[arximboldi]

I felt similarly often, even though I was working for a great company with great products and with a very humane way of working. At some point I just could not stand the worker-owner fundamental power imbalance. There is a lot of pretending in our industry that this conflict does not exist, which often ends up in quite schizophrenic logic. I had to go. And Since I don't want to inflict such pain in other people, become the typical entrepreneur (i.e. a capitalist) was not an option either.

My solution for now is to freelance and consulting. It comes with a hole different set of contradictions, but it is a good learning experience and great way to experiment and explore what you want to do. It also buys me time to do open-source and research, but it requires more self-motivation.

My long-term dream is to start a worker-owned coop with other people in the future.

[gremlinsinc]

You sound a lot like me...I'm a laravel/vue dev if you want to join forces let me know. Email : [e-mail]

I think if we could get 2-3 devs, a designer, and a marketing person to join the team we could start filling our pipeline and build a pretty cool worker-coop.

My vision would reward first in more, but give everyone coming in - even non-technical people a stake in the company with stock and what not. I think the lowest income in a company should be at least $70k -- that's the current number it takes for someone to feel 'happy'... about their position in life and presumably live comfortable.

I admire companies like Winco where some cashiers who started back in 1990's are worth millions because of ESO plans.

My dream would be helping clients with full biz-dev from idea to validation to mockups to development to SEO/Marketing and growing the user base. It would be cool if we worked in some equity as well, say 5% equity for a lower cost of development, but if we helped build a unicorn all employees would split the windfall.

[WaxProlix]

I think I feel very similarly to you in a lot of ways. How did you get started? How do you see a consulting co-operative working? I'd be interested in hearing about your approach, what's worked and what hasn't, etc.

[arximboldi]

Hey! To you and Amiuba. I did get started into freelancing slowly. I had money saved when I quit my job and I took things slowly. I don't use freelancing websites. For marketing I use conferences, user-conferences and open-source. I am still in a good relationship with my last employer and I do freelance work for them too.

Wrt the coop, one of my motivations is this Spanish open-source coop which has been running for quite a while and does excellent work: https://www.igalia.com/

When doing research on the topic I found this document you may find interesting too "Technology freelancer's guide to starting worker cooperative": https://www.techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers...

[bigmanwalter]

Hey, I'm a freelance developer based in Montreal, Canada who is also incredibly interested in building out a freelancer/webdev co-op. Would love to hear more about your ideas and what direction you're interested in taking it :)

Also, any tips on how to find clients at conferences? I've been to a few but never seem to meet anyone who's actually searching for a vendor.

Most of my clients have come through my extended friends/family network.

Happy to keep this discussion on HN so that others get benefit from it, but if you want to take it private my email is [e-mail]

[CorporateTypist]

Wonderful idea, I'm in MTL too. Sounds like an idea for a slack channel.

[arximboldi]

Hi Eric!

W.r.t. the co-op, at the moment my ideas (or fantasies) are more about organizational stuff than the content (what we would work on). I am just gathering ideas, learning and keeping my eyes open waiting for all this to crystalize...

My motivation is to be able to work with other people in a democratic and (internally) non-capitalistic way. You are still playing in the market so there are lots of contradictions that you would have to assume, but I think there is a lot of progress one can make nontheless. For me Igalia, as I mentioned, is a source of inspiration because they have been going for quite a while and they are about ~50 people now and have a good business. They are also very democratic and flat (e.g. everyone has equal pay, something shocking but with very good rationale). They also do excellent technical work---for example, they have been the ones implementing a lot of ES6 features inside V8 and SpiderMonkey. If you want to read about them, Andy Wingo (the person I know from there) has 3-post series on the topic here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master

On a more political side, recently I read the Telekommunisten manifesto which also touches on cooperative models as a way to do social change for real: http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/

In my student times I was very much into activism, but since I started working I stopped "having time" for it. I was also burned out from the energy and emotional sink that activism can be. I've realized with time that the workplace though has not managed to make me more conservative, if anything, it has made me more concerned about the issues of exploitation and alienation---even in "well-off" industries where workers often feel privileged just because of the (relatively) high salaries. My current thinking is that separating work and politics is one of the things that leads to activism and work burn-out and that, if anything, I should use the privilege of being an engineer to try build a democratic workspace for myself and hopefully others too. In the best scenario it could be an example and do some little good for the world, in the worst case I would have tried and learnt something about how the world works.

W.r.t. finding clients at conferences, I am really no expert, I have actually been freelancing less time than you :-) I don't consider myself an extrovert. What has worked for me so far is doing talks about open-source projects. Last summer, for example, I worked with a client that just watched the video of one of my talks and contacted me. Last week I talked with a new potential client that just some comment on Hackernews where I talked about some of that work. Doing open-source work and talking about it is very time-consuming, so it is not a silver-bullet for sure, but something worth trying if that scratches some itch of yours.

I still feel that I have lots to learn and am making lots of mistakes, but I guess this takes time... :-)

[bigmanwalter]

Thanks for the links!

I'm at a similar stage of gathering ideas. It seems that as software developers, we're at a unique point in history where an individual owning their own means of industrial-grade production is a possibility thanks to free software.

I come from a different angle as I was incredibly Liberal throughout my student years. But the working world shattered any illusions I had about achieving self-fulfillment as your typical software engineer.

You might be intrested in looking into Enspiral. They are a huge tech cooperative (~40 core members + ~100 associates) running out of New Zealand https://enspiral.com/ with some great ideas. They started out of individual freelancers grouping together to form an insurance fund and smooth out their incomes between contracts.

I've been thinking lately about how to initially build up a group's reputation and client pipeline. If you start with too many members without their own clients then I am not sure it would be sustainable. You could have initial capital investments from each member, but I'm less comfortable with that idea right now.

As for presenting, from time to time I will give web development workshops. I agree that presenting requires a disproportionate amount of time and energy but I find that it spices up my workload very nicely :)

[amiuba]

Thanks for the input. Like WaxProlix, I'd be very interested to hear more. How to shift to freelancing (fiver/elance/whatever it's called today doesn't seem too good), and how does a co-op work in practice?

[bigmanwalter]

Not the OP but I made a similar transition a couple years ago.

I'm currently a software freelancer consultant working out of Montreal and also very interested in co-ops. The main idea behind co-ops and workplace democracy is that you can't force anyone to do anything, and every decision made should be fair for everyone involved. You can't have a co-op if anyone involved has an overly capitalistic/individualistic mindset. Likewise, in order for the group to not need excessive hierarchy, members need to be open to constructive criticism and must be devoted to doing what's best for the group as a whole even if it is bad for any one individual.

Now, at the moment, I'm an individual freelancer who occasionally hires subcontractors but I do my best to treat them better than any boss has ever treated me. I always pay above market rate for labour, and if someone's skill level is similar to mine I will happily give them the full hourly rate that I am charging out. I see this as a great foundation for building out towards a co-op.

The main issue for starting a co-op, beyond finding interested and committed people, is finding contracts to feed it. It has taken me almost 3 years to get my pipeline to a sustainable level. My understanding is that 3 years is the standard for virtually any small business, from retail to restaurants to a dentist's office, so that was encouraging.

You're right that online freelancing marketplaces are a trap. There's no good work to be found there. You have to build your network so that next time someone with a project and a budget is looking for a vendor, your name is at the top of their list. Any client who frequently buys software development services likely already has a preferred vendor, so you're going to have to fight for what's left: clients who buy software infrequently. And by their very nature, it's a purely numbers/waiting game. Another great type of client to find are those who are fed up with their current vendor. Given how expensive and generally low quality software developed at agencies tends to be, you would think it would happen more frequently but it seems most clients are unable to differentiate low quality software from high quality software.

But first, to even be considered for the contract, you need to have a decent portfolio. Nobody with a serious budget is going to risk it on someone who has never delivered a project from start to finish. This creates a Catch-22. Your best bet is to go after undesirable contracts (generally those with too-small budgets), and over deliver so that you can create portfolio-worthy pieces. At the same time, you should be building up a project template so that you can be more efficient and compete better.

It's been much harder to build up my pipeline than I had anticipated when I first set out to freelance, but the needle is moving in the right direction and I continue to be optimistic. Every year has been significantly better than the previous one! Not only that, I can confirm that I no longer feel the despair and dread from when I worked in an open-office farm with those horrific fluorescent lights. It's been replaced with its own problems, but I am far happier with my new demons.

I'm definitely interested in meeting more like minded people as well as discussing possible avenues for cooperating. We can continue here or feel free to email me at [e-mail] if you like :)