[simongr3dal]

I like to imagine it as a sort of volume vs surface area problem.

The amount of service you can deliver to costumers is your surface area, but the amount of work you put in only contributes to the volume.

As the number of employees grow you will necessarily be less efficient, but there aren’t really any other great ways to gain the required surface area.

[wahnfrieden]

there are perhaps interesting options with bringing in partner-level labor instead of buying someone's time-in-seat and the relative personal investment involved in each

the big point glossed over is that wage labor, where the value they produce is taken from them, isn't a great incentive for great work. that's imo a far bigger issue than fundamental challenges with collaborating, and why so many managers need to continuously trick their employees into productivity

[harrylu]

I have been thinking about _how_ to build good (and stable) software a lot in last 10 years. Tried many approaches and verified them one by one. In my experience this is the ultimate fix. It may not work for big tech companies, but for most projects, it is much better to choose this approach.

Collaborative efforts to maximize good results, and predictable gains for each participators.

[wahnfrieden]

Thanks for sharing your experience, I feel like this is not very well resourced territory for our industry

Btw you may find Graber/Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything to be an inspiration for how these sort of structures could scale up to larger groups of people than conventionally thought historically possible

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

What's the ultimate fix?

[wahnfrieden]

tbh this is a big weakness of the left (in terms of its marketing at least) that I'm trying to understand better. one idea is that whatever solutions we conceive of now, are constrained within the understanding we've gained living under capitalism/state power etc., and that we need to dismantle the current system incl exploitation/keeping the majority of peoples time/energy locked up in wage labor/systemic lack of freedom to disobey an order or to freely relocate/etc, before we can explore a wider range of solutions. But I get how this is unsatisfying, sounds like it leaves a vacuum for bad/regressive solutions to come in, but this is something I'm only starting to learn about.

That's why I appreciated the new Graeber/Wengrow, it finds a wealth of prev overlooked ways that humans have lived, post discovery of agriculture, in large societies and with greater freedoms and prosperity defined in new ways besides within the terms of economics. This gives me optimism that capitalism/states aren't necessary or inevitable and that we might be stuck on this shitty plateau having convinced ourselves it's the only realistic one