There are already groups that function this way, they are called consultants. If you are a high functioning team and want to keep working together, then form a consultancy together. You will probably get paid more over time.
The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well. You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back. You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a team nor as individuals.
It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount.
The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what they could bargain for individually.
Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain.
It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company.
If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy.
Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even more chaotic.
Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.
You are assuming that money is the motivation for people to get jobs. I'm an older developer, and I definitely have my favorites of past co-workers. We're all established enough financially that the extra stress and pain of consulting doesn't sound good to us. Same for doing a startup -- just not the lifestyle we are after. But being able to settle down, spend our working hours with people we have grown to love, whom we know work well together, working on a shared vision for a company, and staying there for years, watching our work have a positive influence on the world... that sounds pretty good.
It is a question of where your ambitions lie - if you have already accomplished your financial goals, already written software that is used worldwide, already done the startup thing, and still want to code instead of going the management or investor route... why would you not pursue something like this?
Admittedly, Stripe is a poor candidate for this... nothing against them as a company, but people in my situation tend to look for work that has meaning on a charitable level -- environmental, education, health care, or other such areas where we can really make a difference in the world would be appealing.
> The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well.
It mentions on the page "you’d all be free to accept or decline individually".
Yes this is a risky move by Stripe, but as they say, it's an experiment and i'm sure a lot of people would be interested to see how this pans out. Kudos to Stripe for taking the initiative to open this up.
> But the offer is made either to everyone, or to no one.
That is indeed what they say. But, say they interview a 5 person team, and really like 2 of them, but not the other 3. So, no offer is extended.
Now they are left with these two resumes of people that are just perfect. They know what those two people want for comp. Are they going to be disciplined enough to shred those two resumes right then and there? No discussion about "what if we wait a month or two, and...?"
> Are they going to be disciplined enough to shred those two resumes right then and there? No discussion about "what if we wait a month or two, and...?"
Yeah. This just sounds like a great way to get more people's resumes, and cheaper hires than consultants. Tech individuals move around after a few projects anyway so the only difference between full time and consultants is the pay.
I could see the strategy appealing to some people. But at the end of the day, once you're in the company, there's no guarantee they won't break you up unless that's in the contract. Further, you will be limited to working with certain people via that company. As a consultant you need to do more legwork but have more freedom. I guess this could be seen as middle ground.
I'd like to hear from more people who've actually tried joining a company as a team. I recall one blog post from someone who tried it a year ago. I think she said the whole group didn't actually get hired and in the end they didn't get to work together as they had set out to. But she was glad to have tried.
Ultimately, this is a whole new model for companies. Nobody has established a track record at doing it successfully and the early players could make or break some of their reputation based on how successful these teams are and whether or not they stick together. I think it is riskier for the company and the employees than they realize. The company is, in a sense, outsourcing their management by allowing people to form their own teams. That could be the missing piece of the pizzle in software development, or it could be a disaster. I look forward to hearing more.
> It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount.
This might or might not be a failure. The central cast of Friends legendarily all pulled very high salaries because they formed an informal 6-person labor union, a key principle of which was that everyone got the same pay.
It's not really the same thing as an acquihire. In an acquihire a company acquires another company and then chooses which employees to give job offers to. In many cases only a handful of top employees are actually hired, the rest are fired. Stripe is saying that it wants to try to hire whole teams.
I don't think this is the same thing. If you want to hire the vast majority of people, it may well be easier to acquire the company. What happens if the other company is much bigger than you though? Stripe would never be able to buy Google, Microsoft, Apple etc., but they could potentially hire a small internal team from them.
Acquihires don't necessarily involve the entire team. I've certainly heard of people who were on the wrong end of "We'd like to buy your company and offer jobs to n-1 of you."
It's an interesting point you mention regards Consultants. I've been operating as a strategic consultant for the last 2 years, but purely as a one-man band. At every step of the way, I've been constantly asked to assist with the implementation/execution as well (since I only focus on the planning element).
The thing is, I read a book called Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss, and he always stated that consultants don't ever do execution, that they only focus on the thinking/strategising side. I'm now starting to think that was a big mistake and that I should indeed form a team.
Any thoughts or suggestions in light of the above?
I'm a freelance consultant, and I charge for my time rather than per-project (except for very small well-defined projects), so I end up doing planning and execution for some clients. If someone is paying me by the hour/day, I'm happy to jump in wherever they want in the process -- I'll even make tea all day if required. :)
I don't think there's anything wrong with an individual choosing only to do strategy though, in the same way that I only choose to work with certain programming languages. I do think it's wrong to say that consultants should never do execution, unless you have a very narrow view of 'consultant'.
I do value pricing and for execution that was always difficult, but i've realised I can do value pricing on the actual strategising that I do, and just time based or project based on the execution my staff will do.
The "consultants don't do execution" mindset is extremely outdated and you're leaving a lot of money on the table if you follow that mantra (as well as giving those of us who do execution a bad name). Even McKinsey staffed up a large Digital & Services org because their strategy-only approach hit a wall. The only thing to look out for is to differentiate your team's billable time between strategy and execution and charge for each accordingly. Clients will often want strategic guidance at execution rates if you're not firm about it.
Check out goElevator.com we have already built a platform to allow teams to do this in a flexible way that allows them to avoid violating a non-solicit.
Starting up a consultancy is much more complicated for people with immigration issues. It might not be impossible, but I don't think anyone I know on an H1B would be eager to try to navigate U.S. immigration law without the support and legal resources of a stable company.
I've only rarely seen this sort of phenomenon with consultants. It's pretty tough to keep the pipeline full for individuals, much less skilled teams.
I can see the appeal of this sort of technique. Within the mega-org that I worked in, we'd always try to keep good teams at least partially intact as members got promoted or reassigned.
But that's the trick, when would employees of a mega-org leave as a group, even in small numbers? I can only see it happening in a layoff or after the shares vest from an acqui-hire. Neither scenario is a recipe for picking up a strong team.
Consultants who struggle to keep the pipeline full are, by definition, struggling. The small firms who have steady clients do tend to shed the "consultant" label pretty quickly, so I can see some selection bias. I've known plenty of firms that don't have a tough time keeping a steady stream of work. I've even worked in a few.
I think Stripe's bid will work because it will stay small. If it really caught on, the idea is deeply flawed. But for small teams, some of the time, it will work.
People hate bad and abusive unions. They're ok with it when they actually improve the collective's pay, healthcare, better hours, treatment from management personnel etc.
Probably because the team here would still be acting as an individual unit - this isn't a union for all workers that cuts across the entire industry and it's workforce.
If forming a team massively benefits the hirer, the bar of hiring will go down thusly, meaning that people being hired also get compensated indirectly.
No. Salaries are relatively inelastic while profit is wildly elastic.
Per engineer, Google, Facebook, Apple make multiple millions of dollars in profit per fiscal year and yet very, very few engineers make $1m+. Even $500k is out of reach of most non-managerial engineers.
So, no if Google made 2x or 4x the profit with the same engineers, they company would pay them the same exact rate if they could. Often times they do.
The only way to really gain serious income is ownership of a technology that you can sell either directly to the market or to another company.
No matter how much you make, as an employee you are always trading lower risk for lower or linear rewards. The company compensates you for your years of experience at a market rate but, retains the fullest share of the profits that they can. They also own the code of your labor after you leave the company so there's that. You work (especially as a developer) makes the company money even after you've left.
If code wasn't so complex and hard to maintain, there would be even lower salaries (compared to profits) at software-based companies.
To put it another way, the only way Google, Apple or Facebook pay an engineer $1M+ is either because of an accu-hire, to stop them from jumping ship to one of their competitors or to stop them from jumping ship to start a startup.
Brilliant programming that creates even billions of dollars of value for one of those companies isn't even going to net the engineer 1% of the value they create.
> I'd really love to see a contribution from a single brilliant programmer that generates a billion in profit.
While I am not answering your question directly, Jeff Dean and Shel Kaphan come to mind, in their key, fundamental roles of building massive scalable systems - information search and retail selling, respectively.
I have detected bugs that where costing several hundred thousands of pounds a week and back in the 80's I and the company accountant fixed a problem that ment we could collect over 3/4 million of uncollected direct debits.
The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well. You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back. You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a team nor as individuals.
It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount.
The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what they could bargain for individually.
Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain.
It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company.
If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy.
Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even more chaotic.
Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.