from Hacker News

Can Engineers Stage a Coup and Take over Their Company?

by utku1337 on 7/22/24, 3:04 PM with 10 comments

  • by JohnFen on 7/22/24, 9:22 PM

    Why stage a coup rather than the tried-and-true method of the core engineers leaving the company to start up a competing one?

  • by pavel_lishin on 7/22/24, 3:13 PM

    I'm not a lawyer, but I bet one could poke three dozen holes in this plan from the first paragraph where the initial felony planning begins.

  • by hnthrowaway0328 on 7/22/24, 3:11 PM

    Engineers in general don't have the heart and gut to play politics. Actually ordinary people don't. That's why we tolerate assholes because they are supposed to be our assholes.

  • by sophyphreak on 7/27/24, 12:40 AM

    I'm confused why the engineers can't just form a union and go on strike, demanding either better conditions, a seat at the table, or actual control like this article suggests. Unionizing and striking are protected activities in the United States and many countries while everything suggested in this article is frankly not.

    I'm not a lawyer, but as other commenters mention, this would be both illegal and totally reversible because it would be a decision made due to coercion. In the same way a contract is not legally binding if someone holds a gun to your head and compels you to sign, the decision to give the coup leader control of the company wouldn't be legally binding either.

  • by rolph on 7/22/24, 3:45 PM

    it seems like the shares should be accumulated first so the take over is not a coup, but a restructuring.

    that being said, engineering the straw purchase and smurfing of shares to produce a controlling, or super-leveraging investors group sounds like what the "bad guy" does.

  • by tracker1 on 7/23/24, 3:56 PM

    Not exactly a new thought exercise... it's basically a communist takeover of a single given company.

    A better, imo, plan would be to convince the most impactful engineers to join you in creating a new, competing company in a location where non-compete agreements aren't binding.

  • by brodouevencode on 7/22/24, 3:16 PM

    > but let’s not forget who’s actually behind these successes: the engineers

    this narcissistic mindset is THE reason why if anything like this were ever tried, it would fail spectacularly