Opinions about work in a hypothetical company

[I D Shukhov]

Imagine yourself having the opportunity to work in a 5-8 person IT shop.  In your interview you get the chance to chat with several team members individually.   You like their personalities and could imagine enjoying working with them.  From all appearances, the shop has a cooperative culture and is relatively game-free.   There is a wiki that describes most of the processes used in the shop and everyone actively updates it. 

There are no managers.   Everyone is paid about the same as is stated by company policy.  Your salary would be $80K with generous health and retirement benefits and equity in the company as an owner-employee.  The work week is 40 hours and overtime is culturally opposed to because the employee-owned company believes that the members' private lives should be in balance with their work lives. 

The domain that this company works in is growing:   health care or educational services, and appears to have great prospects in their niche.  The work is Enterprise or Web Software Development using some technology that you are not familiar with:  say JBoss or the PHP Zend framework. 

The company has no HR department.  You get an offer letter from one of the people in the IT shop that says they think you'd be a great match.

[Walter Mitty]

I wouldn't go to work in such an environment.  5-8 people is too many not to have any formal power structure.  If there is no formal power structure, an informal power structure will grow up.  The problem with an informal power structure is that there is no accountability and no checks and balances.  It's purely a matter of personality and influence. 

You say the culture is relatively game-free.  I don't think you can learn that with any degree of certainty without being in the culture for a few months.  People being what they are,  I expect the games to begin when the stress goes up.

On the other hand, the best programming project I ever worked on was with a team of four other programmers, designing and building a new programming language.  Each of us had a specialized piece of the code, but we all had veto power over system wide design decisions.  But we didn't have to run payroll, or keep sales going.  This was sponsored research, paid by the taxpayers.  And we took our work product to the larger group and its managers at the end of about three months.

[John Masterson]

It sounds like heaven, but it hand-waves away the fundamental challenge: thwarting human nature.

This business lives or dies based upon hiring only the top 10-20% in maturity, altruism, cooperation, and job skill. I submit that you cannot consistently find that level of ability in all those areas. Eventually you will have to hire normal people, and then the problems begin.

I tend to agree with Walter here. An informal power structure will form. There will be games, because that's human nature.

Nobody is perfect.

[David Randolph]

Sounds nice, how do I take over?

[I D Shukhov]

Sounds nice, how do I take over?

How would you take over?  Company policy is that everyone is paid the same and they don't have any managers in the IT department.

[pxsant]

What is the ownership split?   Are some employees more equal than others?   That will determine the distribution or assumption of power in the group.

[David Randolph]

How would you take over?  Company policy is that everyone is paid the same and they don't have any managers in the IT department.

One of the interesting lessons I learned when being secretary of the church council was that in an "equals" situation, often the person who is most organized will become the unofficial leader of the group. If this team is a portion of a company, then the team will be reporting to someone. Whoever volunteers to organize the team status and present it to that someone will, over time, become the leader for the team. I watched someone do that to become the official leader of a programming group. Organization and discipline will trump ideology (see French Revolution for example).

[I D Shukhov]

What is the ownership split?   Are some employees more equal than others?   That will determine the distribution or assumption of power in the group.

The ownership split is that people are issued shares each year equally based on the increased value of the company.  So, in the beginning nobody owns anything because the company has no value.   Each year the company is valued somehow and if the value increases the increased value is distributed as shares.   If the the value decreases, shares are forfeited.  The total number of shares = the value of the company.

All departments: research and marketing, customer service and anything else that does the work of the company are treated as profit centers.  Hiring and firing is done by  each department.   All employees are paid the same just like blood is distributed to each part of the body without regard for importance.

An administrative council, based on a couple of members from each department, makes strategic decisions.  All issues are discussed and documented in a wiki.  The position of council representative has no power, because it simply represents the voice of the department in the administration council.  Council member terms are limited and each person in a department is expected to rotate through this position as an extra responsibility.

[The Gorn]

My own take:

I voted the "willing but skeptical" (15 hr./week of self study) option. But I just took the initial statement at face value.

I think this entire hypothetical scenario is extremely implausible for one simple reason: you are assuming that everything - compensation, incentives, and the value and input of individual employees - are all in perfect, ongoing balance.  I have never worked anywhere where a very few people did not rise  and a lot more people sank or gravitated toward the mean or median.

In other words, all "monocracies" are inherently unstable.

Don't get me wrong, I like your hypothetical concept. If it could be realized it would eliminate a lot of the sources of stress and bad feelings in a business environment.

But the absence of operating examples of this structure in real life points to its improbability. Some people want to coast, a few drag the company down, and the few top producers always seem to want a big score and to be perpetually moving on.

[I D Shukhov]

I have never worked anywhere where a very few people did not rise  and a lot more people sank or gravitated toward the mean or median.

The star performers may decide to move on, although I often see star performers who don't move on.  They may like the work, like being a star performer, like who they are working with,  maybe they are biding their time for a promotion.  I really don't know.

Underachievers usually seem to have a kind of attitude problem like an inferiority complex, hostility towards some form of "they", or it could be they don't have very good problem solving skills or are burned out.   This environment may be remedial,  may in fact bring out the best in people,  but if it doesn't help somebody to perform within an acceptable range, they'd have to go.  A business can't be a halfway house.

But the absence of operating examples of this structure in real life points to its improbability.

I really like this point.   Real-world examples *should* exist, and if they don't one has to wonder why.   Of course the fact that we aren't aware of any examples doesn't mean they don't exist.

[Walter Mitty]

Whenever this conversation comes around,  I always have to ask about Avis rent-a-car. 

I don't know all that much about Avis, but here's what I remember.  The managment tried to sell it off, and failed.  Their next move was to decide to close it.  But first they gave the employees the chance to buy up the company.  To everyone's surprise, that's how it turned out.  The employees bought the ocmpany.

I don't know where it went from there.  Was it run "democratically"?  Did the employees hire "professional managers" to run things?  Did it revert to investor owned?  It has to be a classic case study in the alternatives to the corporate model.

[DarkHumour]

I really like this point.   Real-world examples *should* exist, and if they don't one has to wonder why.   Of course the fact that we aren't aware of any examples doesn't mean they don't exist.

Their products were bought by a larger company and they retired on the buyout.  Gone.

Their products were copied/patent-trolled by a larger company and the smaller company couldn't defend themselves in court. Gone.

The best software/widget/invention of it's type was made but marketing it failed.  Gone.

And many more I'm sure...

It's like one of my favorite quotes. "It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

DarkHumour

[Carrie Cobol]

One of the interesting lessons I learned when being secretary of the church council was that in an "equals" situation, often the person who is most organized will become the unofficial leader of the group.

And many times the person with the strongest personality will become the unofficial leader.  This tends not to be a good thing.  A strong personality isn't the same as smarter or more organized or has better ideas.  Only that they can throw their weight around better.

[Walter Mitty]

One of the interesting lessons I learned when being secretary of the church council was that in an "equals" situation, often the person who is most organized will become the unofficial leader of the group.

And many times the person with the strongest personality will become the unofficial leader.  This tends not to be a good thing.  A strong personality isn't the same as smarter or more organized or has better ideas.  Only that they can throw their weight around better.

Exactly.  I was once part of a church that had no official leadership.  That's when I began to respect the role of leader a little more.  Not necessarily respect for the people who occupy that role, but rather respect for the role itself. 

[choppedwood]

The situation, as described, has lots of good things: sane hours, sane people and more than enough pay to live on (80K is a long way above the median income for families in any state).  I spent several years in a situation that had some of that and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.  Especially, since I've been through the other side of it, and ironically, at the same place.  I worked in a small group, had ownership of what I did, and my manager asked me to do something specific about once/month.  As long as I kept finding things to do, and I didn't go too far off the beaten path, we were good.  That wouldn't work with everyone, but, with the right group it could and did work for the most part. 

It's interesting that some immediately go to why it can't work.  I have no doubt there would be pain, problems and other issues, but if you had the right people, in the right places, you'd have a shot at it.  Growth would probably be your biggest enemy because you'd have to resist it (or raise prices) or risk diluting the situation.

Hard at times but well worth it if you pulled it off.