5 ms·

Once the fad is over, will we admit that hierarchy can be beneficial? People don't want to admit that. Ideological bias.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Its hard to determine something is a fad until is over.
- golemotron 11y ago
  Not really. When people say it must all be X and not Y, you can bet that there's a sweet spot between X and Y.
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    Ah, classic middle ground fallacy. What if I say X is we must all stop working and you say Y, we should carry on as we are? Do we fire half the company?
    - NhanH 11y ago
      > What if I say X is we must all stop working and you say Y, we should carry on as we are? > Do we fire half the company? If we can fire half the people currently working in the economy, stop the pretense that "job" is something meaningful on its own and start dealing with the actual issue, things might actually get so much better! I mean, I'm not sure if the GP committed a fallacy or not (he probably did with that blanket statement), but you picked a bad example.
    - golemotron 11y ago
      Talk about a strawman example.
      - dalke 11y ago
        For two real-world examples: compare "We must ban slavery" to "We must allow slavery", and compare "Equal voting rights for women and men" vs. "No voting rights for women". What's the sweet spot between those two pairs which isn't one of the endpoints?
        golemotron 11y ago
        This is funny. You're picking examples where this no middle ground to counter an example where there is: you can have organizations that are somewhat flat with a bit of hierarchy. Do you realize you're doing this?
        dalke 11y ago
        Yes, that was deliberate. You objected to ethanbond's comment because you regarded it as straw man example. I restated ethanbond's objection to show real-world examples where your statement "When people say it must all be X and not Y, you can bet that there's a sweet spot between X and Y" does not apply. Therefore, it is not a strong rule for inductive logic, which is our point.
    - rconti 11y ago
      The midpoint fallacy is that the truth lies directly in the midpoint. Typically it lies SOMEWHERE in the middle, but the fallacy is meant to point out that it's just as likely to lie very close to one end or the other, as directly in the middle. Of course, if you construct a total straw man argument where we already know the god-given truth, you can show that a second argument will take you further from the truth.
      - rz2k 11y ago
        "Somewhere in the middle" is one of three possibilities if you reduce everything to a one-dimensional line and pick two points. Even in the rare cases where an oversimplified single continuum expresses the best solutions to address a problem, there is little reason to assume that two point alternatives aren't together in being the wrong direction away from the optimum. However, I really think golemotron was just referring to when a trend becomes a default that no longer needs to have its case made in new situations. Like assuming middlegrounds are implicitly correct, or cargo culting, it's just a form of assuming there are shortcuts that make understanding the mechanisms of success or doing actual analysis are unnecessary.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        Your understanding of the middle ground fallacy does not accord with the rest of the world's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation The middle ground fallacy is the idea that given two ideas, the truth lies somewhere in between them.
CuriouslyC 11y ago
Hierarchy is part of human social interactions, switching to a completely flat organizational structure is just sweeping it under the rug. Better to re-organize to try and match the organizational structure to the actual communication and power structure. If your organization has too many groups and tiers of communication, that is either a staffing problem, or you haven't properly separated business concerns.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Personally I feel jobs like engineering should not be subordinate to management so I'll take flat.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Make the tech people the managers. Hire BAs for the soft skills and project management, attach a BA to each tech lead, and they work together to provide direction for their group. BA owns all communication and requirements, Tech lead owns the technical decisions, code reviews, work assignments, and they collaborate on managing the team.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    That sounds mostly great. Separate technical leadership from organizational management. Not sure "requirements" necessarily belong to the BA. They probably belong to whomever can identify best with the customer. That's certainly a BA in many circumstances, but hardly all of them.
  - thawkins 11y ago
    We are moving tne ba/requirements role over to the product managers, the devleads operate virtual teams and pull tesource in on an as needed basis.
    - jon-wood 11y ago
      > pull resource in Did you mean people? I really hate this kind of dehumanising management speak.
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      We're a small group so we don't have separate roles of PM vs BA.
- balls187 11y ago
  Who is responsible for making hiring decisions? Who is responsible for removing engineers that aren't pulling their weight?
mocko 11y ago
I second the "fad" perspective. As a DevOps guy with a great deal of startup experience I briefly worked at a hierarchy-less organisation and found it soul destroying. In the absence of any hierarchy decisions tend to be made by whomever can shout the loudest; projects go unmanaged; the needs of minorities (in my case long-term operational requirements for hosting the damn product) get ignored and appeals to reason with the company's owners were politely ignored. My inner cynic wonders if founders love this fad because it saves the payroll they'd need to spend on experienced managers and absolves them of any responsibility to run the internals of their organisation, freeing them up to focus on overall strategy. The result (admittedly based on a limited sample size - I'm not trying that again) was chaos. Real lord-of-the-flies stuff. One of the first questions I now ask when startups approach me is "what's your org structure like" - and if they haven't got one I run like hell.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  > My inner cynic wonders if founders love this fad because it saves the payroll they'd need to spend on experienced managers and absolves them of any responsibility to run the internals of their organisation, freeing them up to focus on overall strategy. I totally buy this at the macro level. Just like open office concept saves buying a bunch of walls and more office space. But Zappos? I think they have a history of making the "poor financial" decision to make employees and customers very happy. Seems very out of character to come form them.
- Animats 11y ago
  "In the absence of any hierarchy decisions tend to be made by whomever can shout the loudest." This. Classic problem with volunteer organizations. If you have the time, you can have formal meetings using Robert's Rules of Order, which are designed to force decisions by voting after discussion. But that's unwieldy within an operating organization. The military is formally very hierarchical but, when planning operations, is much less so. There's a military custom that, when discussing a proposed plan, the most junior people speak first. (The elder Moltke is credited with this custom.) This, of course, is to reduce the tendency of people to agree with their superiors. More than that, it's to find holes in a plan before the enemy does. Once the decision is made, everyone is expected to carry it out fully, and not drag their feet, whether they agreed or not.
natrius 11y ago
Holocratic organizations are not flat. It's a common misconception. Holacracy is just agile redirected towards defining roles in an organization rather than building a product. You take on roles when you can help the organization by doing it instead of having a manager tell you what to do. Those roles are constantly iterated on to make them better.
- MBCook 11y ago
  I understand every word you wrote, but I honestly think if I took that paragraph and surround it with some anti-Holocracy quotes and put some sort of sarcasm mark around it it would read perfectly. It all makes perfect sense and a small organization, but how could it ever work at the scale of something like Zappos? At that size how can any employee have enough information to make a good decision as to what role in the organization needs filling right now? For that a role that is filled needs to be filled by someone else as the person currently doing it is suboptimal and doesn't realize it. It seems like one of those things where the communication demands necessary to keep it running smoothly between all the individuals would quickly overwhelm what any normal person could actually do. The obvious solution is to have people in charge of relaying messages to other sets of people. Whoops. I added hierarchy.
  - natrius 11y ago
    > At that size how can any employee have enough information to make a good decision as to what role in the organization needs filling right now? It's not necessarily about finding what roles need to be filled in the whole organization. It's more about doing what needs to be done in your department. If something needs to be done in another department, you point out the problem and they decide how to fix it. > or that a role that is filled needs to be filled by someone else as the person currently doing it is suboptimal and doesn't realize it I think Holacracy is actually better at solving this problem than traditional management. If a role isn't being fulfilled well, it's everyone's job to bring that up at a department meeting so the group can decide how to fix the problem. > It all makes perfect sense and a small organization, but how could it ever work at the scale of something like Zappos? I have no idea. I hope they make it work. It sounds better than the status quo.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Its hard to determine something is a fad until is over.

golemotron 11y ago
Not really. When people say it must all be X and not Y, you can bet that there's a sweet spot between X and Y.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Ah, classic middle ground fallacy. What if I say X is we must all stop working and you say Y, we should carry on as we are? Do we fire half the company?
  - NhanH 11y ago
    > What if I say X is we must all stop working and you say Y, we should carry on as we are? > Do we fire half the company? If we can fire half the people currently working in the economy, stop the pretense that "job" is something meaningful on its own and start dealing with the actual issue, things might actually get so much better! I mean, I'm not sure if the GP committed a fallacy or not (he probably did with that blanket statement), but you picked a bad example.
  - golemotron 11y ago
    Talk about a strawman example.
    - dalke 11y ago
      For two real-world examples: compare "We must ban slavery" to "We must allow slavery", and compare "Equal voting rights for women and men" vs. "No voting rights for women". What's the sweet spot between those two pairs which isn't one of the endpoints?
      - golemotron 11y ago
        This is funny. You're picking examples where this no middle ground to counter an example where there is: you can have organizations that are somewhat flat with a bit of hierarchy. Do you realize you're doing this?
        dalke 11y ago
        Yes, that was deliberate. You objected to ethanbond's comment because you regarded it as straw man example. I restated ethanbond's objection to show real-world examples where your statement "When people say it must all be X and not Y, you can bet that there's a sweet spot between X and Y" does not apply. Therefore, it is not a strong rule for inductive logic, which is our point.
  - rconti 11y ago
    The midpoint fallacy is that the truth lies directly in the midpoint. Typically it lies SOMEWHERE in the middle, but the fallacy is meant to point out that it's just as likely to lie very close to one end or the other, as directly in the middle. Of course, if you construct a total straw man argument where we already know the god-given truth, you can show that a second argument will take you further from the truth.
    - rz2k 11y ago
      "Somewhere in the middle" is one of three possibilities if you reduce everything to a one-dimensional line and pick two points. Even in the rare cases where an oversimplified single continuum expresses the best solutions to address a problem, there is little reason to assume that two point alternatives aren't together in being the wrong direction away from the optimum. However, I really think golemotron was just referring to when a trend becomes a default that no longer needs to have its case made in new situations. Like assuming middlegrounds are implicitly correct, or cargo culting, it's just a form of assuming there are shortcuts that make understanding the mechanisms of success or doing actual analysis are unnecessary.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Your understanding of the middle ground fallacy does not accord with the rest of the world's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation The middle ground fallacy is the idea that given two ideas, the truth lies somewhere in between them.

CuriouslyC 11y ago

Hierarchy is part of human social interactions, switching to a completely flat organizational structure is just sweeping it under the rug. Better to re-organize to try and match the organizational structure to the actual communication and power structure. If your organization has too many groups and tiers of communication, that is either a staffing problem, or you haven't properly separated business concerns.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Personally I feel jobs like engineering should not be subordinate to management so I'll take flat.

Pxtl 11y ago
Make the tech people the managers. Hire BAs for the soft skills and project management, attach a BA to each tech lead, and they work together to provide direction for their group. BA owns all communication and requirements, Tech lead owns the technical decisions, code reviews, work assignments, and they collaborate on managing the team.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  That sounds mostly great. Separate technical leadership from organizational management. Not sure "requirements" necessarily belong to the BA. They probably belong to whomever can identify best with the customer. That's certainly a BA in many circumstances, but hardly all of them.
- thawkins 11y ago
  We are moving tne ba/requirements role over to the product managers, the devleads operate virtual teams and pull tesource in on an as needed basis.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    > pull resource in Did you mean people? I really hate this kind of dehumanising management speak.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    We're a small group so we don't have separate roles of PM vs BA.
balls187 11y ago
Who is responsible for making hiring decisions? Who is responsible for removing engineers that aren't pulling their weight?

mocko 11y ago

I second the "fad" perspective. As a DevOps guy with a great deal of startup experience I briefly worked at a hierarchy-less organisation and found it soul destroying. In the absence of any hierarchy decisions tend to be made by whomever can shout the loudest; projects go unmanaged; the needs of minorities (in my case long-term operational requirements for hosting the damn product) get ignored and appeals to reason with the company's owners were politely ignored. My inner cynic wonders if founders love this fad because it saves the payroll they'd need to spend on experienced managers and absolves them of any responsibility to run the internals of their organisation, freeing them up to focus on overall strategy. The result (admittedly based on a limited sample size - I'm not trying that again) was chaos. Real lord-of-the-flies stuff. One of the first questions I now ask when startups approach me is "what's your org structure like" - and if they haven't got one I run like hell.

brianwawok 11y ago
> My inner cynic wonders if founders love this fad because it saves the payroll they'd need to spend on experienced managers and absolves them of any responsibility to run the internals of their organisation, freeing them up to focus on overall strategy. I totally buy this at the macro level. Just like open office concept saves buying a bunch of walls and more office space. But Zappos? I think they have a history of making the "poor financial" decision to make employees and customers very happy. Seems very out of character to come form them.
Animats 11y ago
"In the absence of any hierarchy decisions tend to be made by whomever can shout the loudest." This. Classic problem with volunteer organizations. If you have the time, you can have formal meetings using Robert's Rules of Order, which are designed to force decisions by voting after discussion. But that's unwieldy within an operating organization. The military is formally very hierarchical but, when planning operations, is much less so. There's a military custom that, when discussing a proposed plan, the most junior people speak first. (The elder Moltke is credited with this custom.) This, of course, is to reduce the tendency of people to agree with their superiors. More than that, it's to find holes in a plan before the enemy does. Once the decision is made, everyone is expected to carry it out fully, and not drag their feet, whether they agreed or not.

natrius 11y ago

Holocratic organizations are not flat. It's a common misconception. Holacracy is just agile redirected towards defining roles in an organization rather than building a product. You take on roles when you can help the organization by doing it instead of having a manager tell you what to do. Those roles are constantly iterated on to make them better.

MBCook 11y ago
I understand every word you wrote, but I honestly think if I took that paragraph and surround it with some anti-Holocracy quotes and put some sort of sarcasm mark around it it would read perfectly. It all makes perfect sense and a small organization, but how could it ever work at the scale of something like Zappos? At that size how can any employee have enough information to make a good decision as to what role in the organization needs filling right now? For that a role that is filled needs to be filled by someone else as the person currently doing it is suboptimal and doesn't realize it. It seems like one of those things where the communication demands necessary to keep it running smoothly between all the individuals would quickly overwhelm what any normal person could actually do. The obvious solution is to have people in charge of relaying messages to other sets of people. Whoops. I added hierarchy.
- natrius 11y ago
  > At that size how can any employee have enough information to make a good decision as to what role in the organization needs filling right now? It's not necessarily about finding what roles need to be filled in the whole organization. It's more about doing what needs to be done in your department. If something needs to be done in another department, you point out the problem and they decide how to fix it. > or that a role that is filled needs to be filled by someone else as the person currently doing it is suboptimal and doesn't realize it I think Holacracy is actually better at solving this problem than traditional management. If a role isn't being fulfilled well, it's everyone's job to bring that up at a department meeting so the group can decide how to fix the problem. > It all makes perfect sense and a small organization, but how could it ever work at the scale of something like Zappos? I have no idea. I hope they make it work. It sounds better than the status quo.