Hey everyone,
there are rarely open positions at Village One, but we do have one now: We just published a job posting for a web developer with Craft CMS experience!

Putting together a job posting is always a slightly strange experience for us, because our context is so different from most other companies. For starters, we’re extremely transparent, e.g. including salary information and even linking to the future employment contract. Here’s a peek:

The salary is 5000€/month (before taxes, in Germany) during the six-months of probation time, then 5500€/month afterwards. If you’re not in Germany, we’ll make sure a comparable amount of money ends up in your pocket. Please note: We can’t pay more than this; there is no negotiation and no location-based adjustment. Please only apply if you can live comfortably off this salary.

You can read your future employment contract here: in German / in English.

Generally speaking, we try to be as up-front and open as possible, being respectful of everyone’s time. It should be immediately clear to a reader whether the job is for them or not. That’s why the posting is also quite detailed and specific regarding the skillset we need.

But the highlight is of course that the person will also become an equal co-owner of the company. Need a reminder? Village One is structured as a worker-owned cooperative, which means two things: democratic governance and collective ownership. Each team member has an equal voice in decisions and we’re a worker-owned company. In German we often call it „Arbeit auf Augenhöhe“, which roughly translates to “work at eye-level” or “work on equal footing”.

What’s the process to become a new co-owner? The new hire will have a probation time of six months, and will afterwards automatically become a full cooperative member, gaining the same decision-making powers and the same formal ownership as everyone else. The best thing? There’s no financial hurdle, as you only need to acquire a single cooperative share for 100€. Wild.

Almost no other workplace extends this level of trust, transparency and participation to their workers, giving everyone true agency in shaping their workplace. We have no bosses, no investors, nobody to report to, not even a singular vision for what Village One should be. It’s a collective project, involving each person and their interests; an experiment in trust and emergence.

But it doesn’t stop there: We also work in a four-day workweek (Mon-Thu, 32h total) and there’s unparalleled financial transparency. Truth be told, that last point is sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse … but at least everyone always knows where we stand, no hush-hush. You inevitably get a crash course in entrepreneurship as a member of our team.

Furthermore, this is a full-remote position, because we work as a distributed team: We do get everyone together once per quarter, but otherwise you can work from anywhere, as long as there’s some timezone overlap with Berlin/CET. We can even employ internationally, via an employer of record, such as Deel. There will never be a “return to office” call, as we do not have (or ever had) an office.

In terms of the actual work, we only accept projects we find meaningful, based on our wishlist/blocklist. Over the last three years we’ve been fortunate to work with awesome partners, among them the Sovereign Tech Agency, Publix, the Prototype Fund, Youth Policy Labs, dekoder.org, DIE ZEIT, Media Lab Bayern, Start into Media, Liquid Democracy, the European Cultural Foundation, Platform Coops, TypeMates, HvD Fonts, PLATTE, the Media Forward Fund or Democracy Next. Most of them are non-profits, all of them do excellent work and we consider ourselves very lucky to get to team up with them every day.

The reason we’re hiring is that a current team member is leaving us … that’s always a sad occasion, but we’re also all extremely curious who might join us next. Every new person takes the company into a slightly new direction and we’re looking forward to see who’s drawn to this unique setup we’re offering!

Enough about us though—do you know somebody who may be a good fit to join our team? We’d be very grateful if you forwarded the job posting to them. Applications are open until Dec 15. Thank you for your support and any feedback about the job posting is also greatly appreciated, of course!

We’ll keep you posted on how the search goes,
Harry (+ the Village One team)