Guild/Studio structure for Software Engineers?

I joined a mailing list recently that discusses tech coops: https://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coop Some interesting discussion.

I found a repo with a lot of information and companies here: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

It's really unclear to me how you would go about joining an existing studio like this. At least in North America, there are so few, I think the answer is to start one yourself.

My org has an Engineering Guild that I am a "leader" of [in the sense that I just organize calendars and "officiate" the call, it's completely flat otherwise]-the guild itself doesn't make up the company, but rather just exists as a small little "coven" within the larger enterprise, there's about 12 of us, though we don't publish anything out publicly for other teams to emulate. Probably not a bad idea now that you bring it up. We've written code for things that went to local non-profits, and written code that became a fully-funded line of business for the company as a service offering (but wasn't-at the time-part of any scoped or planned work, just an idea one of our SREs had to improve an existing business product, built it, deployed it, showed it to the executives).

What would you like to know?

I’ve often thought of the idea of a “town programmer” that could solve problems for businesses/people in the town. It feels like the biggest problem with that is people don’t know what a generalist programmer can do. I think just setting up Shopify instances and inventory/online ordering systems would be a good use case.

I suspect what we are missing is has to do with IP ownership. To greatly simplify, guilds had a straightforward way of handling the IP of the trade or craft -- it was secret and you couldn't tell outsiders anything and every tradesman was committed to a considerable term of service (decades) dedicated to the trade. Trades were fairly closed communities. You couldn't steal the IP, the IP you generated couldn't be stolen from you.

We have greater freedom in our lives today and lack the institution of bondage to the company/craft (remember that a guild effectively represented both things). It might be that trusts are an effective way to reintroduce meaningful ownership. Any IP a developer generates, they retain a certain residual interest in and right to; but it is administered by the guild (a trust management company) and on favorable terms since it is assumed to be the result of use of other IP managed by the guild.

Motion Twin is the classic example in the games space http://motion-twin.com/en/

They shipped Dead Cells, which is rated as "Overwhelmingly Positive" "96% of 50,435 reviews" on steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/

The HaXe programming language originally came out of Motion Twin, although Nicolas Cannasse has since left to do his own thing.

I don't know of a company doing this, but a group of awesome developers does this in the GraphQL + TypeScript Open Source Libraries space with great success (As in useful libs, I don't know how they do economically but prob great or fine!)

It's actually called the-guild.dev, they just don't promote much I think.

They're the creators of GraphQL Modules, graphql-tools, graphql-code-generator etc...

I'm also a small contributor to an Authentication/User management library called AccountsJS https://www.accountsjs.com/ (Which uses gql-modules) under the hood, and the-guild members are active contributors too (although not exclusively)

I would love to some day become a good enough developer to be part of that team/org/guild!

Motion Twin are a worker's co-op in France that have worked like this for the past 20 years. They are back down to 6 people now but had been a bit bigger until recently when a group spun off to make a more commercial structure to support their big game. http://motion-twin.com/en/

Seems like Igalia might fit that description

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia

Where would you draw the line between Guild and contractors? I once worked with an extremely talented closeknit small contract company in Canada. When offered jobs at my company, they basically laughed and said they are well compensated. So not generally what you think of when you hear 'outsourced contractors.'

No good examples, but I want to start one of these myself. The hard part is finding team members who are in sync w/ the concept, though I consider it more like a unified worker-coop-style agency. Than a 'guild'.

if you need a partner hit me up : patrickwcurl - gmail. I'm a laravel / vue / inertia / livewire / alpinejs dev mostly.

Holacracy might work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

Seems like the challenge is that software is rarely and end goal in itself. Either it's for end users and needs design, marketing, etc or it's for businesses and needs sales people, account management, etc.

I'd love to see someone find a way to make it work, though.

Some useful links, I hope

https://agaric.coop/show-and-tell https://community.coops.tech/ https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://patio.ica.coop/ https://facttic.org.ar/

We've started a co-op like this to build cross platform spatial web apps (MMOs, metaverses, online virtual storefronts, etc). The project is MIT licensed but we're going after big contracts, especially trying to fill voids in the events and retail space. While things are being developed, everyone is living on a bit of runway contributed by one of the partners to make the project a reality.

If you're interested, code is here: https://github.com/xr3ngine/xr3ngine

Happy to discuss more about structure on Discord or w/e

I've really wanted to be a part of a tech co-op, and I wish more existed. There are several in most major cities that I've found, but they tend to spin up and down after a while, so I'm not sure what's current.

Different from co-ops, but a lot of small funds (micro-VCs, etc.) have this kind of structure to help their portfolio companies - I actually interviewed at one earlier this summer. There are also similar places like Betaworks (https://betaworks.com). A small few operate as a true collective, but there aren't many.

This article I read recently talks a bit about some of these less-traditional setups: https://www.instapaper.com/read/1341389477

It can be difficult to do the guild structure in such a small organization. Not impossible but difficult, as many different people tend to play a diverse set of roles.

At least, that's how it's been in my career. Prove me wrong!

Edit: here's a classic from Spotify, which is much larger but potentially relevant: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal...

I'm not sure what you mean by Guild, but for tech co-ops mainly in the UK try https://www.coops.tech/

Wix employs guild structure for all it's teams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpeY_jahjI

Plausible Labs has always been one I've looked up to: https://plausible.coop/about

I saw Andrés Angelani of Cognizant Softvision speak about the model employeed there. There's guilds, which are centered around professional skills. And then pods, which are teams of blended skills to get projects done.

https://www.cognizantsoftvision.com/our-approach/

Tech co-ops

https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Valve uses a holacracy. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

I know of some highly profitable software businesses that operate like law firms with partners. Think along the lines of gambling and similar “on the edge” industries that won’t receive VC for what they do.

I can't name names, but if you look at some of the security/exploit dev shops, a lot of them have this structure. Small number of engineers, lots of internal tooling, and good money

Igalia are a co-operative of engineers and others working on Free Software & Open Source projects:

https://www.igalia.com/

I don't know the inner working of them but seems to match http://motion-twin.com/en/team

My, now decommissioned, Microsoft branch tried to move to the Spotify model.

Many of us worked on internal products, but never got to a level of flat partnership structure.

Does Latacora count? Though I don’t know how big they are at the moment. https://latacora.com/

Poptel in the UK was a worker COOP that was about 45-50 ISP / Web

Might be worth looking at "programmer anarchy."

What is going on?