The organization is a cooperative worker-directed agency. Decisions typically made by an owner, CEO, or board of directors made up of owners and managers will instead be made democratically by all those whose livelihoods and well-being depend directly on the business and who directly contribute to the production of the surplus.
Democracy is a central value for modern civilization. But our local and national elections in modern democracies only give us limited input into the actual running of things. We may elect our leaders, or our electoral college may do so, but can't really keep our leaders in line, and they often end up fighting for the interests of lobbyists and campaign donors rather than their own constituents.
Beyond our regular governmental elections, democracy doesn't really happen in our communities and workplaces. Most workers are subservient to their managers and owners. If they attempt to unionize or otherwise make their voices heard, they risk getting fired or passed over for promotions.
In contrast, a worker-directed cooperative would directly involve the collaborative efforts of all employees to build the company and run it democratically.
The surplus-producing workers together function as the board of directors, so that decisions dealing with the appropriation of the surplus are made by those who produce it*. Other decisions should also take into account the opinions of any faciliator worker-members (such as sales, office managers, accountants).
Development managers are elected at a biannual meeting and can serve at most 2 consecutive terms. Unlike other organizations, there will never be a time when there are development managers who don't actually write code. This is prohibited in the Cooperative's constitution (in this very sentence). Developers may rotate between writing code, QA, project management, and DevOps. But when managers' terms are over, they must always rotate back into engineering.
When new producer employees are added to the company, they must be added to as owner-shareholders within 8 weeks by the company filing the appropriate ammendments with the California secretary of state.
When an employee leaves the company, the employee's shares will be converted to non-voting shares within 8 weeks by filing the appropriate ammendments with the California secretary of state. The departing member may then elect to redeem the shares via the buyback program or to continue receiving dividends via non-voting shares.