Can Engineers Stage a Coup and Take over Their Company? | Hacker News Reader

Can Engineers Stage a Coup and Take over Their Company?

utkusen.medium.com

14 pointsutku133710 comments

Why stage a coup rather than the tried-and-true method of the core engineers leaving the company to start up a competing one?

I'm not a lawyer, but I bet one could poke three dozen holes in this plan from the first paragraph where the initial felony planning begins.

Yeah, like the shares being transfered under duress. It's not like that can't be undone. The only thing this would achieve is a bunch of prison time and possibly destruction if data.

Not to mention that modern-day IT systems are such a mess that you'd need a crazy amount if time to find and access them all.

Engineers in general don't have the heart and gut to play politics. Actually ordinary people don't. That's why we tolerate assholes because they are supposed to be our assholes.

You should read the articles. OP isn't writing about politics, OP is writing about crime.

I'm confused why the engineers can't just form a union and go on strike, demanding either better conditions, a seat at the table, or actual control like this article suggests. Unionizing and striking are protected activities in the United States and many countries while everything suggested in this article is frankly not.

I'm not a lawyer, but as other commenters mention, this would be both illegal and totally reversible because it would be a decision made due to coercion. In the same way a contract is not legally binding if someone holds a gun to your head and compels you to sign, the decision to give the coup leader control of the company wouldn't be legally binding either.

it seems like the shares should be accumulated first so the take over is not a coup, but a restructuring.

that being said, engineering the straw purchase and smurfing of shares to produce a controlling, or super-leveraging investors group sounds like what the "bad guy" does.

By "bad guy" you mean stereotypical management/business types, yes?

Sometimes you have to fight as dirty as the other fella is willing to.

That being said; many companies specifically structure their share offerings in such a way to keep the muggles from even being able to accrue meaningful voting rights. See Facebook/Meta's share partitioning strategy.

The fact is you have one meaningful vote: and that's "I will not work for you." After that the best you can do is raise awareness amongst others to hopefully get them to make the same decision. As usual for our capitalist system, however, greed is considered good, so the number of successes you'll see starving a project for talent will be far lower than implementations that shouldn't have been done being done because the lucre was too good for someone to pass up.

Not exactly a new thought exercise... it's basically a communist takeover of a single given company.

A better, imo, plan would be to convince the most impactful engineers to join you in creating a new, competing company in a location where non-compete agreements aren't binding.

> but let’s not forget who’s actually behind these successes: the engineers

this narcissistic mindset is THE reason why if anything like this were ever tried, it would fail spectacularly

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