[zozbot234]

Co-ops and partnerships work very well for low capital intensity businesses, and coding is a low capital-intensity business in this day and age. It makes total sense that people are interested in such arrangements, it's not just a matter of wishful thinking.

[leethaxor]

I don't understand... I work as a software contractor in EU. I don't see a single thing I'm missing by not being in a coop. 5% of my income is a lot of money. For that money I can buy all the accounting and tax advisory services I need with enough money left over to get a Wework All Access membership and even then I'd have a significant portion of the 5% left. Why does it make total sense that people are interested?

[nanomonkey]

I would assume that the benefits are in having coworkers that fill in the gaps in your own business skills. For example: finding clients, invoicing, server maintenance, customer service, training, documentation, implementation consultants. There are a variety of job skills that one person will not have or want to contribute 100% of the time that are valuable jobs for junior or more senior coworkers.

If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on. If they are a part of your cooperative then it comes out of the businesses own funds pretax. There are also incentives to share in other resources, such as buildings, child care and other invisible labor that we normally place little value on.

Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.

Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.

[leethaxor]

> finding clients, invoicing, server maintenance, customer service, training, documentation, implementation consultants

Clients find me, not the other way around. Documentation and implementation are my own lines of work.

I have an accountant, tax advisor and lawyer as subscriptions. I also have a coworking pass. These cost me about 1.5% of my annual income.

Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.

> If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on.

No. As a contractor, all of the above are my business expenses (also including conference passes, trainings/certifications, driving to/from the client, all my hardware I use to work etc). Companies and contractors pay tax on profit, not turnover.

> Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.

Yeah indeed there's a coop like that where I live. They pay like half of what I make to their top guys (I myself am not a top guy; they offered me even less). Not encouraging.

> Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.

I have this at the coworking space - and we don't share any money so there's no chance of any bad feelings whatsoever. I have very bad experience with that, it ends friendships.

[therealdrag0]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m not familiar with the space but I wonder if it’s just a matter of elite-ness. Hypothesis: The top 1 or 10 percent of a field are better off in their own, whereas the rest benefit from collective benefits. Another example that comes to mind is Matt Yglesias leaving Vox. He was well paid at Vox but now on his own I’m sure he’s even higher paid and has more freedom etc. I donno just speculating.

[nanomonkey]

>Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.

No one said anything about training for free. This was an example of work that needs to be done for a client that you may not want to do yourself. A junior level member of your coop could travel to the client's site and train them on how to use your software, learn from the experience and make valuable ties, while you stay at home and work on more appropriate tasks.

[leethaxor]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. Sorry I misunderstood. This is not really something applicable to my line of work (standard software development tasks on a larger project in an agile team managed by the client) but I can imagine some of my friends doing this.

[kybernetyk]

>Why does it make total sense that people are interested?

Because that way you can finance a bunch of useless moochers who "administer your coop". Smells like typical rent seeking.

[yogthos]

If you're worried about rent seeking wait till you find out how a traditional business works. The owner of the company takes all the profit, and then pays out a small portion of that profit to the workers doing the work in form of wages.

On the other hand, in a coop the profit is shared fairly amongst the people actually doing the work. It's frankly incredibly that somebody thinks this is a worse model of compensation.

[cercatrova]

The labor theory of value has basically never been shown to work, while the subjective theory of value, however many its flaws, has been shown to work and bring us the world we see today.

[zozbot234]

The labor theory of value is approximately true when capital intensity is low, however.

[leethaxor]

It's never true. It's like a broken clock - it's right 2 times a day. When the conditions are exactly correct, it seems like the labor theory of value is true - but it's not. Consider a simple example - food production. Nothing changes about the labor necessary to produce it but that doesn't mean you won't have to sell your produce way under price (or let it rot) if you and other farmers make too much of it.

[cercatrova]

True, in a commune or something like that, it does work. I think though once we hit Dunbar's number, then it breaks down and we need a subjective value based market.

[yogthos]

Yeah, subjective theory of value brought us the world where a handful of individuals have more wealth than over half the world population, while the rest live in shit.

[cercatrova]

Industrialization via the profit motive has been the single greatest lever of increasing humanity's quality of life.

The people who say that the rest live in shit in my experience have never been to a third world country and actually lived there. If they did, they'd realize just how shit the first world is.

As long as we have scarcity of goods that must be distributed somehow, communism only works in theory, not in practice.

Edit: Ah, I see, so you're a tankie who grew up in the USSR yet still supports them. Thanks, I have no need to speak to you further.

[kybernetyk]

Your communism is showing.

[yogthos]

And proud of it.