TL;DR: In my pursuit of the perfect job, I created Antropia, a cooperative software development studio focused on prototyping mobile apps, aligned with my vision on work.

Epigraph

I want to start this post by acknowledging this is not my classic tech-ish post where I talk about a problem, I solve it somehow, and I write the key takeaways. This post is personal, it’s raw, and it’s definitely not techy.

This post is all about how I envision my perfect job, my personal vision on the future of work in the tech industry and how I want to contribute to see this future change.

Disclaimer #1: This post is a reflection of my own experiences and thoughts. I reserve the right to change my opinion anytime I want; I always do, but because this is a personal bet, I want to keep it written here.

Disclaimer #2: There are some opinions in here that might touch a nerve depending on your personal experience. If you feel upset by something I say, I found reading the oatmeal’s comic on beliefs to be mind-opening.

First steps

I’ve been working for tech startups and agencies for the last 12-ish years.

My last job was at Harvest where I worked as a Security Engineer for 2 years. Yeah, Security, it doesn’t sound much like me, and in retrospect, I think picking a Security role was my unconscious way of surfacing my discomfort at the time, somehow. I left Harvest tired, angry, and confused. My main issue - and the reason I spent countless hours struggling with the most basic tasks - was that I was no longer able to feel anything but dread for my job. They call it burnout, I now prefer the term alienation.

I didn’t see it at the time, but I now know this period of time has been as crucial as it was painful. It led me to ask myself some of the most important questions, especially around work and life. This post is about the former, and I will leave the latter for a future writeup, if ever.

”What is work?”

During that time, and still today, I asked myself questions about work and all its derivatives like salary, working hours, work-life balance, ownership, and others. At first, these were general blurry questions, but eventually more sophisticated ones arose. As an example, I condensed here some of the questions I asked myself:

• What is work?
• What is meaningful work?
• What motivates work?
• What are the intrinsical motivators (e.g. satisfaction, pride, learning, etc.) and extrinsical motivators (e.g., validation, salary, promotions, etc). Which ones are effective and which ones aren’t? Why?
• Why are some of these motivators kept private (i.e., salary) while others are openly talked about? Why are we only allowed to talk about the ones that makes us look like better employees? — Not that it’s forbidden, but that is not well looked upon.
• What does risk mean?
• How is work compensated? How is risk compensated? Is it fair?
• How are shares distributed? Why often so unevenly?
• What is truly urgent in a tech job? Is there such a thing as artificial urgency?
• Why do we work the amount of time we work? Why 8 hours a day and 5 days a week? Why a fixed number of annual vacations?
• Why do we keep working long hours even if it’s been proven it often backfires, making us less efficient, less happy, and more frustrated?
• Why are different types of work (e.g., technical, managerial, tactical, strategic, etc) differently compensated? Does it have to do with employee replacement cost?
• Why do we keep splitting and silo’ing work? KPIs/OKRs ⇒ teams ⇒ projects ⇒ sprints ⇒ tasks; each with their separate owners.
• Why is work structured in such a way?
• Are there better ways to do any of this?

And many more… I can’t even start to describe you how deep the rabbit hole is. To make it worse, every time I opened a new door, all I got back were more questions and uncertainty. It didn’t help hearing from colleagues how discussing some of these (especially the ones related to working hours and compensation) made me look unprofessional; it made me feel truly awful, and it still hurts today.

Some of these topics might seem ill if you never faced them before, they sure sounded childish to me the first time I heard them out loud. I’m pretty sure that if anyone asked me about “working hours” 3 years ago I’d just say: It’s how the world works. But this would also be my (non) answer for the many things I take for granted to this day.

I realize now how powerful my day to day inertia is, and how that eventually turned me into a (life) spectator rather than a (life) actor. Breaking that loop - and truly asking yourself things you haven’t asked yourself in a very long time, if ever - is where I recently found meaning, with its pains and joys.

I recommend taking a pause here, reading some of these questions out loud and thinking about them, relying on first principles, let the automatic answers come and go, and then explore their true depth. It’s ok if your responses do not align with mine; hell, I’d be surprised if they did. As Emerson once wrote: “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey”. It’s asking yourself these questions that’s valuable, not the specific conclusions you get from them.

Where am I now?

Dear reader, I’m afraid this will sound disappointing: I still have no definite answers to the previous list of questions, even less for the ones that haven’t come up yet (the famous unknown unknowns). Such is life. As of today, I don’t even think there is a universal answer, and I tend to believe it’s more of a personal, living explanation that changes with time, experiences, and proper reasoning.

While deconstructing work (that’s what I called it), I did my fair share of freelance jobs, developing mobile apps, and exploring how I could make a living in a way that made sense to me. I discovered a bunch of simple variables that’d be worth pursuing for me personally:

• Novelty: We usually need a breath of fresh air from time to time, face new challenges, learn concepts, etc. Novelty is a powerful engine, it puts us in motion, and, in my case, it’s perhaps my main motivator. To keep this going, I need to work on short projects.

• Pride: I want to feel proud of my work, and the only way to achieve that is if I feel fully responsible for it and I own it. In my career, I led projects like implementing SSO or securing emails but they were a “small” piece of the whole thing. I want wide projects, and feel accountable for them.

• Progress: Solving the same problems over and over again ends up being unfun. Even when the domain changes, I always end up implementing a signup page, a place to store data, notifications, and i18n; to name a few. The automation required to make these things easier on each iteration is a challenge I particularly love. Tooling makes me feel things are improving with each project, that I learned something new and applied it.

• Fairness: The physical benefit of your work is money, in one or more of its many forms, to cover your needs. I have grown distrustful of compensation mechanics in tech jobs. Some (not all) of the concerns I have are:

  • Bonuses soon turn into politic games.
  • Artificial competition: Target rate for annual turnovers (pushing for “hire to fire” practices) or fixed bonus pool policies to encourage fighting for your share.
  • Company shares are used as a carrot on a stick to either keep employees in golden handcuffs if the company is public, or as a promise of a rich future otherwise.
  • Different roles having substantially different salaries, even when those roles are equally important for the outcomes of the company.
  • Adjusted salary by location — effectively detaching it from your productivity/impact.

  There has to be a better way to pay for our work, one that aligns with our results and reflects our efforts. Also, one that doesn’t forcefully categorize workers into classes. Every worker should have a voice in how the place they spend so much of their time is managed.

• Satisfaction: Work should be fulfilling. This has everything to do with working hours. I tried them all: part-time (4 to 6 hours a day), 4-day week, and the full range in between. Here is the interesting part: By working less hours I managed to be in the zone more often and for longer periods, with little to no changes in productivity. All while having more time for my personal life: developing other areas of interest, spending time with my wife and dogs, you name it.

• Impact: I came to realise most of the work I do has little impact in today’s world. I want to change this. I can’t always decide the kind of projects I take to walk towards this goal, specially when starting. What I’ve done instead is to sign the Giving What We Can pledge. No matter the projects I tackle, I ensured each one of them will help others in need.

• Organicity: I truly believe there are as many roles as persons are in this world. Someone might tag me as just a software developer, but I see myself as much more. It took me ages to embrace my generalist skills, and now I finally feel comfortable enough to safely explore other domains like design, product, security, or marketing (also carpentry, artistry, or cooking, to name a few). From my experience, the best teams are those that work under this assumption, and are composed by curious, multi-skilled individuals, better yet when they are purposefully small.

This list of variables (you probably noticed I don’t call them principles nor values, because strictly speaking, they aren’t) isn’t closed, but the ideas I wrote here have now become part of my ethos. And it’s now my goal to create a vehicle that helps me with this purpose. That thing is Antropia.

What is Antropia?

Antropia is a cooperative software studio that embodies these concepts, and it’s much more. It’s my personal commitment to them, and, during this time, when I’m its only member, it will be my alter ego: the best mechanism I found to openly talk about different ways of working and discussing alternative views on work organization.

Because these ideas are centered into work, Antropia will be my way of materializing them:

• Novelty: Antropia focuses on the initial steps of your projects. I create mobile apps and functional prototypes. Do you need to show your idea to investors? Maybe you need to kick off your project while you hire an in-house team. There is only one hard requirement: projects can’t last longer than a couple of months.
• Pride: I do mobile apps, but I can also do web, backend, and design. I thrive when I have the full picture, and the best way to do this is by picking entire projects, rather than features. Extra points if there are multiple complicated parts involved. I believe when these requirements are met something magical emerges: true ownership.
• Progress: I work in my own tooling that eases and solves the different problems I encounter. While others look for continuous integration and deployment, I look for continuous improvement (not exclusively 😅, I also do the former). Needless to say, it only makes sense for the tooling I develop to be open-source. In the end, it’s not the tooling itself that gives value, it’s the community behind it.
• Fairness: There are two ways to look at this: externally and internally. One way to be externally fair is to be totally transparent: I work on a fixed rate for all clients, no bargaining. On the other hand, internal fairness is quite a challenge and is probably the policy that will take longer to be developed if only because it’s just me for now. One thing is clear: it’ll be up to all workers-shareholders to decide what’ll be the best compensation for our own work. Everyone will have a voice, and everyone’s voice will carry the same weight, hence a cooperative model.
• Satisfaction: I’ll keep exploring my options (maybe I will never stop doing it) but one thing is certain: the 40-hour week is not for me, and therefore it’s not for Antropia. Once other voices join the team, we will collectively decide what’s the best option. I have the feeling everyone will have their preference, and we will have to find a compromise, as long as it implies working fewer hours. I know this might sound like one of the hardest sells but, I have surprise for you… I have already done it and the results are better than everyone expected.
• Impact: Because I joined Giving What We Can, Antropia has joined it as well. That means 10% of the studio’s income will be donated to the organisations that can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. On top of that, when - or if - there are conflicting schedules for projects, I will favor those that better aligns with these points.
• Organicity: This is still not applicable but the mechanisms that better resemble this principle are those of a “teal organisation”. Self-organization and self-management over traditional hierarchies. An organization model that act as a purposeful living organism, one that reacts to signals, and adapts to changes in the environment. If that sounds abstract it’s because it is. As with the cooperative model, this will be hopefully explored in the future, when others join the team.

A coop of one — Why a cooperative?

It has to be a joke, right? You might be thinking a cooperative of one doesn’t make any sense. And you would be 99% right. But there is still that missing 1%, that represents my hopes for this new project. It’s my public commitment to turn Antropia into something bigger, one step at a time. And when it becomes so, it will do it under the umbrella of these ideas.

To be fully honest, I didn’t start this journey with the idea of a cooperative in mind. I had the same fears others have: they don’t work. But the seed was planted, and I did some research (^1, ^2, ^3). My current view is that it not only is the most democratic organizational model (doubling on the effort towards fairness), it performs similarly to traditional companies, and can grow as much (mandatory Mondragon Corporation reference).

As a fun side note, I like to cite my own country’s constitution (Spain), article 129.2:

The public authorities shall efficiently promote the various forms of participation within companies and shall encourage cooperative societies by means of appropriate legislation. They shall also establish means to facilitate access by the workers to ownership of the means of production.

Emphasis mine, but not really needed.

The near future

I expected a slower start, but we are booked until June. In the meantime, if you need to develop a mobile prototype, let us know. I work in React Native and Typescript and I can help you publish your app in the stores. If you need a design for your app, or maybe a backend and a subscription webpage to get people interested in your idea, I got you covered. Visit antropia.studio and drop me a message, or email me to hi {at} antropia {dot} studio.

Finally, if the ideas in this post have made you think, please share it with your community; it will mean the world to me ❤️.

Inspiration

The key inspiration for this journey is… people with whom I talk, I can’t name them all but one deserves her own spot in this post: my wife Ali, who showed me with her leadership that it all comes down to humans. People over deadlines, people over pressures, people over evaluations. When we don’t run things for people (or dogs 🐕) we lose our essence.

I also list here the non-personal resources that inspired me the most during this time of change. Some ideas have a very clear 1-to-1 correspondence with the concepts exposed in these references, others are more vague but have anyways earned their place in the list:

• Book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• Book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
• Book The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel
• Book The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
• Book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux - Thanks, Nuria
• Talk Principles of Technology Leadership by Bryan Cantrill - Thanks, Abdallah
• Book Capital in the Anthropocene by Kohei Saito
• Novel The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Novel Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin
• Game Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital