Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

If you run an "agency" business then you should always be promoting junior employees to full partner. They start our doing work that you find for them, but after a few years of training from you they are now bringing in their own work and should be treated like an independent business owner in your space that you agree not to compete with (which would be against monopoly laws if you were not the same company) and once in a while one covers for the other for vacations/sick. Lawyers regularly change the name of their company to reflect changes in who is partner.

Not all employees become full partners. Most do not, but it should be clear to everyone what hard work is required to become a partner and they should see examples of it happening.

View on HN

I think you make, in miniature, a good example of the case for why most businesses should be making most employees into equity stakeholders.

Most employees don't generate anything that can be taken elsewhere.

overall emplopee owned companies are a bad idea because you get too invested personally in it. If the company goes bankrupt you are out not only your job but also your savings.

I'm missing something, how does giving employees a path to equity prevent them from having other savings and investments?

It doesn't stop it but it discourages it since so much wealth is in that one basket.

Don't keep all your eggs in one basket, unless you control that basket

In an employee owned company you don't control the basket. In a partnership you do.

This is an interesting idea. I started in agencies and this is indeed a problem.

It’s a good start for junior people to get experience but they tend not to stay long.

It also attracts people who can do it all - design, programming, animation, etc who become stars, and then wonder why they aren’t working for themselves.

Generalists like that also tend to navigate poor management well (also very common) because they remove the need to be managed.

The agencies I was at came to the opposite conclusion - why do we even have employees instead of contractors? Which never really worked out.

> It also attracts people who can do it all - design, programming, animation, etc who become stars, and then wonder why they aren’t working for themselves.

This is why you promote to full partner all the time. The people who wonder why they aren't working for themselves should answer "I will have all the advantages of working for myself, plus the advantages of partners for the few places that matter". If you don't promote to partner you lose all the effort you put into training that person if you did you get someone who can help you once in a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com