Coops is one of the structures that the author talks about in "Developer Hegemony". The bulk of the book is about the inverted pyramid that modern software development houses are (with production being at the bottom, and manager on top).<p>I really like this passage:<p>> “Consider a law firm. Do the founding partners go out and hire a Lawyer Manager to order them around, and then do they hire a VP of Lawyering to order the manager around? Do they then hire a CEO to rule over everyone and a CFO to handle the finances and a COO to schedule court dates and such? Of course not. There’s no historical precedent for all that fluff. Rather, they handle facets of the business themselves. What they can’t or don’t want to handle, they delegate to subordinates that they hire. The partners don’t specialize in finance, sales, marketing, or operations. That would be silly. But they understand enough about it to act as the boss.”<p>...and this one:<p>> “It turns out that treating knowledge work pursuits like manufacturing operations doesn’t work particularly well. But it was the model inherited from the Industrial Revolution, and it’s been hard to shake. The thinking goes like this: if you break a complex operation down to its individual components and then have people specialize in those components, batching the work and letting people get good at tiny slices of it leads to greater efficiency. This works well for stations on an assembly line but not so much for writing software.”