[leethaxor]

> finding clients, invoicing, server maintenance, customer service, training, documentation, implementation consultants

Clients find me, not the other way around. Documentation and implementation are my own lines of work.

I have an accountant, tax advisor and lawyer as subscriptions. I also have a coworking pass. These cost me about 1.5% of my annual income.

Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.

> If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on.

No. As a contractor, all of the above are my business expenses (also including conference passes, trainings/certifications, driving to/from the client, all my hardware I use to work etc). Companies and contractors pay tax on profit, not turnover.

> Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.

Yeah indeed there's a coop like that where I live. They pay like half of what I make to their top guys (I myself am not a top guy; they offered me even less). Not encouraging.

> Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.

I have this at the coworking space - and we don't share any money so there's no chance of any bad feelings whatsoever. I have very bad experience with that, it ends friendships.

[therealdrag0]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m not familiar with the space but I wonder if it’s just a matter of elite-ness. Hypothesis: The top 1 or 10 percent of a field are better off in their own, whereas the rest benefit from collective benefits. Another example that comes to mind is Matt Yglesias leaving Vox. He was well paid at Vox but now on his own I’m sure he’s even higher paid and has more freedom etc. I donno just speculating.

[nanomonkey]

>Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.

No one said anything about training for free. This was an example of work that needs to be done for a client that you may not want to do yourself. A junior level member of your coop could travel to the client's site and train them on how to use your software, learn from the experience and make valuable ties, while you stay at home and work on more appropriate tasks.

[leethaxor]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. Sorry I misunderstood. This is not really something applicable to my line of work (standard software development tasks on a larger project in an agile team managed by the client) but I can imagine some of my friends doing this.