Unless they are given meaningful equity, it's not their ship, and regardless of whether it is or isn't, unlike the shareholders and creditors, they won't be sinking with it.
If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.
People get invested in their work. And there are a lot of software people who make their work part of their identity, and so when they are accused of doing bad work they take is as a personal attack.
Getting invested doesn’t mean your interests align. What’s best for your or the product can be different than what’s good for your boss, your company, your customers, or your teammates.
I used to document things in a way that would quickly get people up to speed, but was generally useless to current team members. Very useful if you where new or hadn’t touched the project in 3+ years, but no so helpful if you’ve been working on it for the last few months.
Don’t you have the same problem illustrated by this author? My perspective is the “untapped” people get diminished rewards for their inputs because they are being outplayed by politicos who inflate their importance to the process at the expense of others. For some people it is less work to make the system unfair than to excel on a fair system.
I agree that this structure has incentive problems and have so far avoided it. That said, I think it does better than a co-op. This fits the saying "the opposite of stupid is not smart". Standard corporations [frequently] used to serve only owners have a problematic incentive structure for everyone else. A co-op that serves only employees has a different bad incentive structure. Of course there are instances of improvements over the base incentive. The FairShares Commons attempts to be explicit about the balance between the stakeholders of the corporation. You can read more on Boyd's site [0] but really chapters 15 and 16 of his book Rebuild that seems to be linked there.
I'm sorry that I don't have a good index or personal awareness to share. Boyd's book linked in a peer response is a source but otherwise I can only offer that B-Corps [0] or Benefit Corps are the formally/legally recognized entry into space. A structure like the FairShares Common is a sophistication, based on the articles of incorporation above and beyond establishing legal obligations to a purpose (as is part of B-Corp incorporation). It is, itself, based on the FairShares [1] and Commons ideas [2].
