import labor, you can’t constrain supply. Bonus points if you can underpay the immigrants.

H1B should be much more heavily scrutinized. And for those who are granted visas, their compensation needs to be exceptional, so that it doesn’t compete with American workers.

It’ll never happen, but I’d vote for any politician campaigning on requiring, across the board, that H-1Bs be in the top 10% of industry comp for the role.

have you seen H1B numbers lately? H1B constraints supply as crazy. 80K slots for 800K+ applications.

and besides, over-restricting import of labour will just result in offshoring dev teams to India. just look at major USA tech names

It doesn’t matter how many applications there are. What matters is those 80k slots which aren’t enforcing prevailing wage, and consequently push salaries down.

Something like a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) could be one way to go. DAOs are tricky however: very difficult to implement an effective governance structure in code. But I reckon it's possible to use some DAO concepts and develop a co-op type model. There are sources of funding available for 'community interest' type business ventures.

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