Slashdot Mirror
Toward the Open Company
Arto Stimms writes "The author of the e text editor is using the principles of open source to transform his company into an Open Company. Not only is he releasing the source, the company itself becomes totally open: no concept of bosses or employees. Anyone can join in at any time, doing whatever task they find interesting, for whatever time they find appropriate. This is in service of the idea of 'the real freedom zero': the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on."
...a policy where no person could make more than seven times as much money as any other person in the company.
Imagine two goods, good A and good B, that are sold on the open market. Good A sells for a price that is eight times greater than good B. Person A was able to produce good A in one day, and person B was able to produce good B in one day. So, on the open market, person A makes eight times more money than person B in the same period of time. That means consumers have judged person A to be eight times more productive than person B, even if person B worked much harder!
So, if person A and person B happen to be working for the same company, why shouldn't their boss pay person A eight times more than person B? Why should their boss come up with some arbitrary limit?
The guy doing this determines the operating expenses, including (I'd assume) their own salary. If it's really as open as they claim, all the accounting will be public, too. So anyone who wants to do some work can see how much the company is spending on those operating expenses, and the (ongoing) income statements. If they accept it as reasonable, they can do the work, or they can just not do the work.
This principle could work. It's like a cooperative company, "employee owned", but without employees owning shares in the corporation getting dividends of the profits (income - expenses), just a direct share. Eliminating the shareholding eliminates control, but it also makes coming and going as a "profitholder" much easier.
Of course the real problem is the "trust metric". It's a popularity rating, set by members of the group on anyone else who joins the group. Joining requires only contributing code. There's going to be a fair amount of (paid) work by group members reviewing the code to decide trust, but that's a necessary part of software quality anyway.
The real problem is for people who contribute code (or review, or other work) who aren't rewarded with trust metrics by others in the group, perhaps because of a bias by some against others because of the type of work. If some people contribute only code, and others contribute only review, that might lead to a "class war" where one group discounts the value of the other, regardless of the (only guessable) "real" value of each kind of work to the profits being divided up. If more people review than code, even if that's not necessary, and the reviwers all have a bias in rewarding each other's work more than they reward coders, an coders don't have a bigger bias against reviewers to compensate for their smaller numbers, then reviewers will get a higher rate of reward than coders. Which could prevent any coders from contributing. Or the sizes/biases could be reversed, and reviewers could get shorted enough that no one reviews.
I think this project goes too far all at once. If this system were familiar across our large Internet development population through its exercise within closed groups, with more permanent membership, perhaps assigned traditionally by a boss who hires, it's less likely to be torn apart by people who don't understand they're working against their own best interests. Then, once it's understood to be workable by people who understand their best interests, and not just an easy target for losers looking to game a system they merely clumsily destroy, maybe the transition from co-op to open co-op would work.
Does anyone know of any successful closed co-ops running like this one, but centrally hired, fired and assigned shares of the profits?
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make install -not war
If that were the case, the company should seriously think about producing more of good A and less of good B.
I get that it's a hypothetical, but it's not realistic. You're trying to force a choice when that choice doesn't really need to be made... There are other options.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
So basically, executives?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Imagine two goods, good A and good B, that are sold on the open market...
I've been through the economic allegories hundreds of times before. All of us on Slashdot have. I've read the Wikipedia summary of Atlas Shrugged (sorry, I'm not reading it, too high of an opportunity cost), and have been through several semesters of college economics, accounting, and finance.
I look around today and say to myself, I could run GM, Lehman Brothers, and AIG, into the ground just as well as anybody. Why shouldn't I get paid the big bucks like those guys? The fact is, they aren't worth what they get paid. There is some sort of flaw in that logic. If Ayn Rand was right, engineers would make more money than CEOs.
Seven times the minimum salary isn't an "arbitrary limit", the owner of the company I mentioned spent quite a bit of time figuring out that amount. At the time I met the owner of that company he was making $350k and the janitor was making $50k. If the janitor wasn't worth $50k, he would fire him, it's that simple. He told me that the janitor was very good at his job, and had been working for him for many years.
Policies like that encourage people to be conscientious about their work. It also reduces employee turnover, and hostility between the work force and the management. In the end, the company is more efficient because of it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I think the new buzzword for this is "crowdsourcing".
I was thinking more along the lines of "abandonware".
No longer interested in being the sole contributor to your yet-another-editor software project? Send out a press release touting it as a new paradigm in "Open management"!
Taking it farther, people would only wish to be producing good A, until the point where the market for good A drops in price down to where good B and good A have roughly the same margins.
Treating people as commodities, you have the present situation in north america. Everyone is in a pile on to be "a leader" (by which I mean CEO), to get the top dollar. Very few people want to be the scientists, engineers, accountants, factory workers, janitors, nurses, etc. required to fund that CEO because the wages are low(er). People choose career paths that will lead them there, which often neglect the company fundamentals.
Because of this problem, we have a shortage of the types of labor we want, but to avoid the unpleasant solution (amongst decision-makers) of paying higher wages based on need, we have are providing an escape valve via globalization strategies. We can back fill exportable jobs via cheaper foreign labor by taking advantage of arbitrage. This further exacerbates the problem locally, by reinforcing the trend to CEO-type positions (and janitorial/nursing, should that prospect look dim).
In the long run, assuming no armed revolts, it will ultimately balance out. It's clear the time constant required for stability exceeds the lifetime of most of us here on slashdot. A better solution to achieve control sooner is to reduce the discrepancies in pay, and attempt to change our cultural values away from being "the" boss, to being a solid, reliable individual who is an expert in his chosen field.
We all know that if you have a company of 80k people, and the ceo goes from getting 100M in a year to 0 in a year, it won't make a huge impact to each employee if spread equally ($1.25k/yr), but it may make a huge impact in driving the labor market the way we need it to.
If CEOs are chosen based on the person with the best capability of leading organizations and making decisions, other factors removed, rather than the person who most wants to make a fortune... I think good things would happen to our labor market and our corporate governance.
This isn't quite a hippie commune mentality, wages will vary based on need and difficulty in producing qualified individuals. But it will be more stable than the rabid elitist method we currently use.
The question is how to produce this ideal when the people who have the money and/or authority who traditionally create and profit from a top-down model won't immediately benefit (or in fact would lose out). Since the investment for software projects is very low (particularly open source), it is interesting to see how ideas like these work and how they could be applied to other areas.