

Ask HN: Co-Ops for Developers? - buzzzlight

Startups seem to be hiring more developers this year.  And developers are leaving their day jobs in droves.  This presents a strange paradox.  What does everyone think about programmers working "with" each other instead of "for" each other?<p>In my own career, I can say that without a doubt, the employees were more competent in their endeavors than their employers.  They just suffered from a lack of funds or the freedom to do their calling (whether from family obligations or past debts).<p>I just keep thinking, if there was a project like Mozilla that I could contribute to from home, and then if it was sold/supported similar to Red Hat, the programmers could split the earnings.  Whoever contributes the most, could take the largest split of the profits.  I don't see elance or other sweatshops as the future of programming, because they are limited to working at the level that employers expect.  We should be able to work at our level and create income streams appropriate for our expertise.
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notphilatall
Who determines product direction? Aside from the challenge of estimating
developer contributions ("I wrote the core services" vs. "I wrote the money
making feature of the day" vs. "I wrote the analysis / AB test tools that let
us optimize"...), how would you split revenue among non-coding contributors
(including artists, for example)

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bobds
>Who determines product direction?

Everyone submits ideas, some voting and discussion takes place, then people
work on what they want to work on.

Splitting equity and revenue is a much more complicated issue. In my
experience it's easy to figure this out for small teams, provided the members
are reasonable and can appreciate each other's work.

There was a software startup that was trying to do exactly this but I can't
remember what it's called. Quirky is also doing this, albeit for tangible
products, and they have an interesting approach.

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buzzzlight
That's cool. Ya I was thinking that it would have to work similar to real
employee-owned companies. There would be votes to determine tiers of pay, or
equal pay for everyone (which I personally don't think is fair, after pulling
about twice the weight fixing computers at my last job). The more perceived
"fairness" for all parties involved, the better the talent that will be
attracted. This kind of flies in the face of for-profit decision making, where
the owners and shareholders are given more priority than the workers.

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locopati
I've thought about something similar along the lines of a developer
cooperative with incubator leanings. People could work on their own projects
or together on joint-projects or on consulting projects. Non-technical
abilities like branding, marketing, SEO, etc etc could be handled by folks
willing to work with anyone in the co-op (in the same way that a large media
company will share common skills across brands). Risk is reduced by providing
an environment where people can share knowledge and skills. The big questions
is how you share revenue and handle management.

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thoughtTinkerer
I've been thinking about something like this for a while. What I picture is
something like elance or rentacoder with a mix of sourceforge (or the like).

Projects could advertise for members, and use the site for hosting the source,
bug tracking, wiki, etc. Plus, the site could, if it were a commercial
product, act as a payment processor and distribute collected funds according
to some set of percentages or rules.

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thoughtTinkerer
It looks like some software projects are getting kickstarter.com funding.
Interesting idea.

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jules
How are you going to determine who gets how much?

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bigohms
Programmatically. License an open source formula based on the value of
short/long contributions against a revenue / equity model.

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jules
Do you mean based on number of lines of code?!

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jules
Why is this downvoted? "License an open source _formula_ based on the value of
_short/long_ contributions" sounds like LOC to me. Dividing income fairly is
the core issue. Solve that and the rest is easy. The problem is that this is
very hard.

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stuaxo
I forget who it was, but there was a car factory that worked like this:

Groups no larger than 6, reporting to higher groups of 6, up to how many
levels you need.

Within the groups of 6, they work out themselves who gets paid what,
completely transparently.

The amount everyone gets paid is posted publicly. It worked, because people
set the rates fairly in the groups.

If your going to do something slightly anarchistic like be by developers for
developers you might as well go the whole hog.

Oh, also make sure the whole organisation isn't bigger than 150 at any time -
staying within the dunbar number seems like a great idea.

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woid
Here is the receipt: 1\. be awesome 2\. start a company 3\. make that company
successful 4\. morph the company to play these rules

And report back.

