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Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace

259 points by lnguyen 10y ago

wutf 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
- kaosjester 10y ago
  I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether). That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.
  - initram 10y ago
    Ever lived in a condo with an HOA (Home Owner's Association)? You get the opposite problem. One person, household, or small set of owners wants to be in power so they can make changes that benefit them, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the HOA so they can't be blamed when something goes wrong and because they're too busy with their lives. So a vote is held, most people don't show up, and even if they do, they don't want to do the jobs themselves so they vote for the people who want it, and the result is usually terrible.
    - GVIrish 10y ago
      This. And really, it's the same problem in elected government too. Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. People who might actually make great leaders (or at least would not be tyrants) often don't want to get involved with politics. In the work setting I've never seen management determined by vote, but you see the phenomenon just the same. Most people who want to climb the management ladder are normal, sane people, but the power-hungry are the ones who try the hardest to get to the top. In an organization that doesn't properly evaluate people you end up with the brutes in charge, which makes life miserable for everyone else.
      - vintermann 10y ago
        > Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. The funny thing is that the first democracy which called itself a democracy was perfectly aware of this problem - and the tyranny of informal leaders - and had a simple and effective solution to both problems: filling chairs by lottery.
  - RonanTheGrey 10y ago
    I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one. Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.
    - mason240 10y ago
      Exactly, it's "leaderless" in the same sense that a class of high schoolers is "leaderless."
    - kaosjester 10y ago
      No, I got that. The article also has the person who demonstrated it advocating for democratic control of leadership, and I was commenting on how that might run into its own troubles.
  - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    The biggest problem is that the business owners want management to represent their interests; if they were elected by the workers, they would more naturally represent the interests of the workers. It might work out in a worker's co-op where the workers and owners are the same people.
    - wffurr 10y ago
      I'm trying to understand how a "flat org" like this is different from a co-op. Seems like the "flatland" companies give you autonomy without ownership, which seems bad to me. It's only flat so far as the actual owner allows it to be, and you end up with a bunch of people with autonomy with no stake in the outcomes.
      - tjl 10y ago
        Co-ops still have boards and often employees that report to the board (or another employee). There's a structure there, but they also tend to be smaller so the structure has less impact. I was treasurer of my housing co-op and we had one full-time employee who reported to me and the board. That employee (the coordinator) hired contractors for maintenance, bookkeeping, as well as things like the laundry machines. Even large co-ops (like clothing stores) have the members vote a board in that sets up the structure.
  - Jemmeh 10y ago
    I don't want my job to include voting people off the island and MORE office politics and meetings. Please no.
    - wffurr 10y ago
      Too late. As soon as you have more than three human beings in the same group, there's politics and meetings. You can either participate, or allow others to dictate to you.
      - Jemmeh 10y ago
        I know. I said I don't want -more- of that. Every single member of the team having to keep up with every single other person is unnecessary and impossible past a certain number of people. Certain things don't scale well.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        Plato's dictum.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    The only thing that works against cliques in democracy as you described is to have sufficient number of people at each level. The large parliaments are there specifically to block too strong unilateral cliques forming. A democracy full of tiny squabbles is a working democracy - a democracy in unilateral ageeement on all matters really is not a democracy anymore.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The full article. Her point seems to really boil down to this: We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites. And she continues on, the next section is particularly, interesting, describing how these elites she refer to create a network of communication which others aren't party to. I really recommend reading the whole thing. It's a pretty interesting article and, I think, gets at the problems (solvable in some or many cases) in any large organization, structureless or not. EDIT: And do read the article. It's much more than just the snippet I included. That's just her thesis, the rest explains it better and the consequences of insisting on informal organization.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    The problem is that the skills required to win votes generally don't have a lot to do with the skills required to be competent in any field other than electioneering. So elections don't end up quickly revealing and demoting the incompetent people so much as they do raising up people who are competent at electioneering, regardless of their competence or lack thereof in other matters. An example from history. Elections are actually how volunteer units in the early days of the American Civil War selected their officers. Every soldier got one vote, the whole regiment got together and cast their ballots, and the guy who got the most votes got to be the commanding officer. Very democratic! With just one problem: in almost all cases, soldiers voted overwhelmingly for officers who promised not to make them do all the tedious army stuff they hated, like drilling in formation and practicing their marksmanship... which it turns out are actually very important things for a unit to do, if it wants to actually perform in combat. So these units had a bad habit of dissolving into mobs of terrified amateurs (and therefore getting slaughtered) the moment they entered battle. Eventually it was decided that it was more important that army units be able to function in combat than that they be democratic organizations, and the elected "soldier's friend" officers were kicked out and replaced with hardasses. The soldiers hated them, and swore under their breath every time they were called out to drill yet again. But they learned how to fight.
    - yodon 10y ago
      That's incredibly interesting - do you have a source for it?
      - smacktoward 10y ago
        There's some good pointers to the election processes of a few different regiments (North and South) here: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/question-about-election-of-officers-in-acw-combat-units.119835/ http://civilwartalk.com/threads/question-about-election-of-o...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Isn't that what reviews are for? If you have substantive reasons not to like your boss then giving them a lousy review is easy. A manager who is getting lousy reviews from engineers is going to face difficulties with the higher ups.
- sitkack 10y ago
  A little fascism goes along way.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    The opposite of anarchy isn't fascism. Read the author's full paper, it's got a lot of insight into the workings of organizations in general.
    - sitkack 10y ago
      Are you talking about the wikipedia article or http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm I have been in those same activist groups. Right now I work for an "engineering run" organization. Maybe my emphasis should have been on _a little_. Every organization collapses towards high-school. Those that don't are the most successful. Just as the majority of Olympic athletes are freak'n amazing, the contest is rarely not who excels but who doesn't falter.
- rdoherty 10y ago
  I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability. I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. (One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.) > if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.
    - panic 10y ago
      Sure, but if you're not part of the informal power structure, having some influence through an official structure is better than having no influence at all. In my (somewhat limited) experience, you need a balance to get good work done: too much official structure slows things down and limits good people, but too much informal structure leads to the kind of place described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."
  - jevanish 10y ago
danso 10y ago
It'd be cool to see an internal study, at least within the engineering group, of how commit activity/issue resolution changed before and after the new structure. On an aggregate basis, at least.
- sidlls 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you think that would be useful?
  - danso 10y ago
    Ostensibly the decision to change structure is to improve productivity. Does it? And if so, how does it affect/improve it? Commit activity is as granular/quantifiable a data source as we have to analyze it. Obviously, the analysis shouldn't be limited to the mere quantity of commits. I'm more interested in if the activity becomes more "regular" than sporadic. Or if long-neglected (i.e. boring) issues get more attention than they did before.
    - sitkack 10y ago
      It would be interesting, but not immediately scientific when it comes to measuring productivity. A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at. What I would find interesting is a what is the slope of the line in terms of worker productivity as it varies with org size as the number of workers are added. Having a bossless architecture is fine when there is lots of interesting engineering work to do. Coordination and direction is just overhead when the organism should just spread in every direction. But after some point it needs to move and find food.
      - fsloth 10y ago
        " A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at." This is the best brief simplification of organizational dynamics on scaling I've had the pleasure to read.
morley 10y ago
I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find: > Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning managers in the spring. It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat organizations. Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure works?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Yeah I agree with you I didn't find much of anything useful beyond this one other bit that added another, small explanation for moving away from bossless: > While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance. “Without even a minimal layer of management, it was difficult to have some of those conversations and to get people feeling like they understood what was expected of them, and that they were getting the support that they needed in order to do the best work,” No information about what the current structure is, how it's working out compared to the last one nor really any satisfying answers for why the initial bossless failed (I mean I can certainly guess but they went through it, it would be nice to have more data).
- caminante 10y ago
  My guess? The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a) raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on opportunities.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    This. Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!" PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe how they are now addressed. We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.
nathanaldensr 10y ago
Can GitHub--a company with 600 people--really be called a "startup" anymore (as termed by the article)?
- civilian 10y ago
  There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being inflated, I think there's "startup inflation". In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we ended up with something like: > A startup is a company that is new company, less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment. So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency? Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get commoditized. Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high-growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional business startups".
  - fsloth 10y ago
    I think the brief description is a company in search of a new scalable business model. If the business model is not new then the business can be categorized as X (grocery chain, real estate dealer, machine shop, etc).
- rrdharan 10y ago
  Are they still seeing exponential growth?
- skylan_q 10y ago
  600 people Holy smokes. I didn't know it was already that large. What are they doing with 600 people that they were unable to do with 30? I haven't seen anything novel come out of there for a long time. Maybe Atom?
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Most of the people I've talked to who "reject management", they really reject "bad management".
- metaphorm 10y ago
  to be fair, that is _most_ management. good management is quite rare, unfortunately.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    And much of the "good" management I've encountered is actually about protecting your people from the bad management around and above you in the organization. Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things.
    - strictnein 10y ago
      Yeah, one of the trademarks of the managers I enjoy is that they leave me (mostly) alone and clear my path.
    - flukus 10y ago
      > Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things. The problem is that if you get a professional PM, they typically have seniority on the org chart and call the shots, even when they don't have the technical capacity to do so. I'd like to experience an in team flat structure, one where management/PM is working for the team, not in charge of them.
      - kabdib 10y ago
        All the really excellent PMs at Microsoft that I worked with seemed "flat" to me -- they did coordination, technical documentation and basically "glued together" disparate groups. They were technically deep and would have made fine engineers, except they were better at communication and negotiation than your average engineer. They didn't seem to give a damn what the management structure was like, except to steer around it. The poorer PMs were the ones stuck in hierarchy, who managed schedules, tracked bug counts and (aside from bug triage maybe) did work that could have been largely automated. These folks tended to circulate through and were generally fungible, even at the nosebleed levels of their management tree. I would happily have traded 20 or 30 of the "bug counter" PMs for a couple of technical PMs who could write specs that meant something. (I saw many "bug counter" PMs quit, or get fired).
GrumpyNl 10y ago
Its just agile/scrum for management. How is that working out for you guys? Do you get things finished?
h4nkoslo 10y ago
Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant politically-vetted governance. "the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn’t be solved by the masses. While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance"
nate_martin 10y ago
"flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time.
- icehawk219 10y ago
  In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.
  - adekok 10y ago
    That reminds me of the story of university walkways: https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=university+walkway+urban+legend&source=bl&ots=ahGcmzNYyv&sig=2jz01k2EAD8cCDgIybMYYpsOaok&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCtdXzwPvOAhWm3YMKHc2tDRQQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=university%20walkway%20urban%20legend&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=P... In short, students walked over the grass, despite the "keep off the grass" signs. The solution proposed by university president Dwight D Eisenhower was "Why not let the students take whichever route works, and then build the walkways over the bare patches?" The same could apply here. If the rank & file see person X as being necessary / useful, then give that person an official title and responsibilities.
    - xorblurb 10y ago
      There might be a problem, though. A person can be a go to for a subject because he filled a hole at one point, and then proceeds to kidnap the subject entirely and even obtains new semi-informal-subordinates to work on the kidnapped subject under their orders. Such maintainers are usually not bad, but they can at the same time make tons of dubious discretionary choices and lack random amount of theoretical or practical knowledge. Depending on the culture, the situation can stay like this during years, even decades. Bonus points if such people suffer from the NIH syndrome...
hodgesrm 10y ago
My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves. One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades. (Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)
- dboreham 10y ago
  Exactly. Hard to make a kid clean and tidy their room (source: parent, also engineering manager for n decades..)
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Do you work for one of those companies that hire only 22-year-olds who can answer irrelevant computer science questions on a whiteboard, and then you wonder why it's hard to get engineers excited about business goals rather than endless tinkering with algorithms and languages...?
    - hodgesrm 10y ago
      Actually my current company is pretty large and it's not like that at all. The technical people are by and large extremely good. And to your first question I have been through a few interviews with those 22-year-olds who asked about irrelevant CS questions. That's a good sign to avoid the company.
    - mwfunk 10y ago
      Age has little to do with it, it's more a combination of maturity, professionalism, intellect and talent. These things are correlated with age, but not as strongly as one might think. I've worked with 22-year old developers who had all of these qualities, and developers with 22 years of professional experience who didn't. It does tend to go the other way though. Even the best ones probably wouldn't flourish in a flat org though- that's not a knock against the developers, more the unsuitability of most software tasks to such a structure (or lack of it). On the other hand, I think there's a very strong correlation between people who think they would flourish in a flat org and people who wouldn't do well in one. The only people who might do all right are those who would join a flat org with great skepticism and trepidation, because they would be paranoid enough about things going off the rails that they would obsess over making sure that their own goals are set appropriately as well as the people around them. If you get rid of managers, essentially everyone becomes a manager of sorts and they need to really embrace the role to make it work.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
We desperately need to find new organisational forms - it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships However the transition is hard. Democracy is nice but companies are too close to the daily life of people to allow a vote every four years and let others decide policy GitHub could have experimented with new ways of deciding policy (voting) - and I would argue that it's likely they would have got things like "write good docs" voted in anyway. And it would be interesting to see how one handles voting on issues like "gender bias" But we will all have to have companies like this one day - otherwise where do the big value wins come from. We can't keep inventing technology of the 21 C and hope they overcome the management hierarchies of the Stone Age
- fsloth 10y ago
  "it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships" I think you are confusing structure and culture. I've always worked for the past decade under a boss and retained autonomy and spiritual ownership of my work. Yes, a boss can be a micromanaging asshole but going full anarcho-syndicalism usually just means that politics will happen, structures of influence and fealty will form and the end result is still a tree of authority.
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    The problem is you have no - absolutely no - right to influence policy and business decisions; decisions that vastly overwhelm the impact your good or bad coding will have on the value produced by the company. I had to look up anarcho-syndicalism and no I don't think that's what I mean. I mean democratic participation of the whole company in the decisions affecting the whole company. Edit: unfair to say no influence. Fair to say no "right" to an influence.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      I don't think there is any legislation to stop running a company in an inclusive way. W.L.Gore and Associates of Gore-Tex fame are renowned for their organizational culture, for example (based on what I've read): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates There are lots of different types of decisions made at companies. For example, Germany mandates a high level of employee influence at companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany while remaining typically authoritarian in day to day activities (I've heard). Non-democratic governance does not mean people could not be encouraged to participate and be creative. The book "Creativity Inc" by Ed Catmull ponders the problems of leadership and management at Pixar (namely, how they attempt to avoid all the stupid mistakes that are obvious in hindsight). You might be interested int the "seven day weekend" by Ricardo Semler as well. Human organizations are complex and difficult. I don't think you can legislate the pathologies away unless they are really obvious. But there are several companies already that include workers way better than not.
Animats 10y ago
It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who really, really want to make computer games. (This is also why game developers tend to be exploited. See the EA litigation.) It's surprising that it works for Zappos, which is just an online shoe store. Yes, there are people who are fanatical about shoes, but the business of selling and shipping them is not that exciting.
- aChrisSmith 10y ago
  Does it really? Valve is extremely profitable because of their particular role in the video games industry. But outside of Steam, is the company really a role model for success? Is Valve's latest "new" IP DOTA2 successful when compared to the other set of MOBAs that have come out over the past few years? Have Valve's forays into VR and hardware been successful compared to other companies in the space? e.g. the Vive, Oculus? Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch? Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search, discoverability, etc. I am not an expert, and may have my details wrong about Valve. But I don't think the company has been especially successful outside of being the only game in town for buying AAA video games online.
  - theschwa 10y ago
    Just for some clarification on the VR side, the Vive is a partnership product between them and HTC. Valve did the R&D, and HTC did the manufacturing, adnd Valve helped Oculus get things off the ground as well. I'm not a gamer, so I can't speak to that world, but they are doing truly innovative things in VR.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    Would Steam have happened if they had a different management structure?
    - mwfunk 10y ago
      Perhaps not, but if it didn't it would be because the rest of the org that didn't want to do Steam would have been more empowered to stand up to Gabe, whereas with Valve's flat org, Gabe is God and everyone has to do what he says. It's probably best for Valve that Steam did happen, but if it's due to Valve's flatness, I would attribute that to the org's inability to resist Gabe rather than any sort of bonus wisdom that arose from that flatness.
unabst 10y ago
I've experienced first hand why businesses need bureaucracy, because I resisted building one. Turns out it's the same reason cars have 4 wheels. It just works. Some workers require oversight to be productive, and for some it just helps. This means you get the most out of your work force, and can also hire workers who can't manage themselves. But managers also abstract trust and responsibility from multiple staff to one staff, help organize workflow, and ensure proper communication across teams. It's a simple matter of fact that some work is more fun, some people communicate better, and people don't organize themselves. Add to this the coaching and mentoring factor of a good manager, and it's a no-brainer. Granted, what most employees fail to understand is if you have a manager, the company has already deemed you need one, and you're practically paying for your own overhead. Good managers are hard to come by, and are expensive. But businesses desperately need good managers because they solve most staffing issues. In other words, if you stop being complacent and just behave like a manager, chances are you will become one. Here is how it's done: You start by managing yourself and removing your own overhead. Then you start taking care of other responsibilities because you can't help it. Know what needs to get done, understand the big picture, and just help accomplish it from the side. And when you provide relevant insight about how to improve something, put out a fire, or organize a project, you're already manager material. Your goal is to replace your manager without actually replacing him, without being the boss, without pissing anyone off, and without higher pay. You just made your bosses job easier, increased the value of everyone else, and ensured work got done. If your company doesn't give you a raise, you're at the wrong company. Here is how it isn't done: You keep relying on your manager to keep you in check. You only accomplish your minimum requirements. You blame training for not being able to do anything else. You feel entitled for a raise just by being there for a long time. Both of the above are exaggerated to emphasize two opposites, but most people are somewhere in between. Of course, if you're not manager material and you suck at your job, the likelihood is you will get fired, so it's perfectly okay to be complacent and just do good work. But the point is, you have your manager to thank for your straight forward and fairly comfortable job, and at the end of the day, his/her salary is practically coming out of yours.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  What if you're looking for autonomy without becoming a manager?
rubicon33 10y ago
I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience. This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers, despite those junior engineers often being very wrong. The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment. Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.
- xorblurb 10y ago
  One of the problem is when the difference between technical leadership and management is not recognized. While titles can help, without a clear technical leader on top of that they are clearly not enough. And, most importantly, the titles must be in phase with the actual capabilities of people. Otherwise it is far worse than no title. And obviously, a good technical hierarchy can be quite hard to bootstrap in an organization where the culture was officially flat.
- 8ytecoder 10y ago
  The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues - a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173
  - 10y ago
ricardobeat 10y ago
> GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two-day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that’s expected to attract 1,500 attendees. This can't be serious...
- jdale27 10y ago
  What do you mean?
makecheck 10y ago
The key is that every task must have EXACTLY ONE BOSS whose say is final when a decision is necessary. A hierarchy works fine if it really is a hierarchy. It won’t work if the hierarchy has been poisoned with “dotted lines” or lots of unnecessarily-senior-sounding job titles that let senior people share control over project direction. I’ve worked in groups in the past where there were like 5 senior people trying to pull things in completely different directions, no one would tell us whose opinion really mattered, and we kept having to decide for ourselves.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Yep. A company shouldn't be Congress.
- xapata 10y ago
  Eh. At every large company I've worked in or with, even if there's officially one boss, the reality is it's a committee. Worse, when in the middle of a big organization, you're never really sure who has authority. Someone lower on the org chart might call their friend who is an SVP from some other branch of the company, they fly in to have their say... it's all politics, no matter what the org chart says.
booleandilemma 10y ago
I once worked for a company with a very flat organizational structure. It was just the CEO and thirty people underneath him. Every day I had 10 people coming to me with issues they all thought were critically important. I was being pulled in every direction and I couldn't focus on anything. It was a complete mess. Now I work at a company where I have one boss, and he acts as a funnel for all the work that comes into our department. I'm never going back to a flat company again, if I can help it.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  Not to say it's an unimportant difference, but the only difference is that your boss knows how to say "no" to immediate requests for you time and you don't.
samscully 10y ago
Depending on the business, there is usually a requirement for a coordination role. Whoever that coordinator is needs to have the authority to make a final decision in order to be effective. If companies want to avoid tyranny in the workplace then perhaps it would be better to have bosses but allow a majority vote of direct reports to fire them. Give 360 reviews some actual teeth.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
One of the ways I see manager's having a very positive impact on a product is by managing the (sometimes) competing interest of users versus engineers. As engineers, we can sometimes become obsessed with updates/refactors/optimizations that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. A user doesn't care about your cobwebs and dirty laundry, but as an engineer it's so hard not to obsess over these optimizations. It's so easy to forget that users don't care about the same things as you. At the same time it's maddening when you feel like you're working with a house of cards and your manager asks for a third story. I see a lot of conflict here, and this imho is what separates good technical managers from bad ones. They understand the competing interests and are able to prioritize work in a way that works best for everyone.
- collyw 10y ago
  > that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. The reason I want to refactor is to make the code easier to read and maintain and more likely to be bug free. It doesn't have any meaningful impact on the user experience, but it is making the software a lot better and keeps running costs lower and allows new features to be added more easily.
exstudent2 10y ago
And yet during the flat org structure time period Github was an innovation BEAST. It was one of the most creative technology companies I've ever seen and changed the way we do development. Since more structure has been put in place, innovation seems to have come to a screeching halt. The product feels old, new features are hard to come by, bloat and cruft are everywhere. Maybe they hired too many people for the job at hand?
- technomancy 10y ago
  I think you'll find the slowed pace happened a good deal before the managers came in if you look at the history more closely.
gosukiwi 10y ago
Those were simpler times, when GitHub focused on making a better product rather than organization, money-making and avoid getting sued by feminists.
bluenose69 10y ago
The genius of github is git. Did a manager help Mr Torvalds construct that?
- pluma 10y ago
  If GitHub was only git, we'd be talking about Gitorious (or Gitweb, or...) having hundreds of employees, not GitHub. I've heard people describe GitHub as the "Facebook of Open Source" and that's not as absurd a statement as it may seem at face value. GitHub is basically the SourceForge of Web 2.0. It's where you go for open source projects and it makes it easy to participate. I would hope to see GitLab succeed GitHub by virtue of being open source at heart (rather than just at the surface level) but as much as I love GitLab I'm not holding my breath. Either way, git is ultimately an implementation detail to GitHub's success. Git's success may have given GitHub the edge over BitBucket (back when BitBucket was hg-only and GitHub was git-only) but it feels like the inverse is also true.
mathattack 10y ago
The link to Medium's experiment is interesting too. https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9#.3xupsu3mh https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-mediu...
hoodoof 10y ago
Seems kinda childish to me to not want management.
- collyw 10y ago
  Try working a couple of months in my previous workplace and i am sure you will change your tune.
ilaksh 10y ago
Gitlab is cool but with things like webrtc, ethereum/swarm/ndn, gittorrent etc. out there eventually we will be able to get away from servers and definitely having one company in charge of storing all of the code is not the most ideal final solution.
yuja_wang 10y ago
I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone? Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - brobinson 10y ago
    I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos containing "problematic" language which were ignored.
    - SamReidHughes 10y ago
      Not just that repo -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250
      - brobinson 10y ago
        I'm honestly so jaded by the injection of language policing into everything that all I can do is sigh nowadays.
- kornish 10y ago
  Seems unlikely that an organization of GitHub's size would overhaul the entire management structure to deal with problems brought about by a single employee (or even a few).
- catwell 10y ago
  No, it's almost the opposite. This kind of thing started happening for the same core reason they added management: because of the Tom Preston-Werner / Julie Ann Horvath scandal two years ago. It made them understand the importance (and risk for the business) of such issues, so added HR and middle-management with a focus on them. As a side effect we ended up with things like this happening. The people with an agenda are not random employees in a flat company here, it's the management.
linuxhansl 10y ago
Interesting. I just talked to a friend of mine who is actually a lawyer. He told that in his firm of 300 everybody is a partner and nobody has a boss. Instead they periodically elect a body of 20 (or so) partner to deal with compensation, bad partners, sets policies, etc, etc. My buddy says that all the partner are fairly self-driven grown ups, and usually do the right thing. Rarely is there any action needs to be taken by that elected body. They do have a "CEO" in name to represent the firm to the outside, but with no other powers otherwise. And obviously you need some HR department. Immediately I wondered whether one could run a software company like that. Seems that GitHub drove it a little too far on the no-structure route. I wonder if they could have done what this firm does.
- blahi 10y ago
  Law firms are very different in how they generate revenue and operate than every other company. There is no basis for comparison.
  - mifreewil 10y ago
    Probably similar to a software consulting firm, but yeah different than a software product/service company.
  - jaggederest 10y ago
    The more I talk to lawyers the more I like the way they operate. Is there really no way to steal a lot of that structure for our field?
    - blahi 10y ago
      Sure if you are an application developer (like an integrator, BI, ERP, etc). Make cooperatives. But they won't be flat. You still have a boss - your partner. Every partner is like a mini company and they share resources and partners vote on future direction. It's not that rare actually. The ad agency conglomerates operate similarly. So do management consulting firms which are increasingly getting into tech consulting. Don't know how Accenture operates, but I would think it would be very similar. Ditto for Capgemini, Infosys, Cognizant, the list goes on.
spajus 10y ago
Next step: TPS reports.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Flat management structure is not the problem, is it? Someone always has more of a say in what gets done for whatever reason- seniority, skill, charisma, anything. What should really be flat is the pay scheme: pay every worker 1/n of the company's assets at the end of each financial period. That means anyone who wants more money must work to make the company prosper as a whole. Employees should also have the chance to decide who gets hired (because they have a motivation to hire only the people they think can increase their own pay). Btw, I'm totally willing to try this in my own company one day. And if it doesn't work- who the hell cares. Most companies fail for much more common reasons than their management or pay structure anyway.
darkmarmot 10y ago
Are they still using the Code of Conduct that explicitly allows "reverse-racism, reverse-sexism" etc. for members of marginalized groups?

259 points by lnguyen 10y ago

wutf 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

kaosjester 10y ago
I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether). That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.
- initram 10y ago
  Ever lived in a condo with an HOA (Home Owner's Association)? You get the opposite problem. One person, household, or small set of owners wants to be in power so they can make changes that benefit them, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the HOA so they can't be blamed when something goes wrong and because they're too busy with their lives. So a vote is held, most people don't show up, and even if they do, they don't want to do the jobs themselves so they vote for the people who want it, and the result is usually terrible.
  - GVIrish 10y ago
    This. And really, it's the same problem in elected government too. Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. People who might actually make great leaders (or at least would not be tyrants) often don't want to get involved with politics. In the work setting I've never seen management determined by vote, but you see the phenomenon just the same. Most people who want to climb the management ladder are normal, sane people, but the power-hungry are the ones who try the hardest to get to the top. In an organization that doesn't properly evaluate people you end up with the brutes in charge, which makes life miserable for everyone else.
    - vintermann 10y ago
      > Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. The funny thing is that the first democracy which called itself a democracy was perfectly aware of this problem - and the tyranny of informal leaders - and had a simple and effective solution to both problems: filling chairs by lottery.
- RonanTheGrey 10y ago
  I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one. Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.
  - mason240 10y ago
    Exactly, it's "leaderless" in the same sense that a class of high schoolers is "leaderless."
  - kaosjester 10y ago
    No, I got that. The article also has the person who demonstrated it advocating for democratic control of leadership, and I was commenting on how that might run into its own troubles.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  The biggest problem is that the business owners want management to represent their interests; if they were elected by the workers, they would more naturally represent the interests of the workers. It might work out in a worker's co-op where the workers and owners are the same people.
  - wffurr 10y ago
    I'm trying to understand how a "flat org" like this is different from a co-op. Seems like the "flatland" companies give you autonomy without ownership, which seems bad to me. It's only flat so far as the actual owner allows it to be, and you end up with a bunch of people with autonomy with no stake in the outcomes.
    - tjl 10y ago
      Co-ops still have boards and often employees that report to the board (or another employee). There's a structure there, but they also tend to be smaller so the structure has less impact. I was treasurer of my housing co-op and we had one full-time employee who reported to me and the board. That employee (the coordinator) hired contractors for maintenance, bookkeeping, as well as things like the laundry machines. Even large co-ops (like clothing stores) have the members vote a board in that sets up the structure.
- Jemmeh 10y ago
  I don't want my job to include voting people off the island and MORE office politics and meetings. Please no.
  - wffurr 10y ago
    Too late. As soon as you have more than three human beings in the same group, there's politics and meetings. You can either participate, or allow others to dictate to you.
    - Jemmeh 10y ago
      I know. I said I don't want -more- of that. Every single member of the team having to keep up with every single other person is unnecessary and impossible past a certain number of people. Certain things don't scale well.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Plato's dictum.
- fsloth 10y ago
  The only thing that works against cliques in democracy as you described is to have sufficient number of people at each level. The large parliaments are there specifically to block too strong unilateral cliques forming. A democracy full of tiny squabbles is a working democracy - a democracy in unilateral ageeement on all matters really is not a democracy anymore.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The full article. Her point seems to really boil down to this: We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites. And she continues on, the next section is particularly, interesting, describing how these elites she refer to create a network of communication which others aren't party to. I really recommend reading the whole thing. It's a pretty interesting article and, I think, gets at the problems (solvable in some or many cases) in any large organization, structureless or not. EDIT: And do read the article. It's much more than just the snippet I included. That's just her thesis, the rest explains it better and the consequences of insisting on informal organization.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  The problem is that the skills required to win votes generally don't have a lot to do with the skills required to be competent in any field other than electioneering. So elections don't end up quickly revealing and demoting the incompetent people so much as they do raising up people who are competent at electioneering, regardless of their competence or lack thereof in other matters. An example from history. Elections are actually how volunteer units in the early days of the American Civil War selected their officers. Every soldier got one vote, the whole regiment got together and cast their ballots, and the guy who got the most votes got to be the commanding officer. Very democratic! With just one problem: in almost all cases, soldiers voted overwhelmingly for officers who promised not to make them do all the tedious army stuff they hated, like drilling in formation and practicing their marksmanship... which it turns out are actually very important things for a unit to do, if it wants to actually perform in combat. So these units had a bad habit of dissolving into mobs of terrified amateurs (and therefore getting slaughtered) the moment they entered battle. Eventually it was decided that it was more important that army units be able to function in combat than that they be democratic organizations, and the elected "soldier's friend" officers were kicked out and replaced with hardasses. The soldiers hated them, and swore under their breath every time they were called out to drill yet again. But they learned how to fight.
  - yodon 10y ago
    That's incredibly interesting - do you have a source for it?
    - smacktoward 10y ago
      There's some good pointers to the election processes of a few different regiments (North and South) here: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/question-about-election-of-officers-in-acw-combat-units.119835/ http://civilwartalk.com/threads/question-about-election-of-o...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- serge2k 10y ago
  Isn't that what reviews are for? If you have substantive reasons not to like your boss then giving them a lousy review is easy. A manager who is getting lousy reviews from engineers is going to face difficulties with the higher ups.
sitkack 10y ago
A little fascism goes along way.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  The opposite of anarchy isn't fascism. Read the author's full paper, it's got a lot of insight into the workings of organizations in general.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Are you talking about the wikipedia article or http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm I have been in those same activist groups. Right now I work for an "engineering run" organization. Maybe my emphasis should have been on _a little_. Every organization collapses towards high-school. Those that don't are the most successful. Just as the majority of Olympic athletes are freak'n amazing, the contest is rarely not who excels but who doesn't falter.
rdoherty 10y ago
I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability. I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim. (One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.) > if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.
  - panic 10y ago
    Sure, but if you're not part of the informal power structure, having some influence through an official structure is better than having no influence at all. In my (somewhat limited) experience, you need a balance to get good work done: too much official structure slows things down and limits good people, but too much informal structure leads to the kind of place described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."
- jevanish 10y ago

danso 10y ago

It'd be cool to see an internal study, at least within the engineering group, of how commit activity/issue resolution changed before and after the new structure. On an aggregate basis, at least.

sidlls 10y ago
Could you elaborate on why you think that would be useful?
- danso 10y ago
  Ostensibly the decision to change structure is to improve productivity. Does it? And if so, how does it affect/improve it? Commit activity is as granular/quantifiable a data source as we have to analyze it. Obviously, the analysis shouldn't be limited to the mere quantity of commits. I'm more interested in if the activity becomes more "regular" than sporadic. Or if long-neglected (i.e. boring) issues get more attention than they did before.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    It would be interesting, but not immediately scientific when it comes to measuring productivity. A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at. What I would find interesting is a what is the slope of the line in terms of worker productivity as it varies with org size as the number of workers are added. Having a bossless architecture is fine when there is lots of interesting engineering work to do. Coordination and direction is just overhead when the organism should just spread in every direction. But after some point it needs to move and find food.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      " A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at." This is the best brief simplification of organizational dynamics on scaling I've had the pleasure to read.

morley 10y ago

I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find: > Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning managers in the spring. It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat organizations. Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure works?

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Yeah I agree with you I didn't find much of anything useful beyond this one other bit that added another, small explanation for moving away from bossless: > While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance. “Without even a minimal layer of management, it was difficult to have some of those conversations and to get people feeling like they understood what was expected of them, and that they were getting the support that they needed in order to do the best work,” No information about what the current structure is, how it's working out compared to the last one nor really any satisfying answers for why the initial bossless failed (I mean I can certainly guess but they went through it, it would be nice to have more data).
caminante 10y ago
My guess? The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a) raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on opportunities.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  This. Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!" PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe how they are now addressed. We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.

nathanaldensr 10y ago

Can GitHub--a company with 600 people--really be called a "startup" anymore (as termed by the article)?

civilian 10y ago
There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being inflated, I think there's "startup inflation". In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we ended up with something like: > A startup is a company that is new company, less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment. So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency? Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get commoditized. Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high-growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional business startups".
- fsloth 10y ago
  I think the brief description is a company in search of a new scalable business model. If the business model is not new then the business can be categorized as X (grocery chain, real estate dealer, machine shop, etc).
rrdharan 10y ago
Are they still seeing exponential growth?
skylan_q 10y ago
600 people Holy smokes. I didn't know it was already that large. What are they doing with 600 people that they were unable to do with 30? I haven't seen anything novel come out of there for a long time. Maybe Atom?

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Most of the people I've talked to who "reject management", they really reject "bad management".

metaphorm 10y ago
to be fair, that is _most_ management. good management is quite rare, unfortunately.
- kabdib 10y ago
  And much of the "good" management I've encountered is actually about protecting your people from the bad management around and above you in the organization. Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    Yeah, one of the trademarks of the managers I enjoy is that they leave me (mostly) alone and clear my path.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things. The problem is that if you get a professional PM, they typically have seniority on the org chart and call the shots, even when they don't have the technical capacity to do so. I'd like to experience an in team flat structure, one where management/PM is working for the team, not in charge of them.
    - kabdib 10y ago
      All the really excellent PMs at Microsoft that I worked with seemed "flat" to me -- they did coordination, technical documentation and basically "glued together" disparate groups. They were technically deep and would have made fine engineers, except they were better at communication and negotiation than your average engineer. They didn't seem to give a damn what the management structure was like, except to steer around it. The poorer PMs were the ones stuck in hierarchy, who managed schedules, tracked bug counts and (aside from bug triage maybe) did work that could have been largely automated. These folks tended to circulate through and were generally fungible, even at the nosebleed levels of their management tree. I would happily have traded 20 or 30 of the "bug counter" PMs for a couple of technical PMs who could write specs that meant something. (I saw many "bug counter" PMs quit, or get fired).

GrumpyNl 10y ago

Its just agile/scrum for management. How is that working out for you guys? Do you get things finished?

h4nkoslo 10y ago

Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant politically-vetted governance. "the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn’t be solved by the masses. While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance"

nate_martin 10y ago

"flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time.

icehawk219 10y ago
In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.
- adekok 10y ago
  That reminds me of the story of university walkways: https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=university+walkway+urban+legend&source=bl&ots=ahGcmzNYyv&sig=2jz01k2EAD8cCDgIybMYYpsOaok&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCtdXzwPvOAhWm3YMKHc2tDRQQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=university%20walkway%20urban%20legend&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=P... In short, students walked over the grass, despite the "keep off the grass" signs. The solution proposed by university president Dwight D Eisenhower was "Why not let the students take whichever route works, and then build the walkways over the bare patches?" The same could apply here. If the rank & file see person X as being necessary / useful, then give that person an official title and responsibilities.
  - xorblurb 10y ago
    There might be a problem, though. A person can be a go to for a subject because he filled a hole at one point, and then proceeds to kidnap the subject entirely and even obtains new semi-informal-subordinates to work on the kidnapped subject under their orders. Such maintainers are usually not bad, but they can at the same time make tons of dubious discretionary choices and lack random amount of theoretical or practical knowledge. Depending on the culture, the situation can stay like this during years, even decades. Bonus points if such people suffer from the NIH syndrome...

hodgesrm 10y ago

My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves. One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades. (Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)

dboreham 10y ago
Exactly. Hard to make a kid clean and tidy their room (source: parent, also engineering manager for n decades..)
- pavlov 10y ago
  Do you work for one of those companies that hire only 22-year-olds who can answer irrelevant computer science questions on a whiteboard, and then you wonder why it's hard to get engineers excited about business goals rather than endless tinkering with algorithms and languages...?
  - hodgesrm 10y ago
    Actually my current company is pretty large and it's not like that at all. The technical people are by and large extremely good. And to your first question I have been through a few interviews with those 22-year-olds who asked about irrelevant CS questions. That's a good sign to avoid the company.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    Age has little to do with it, it's more a combination of maturity, professionalism, intellect and talent. These things are correlated with age, but not as strongly as one might think. I've worked with 22-year old developers who had all of these qualities, and developers with 22 years of professional experience who didn't. It does tend to go the other way though. Even the best ones probably wouldn't flourish in a flat org though- that's not a knock against the developers, more the unsuitability of most software tasks to such a structure (or lack of it). On the other hand, I think there's a very strong correlation between people who think they would flourish in a flat org and people who wouldn't do well in one. The only people who might do all right are those who would join a flat org with great skepticism and trepidation, because they would be paranoid enough about things going off the rails that they would obsess over making sure that their own goals are set appropriately as well as the people around them. If you get rid of managers, essentially everyone becomes a manager of sorts and they need to really embrace the role to make it work.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

We desperately need to find new organisational forms - it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships However the transition is hard. Democracy is nice but companies are too close to the daily life of people to allow a vote every four years and let others decide policy GitHub could have experimented with new ways of deciding policy (voting) - and I would argue that it's likely they would have got things like "write good docs" voted in anyway. And it would be interesting to see how one handles voting on issues like "gender bias" But we will all have to have companies like this one day - otherwise where do the big value wins come from. We can't keep inventing technology of the 21 C and hope they overcome the management hierarchies of the Stone Age

fsloth 10y ago
"it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships" I think you are confusing structure and culture. I've always worked for the past decade under a boss and retained autonomy and spiritual ownership of my work. Yes, a boss can be a micromanaging asshole but going full anarcho-syndicalism usually just means that politics will happen, structures of influence and fealty will form and the end result is still a tree of authority.
- lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  The problem is you have no - absolutely no - right to influence policy and business decisions; decisions that vastly overwhelm the impact your good or bad coding will have on the value produced by the company. I had to look up anarcho-syndicalism and no I don't think that's what I mean. I mean democratic participation of the whole company in the decisions affecting the whole company. Edit: unfair to say no influence. Fair to say no "right" to an influence.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    I don't think there is any legislation to stop running a company in an inclusive way. W.L.Gore and Associates of Gore-Tex fame are renowned for their organizational culture, for example (based on what I've read): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates There are lots of different types of decisions made at companies. For example, Germany mandates a high level of employee influence at companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany while remaining typically authoritarian in day to day activities (I've heard). Non-democratic governance does not mean people could not be encouraged to participate and be creative. The book "Creativity Inc" by Ed Catmull ponders the problems of leadership and management at Pixar (namely, how they attempt to avoid all the stupid mistakes that are obvious in hindsight). You might be interested int the "seven day weekend" by Ricardo Semler as well. Human organizations are complex and difficult. I don't think you can legislate the pathologies away unless they are really obvious. But there are several companies already that include workers way better than not.

Animats 10y ago

It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who really, really want to make computer games. (This is also why game developers tend to be exploited. See the EA litigation.) It's surprising that it works for Zappos, which is just an online shoe store. Yes, there are people who are fanatical about shoes, but the business of selling and shipping them is not that exciting.

aChrisSmith 10y ago
Does it really? Valve is extremely profitable because of their particular role in the video games industry. But outside of Steam, is the company really a role model for success? Is Valve's latest "new" IP DOTA2 successful when compared to the other set of MOBAs that have come out over the past few years? Have Valve's forays into VR and hardware been successful compared to other companies in the space? e.g. the Vive, Oculus? Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch? Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search, discoverability, etc. I am not an expert, and may have my details wrong about Valve. But I don't think the company has been especially successful outside of being the only game in town for buying AAA video games online.
- theschwa 10y ago
  Just for some clarification on the VR side, the Vive is a partnership product between them and HTC. Valve did the R&D, and HTC did the manufacturing, adnd Valve helped Oculus get things off the ground as well. I'm not a gamer, so I can't speak to that world, but they are doing truly innovative things in VR.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  Would Steam have happened if they had a different management structure?
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    Perhaps not, but if it didn't it would be because the rest of the org that didn't want to do Steam would have been more empowered to stand up to Gabe, whereas with Valve's flat org, Gabe is God and everyone has to do what he says. It's probably best for Valve that Steam did happen, but if it's due to Valve's flatness, I would attribute that to the org's inability to resist Gabe rather than any sort of bonus wisdom that arose from that flatness.

unabst 10y ago

I've experienced first hand why businesses need bureaucracy, because I resisted building one. Turns out it's the same reason cars have 4 wheels. It just works. Some workers require oversight to be productive, and for some it just helps. This means you get the most out of your work force, and can also hire workers who can't manage themselves. But managers also abstract trust and responsibility from multiple staff to one staff, help organize workflow, and ensure proper communication across teams. It's a simple matter of fact that some work is more fun, some people communicate better, and people don't organize themselves. Add to this the coaching and mentoring factor of a good manager, and it's a no-brainer. Granted, what most employees fail to understand is if you have a manager, the company has already deemed you need one, and you're practically paying for your own overhead. Good managers are hard to come by, and are expensive. But businesses desperately need good managers because they solve most staffing issues. In other words, if you stop being complacent and just behave like a manager, chances are you will become one. Here is how it's done: You start by managing yourself and removing your own overhead. Then you start taking care of other responsibilities because you can't help it. Know what needs to get done, understand the big picture, and just help accomplish it from the side. And when you provide relevant insight about how to improve something, put out a fire, or organize a project, you're already manager material. Your goal is to replace your manager without actually replacing him, without being the boss, without pissing anyone off, and without higher pay. You just made your bosses job easier, increased the value of everyone else, and ensured work got done. If your company doesn't give you a raise, you're at the wrong company. Here is how it isn't done: You keep relying on your manager to keep you in check. You only accomplish your minimum requirements. You blame training for not being able to do anything else. You feel entitled for a raise just by being there for a long time. Both of the above are exaggerated to emphasize two opposites, but most people are somewhere in between. Of course, if you're not manager material and you suck at your job, the likelihood is you will get fired, so it's perfectly okay to be complacent and just do good work. But the point is, you have your manager to thank for your straight forward and fairly comfortable job, and at the end of the day, his/her salary is practically coming out of yours.

dasmoth 10y ago
What if you're looking for autonomy without becoming a manager?

rubicon33 10y ago

I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience. This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers, despite those junior engineers often being very wrong. The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment. Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.

xorblurb 10y ago
One of the problem is when the difference between technical leadership and management is not recognized. While titles can help, without a clear technical leader on top of that they are clearly not enough. And, most importantly, the titles must be in phase with the actual capabilities of people. Otherwise it is far worse than no title. And obviously, a good technical hierarchy can be quite hard to bootstrap in an organization where the culture was officially flat.
8ytecoder 10y ago
The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues - a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173
- 10y ago

ricardobeat 10y ago

> GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two-day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that’s expected to attract 1,500 attendees. This can't be serious...

jdale27 10y ago
What do you mean?

makecheck 10y ago

The key is that every task must have EXACTLY ONE BOSS whose say is final when a decision is necessary. A hierarchy works fine if it really is a hierarchy. It won’t work if the hierarchy has been poisoned with “dotted lines” or lots of unnecessarily-senior-sounding job titles that let senior people share control over project direction. I’ve worked in groups in the past where there were like 5 senior people trying to pull things in completely different directions, no one would tell us whose opinion really mattered, and we kept having to decide for ourselves.

paulddraper 10y ago
Yep. A company shouldn't be Congress.
xapata 10y ago
Eh. At every large company I've worked in or with, even if there's officially one boss, the reality is it's a committee. Worse, when in the middle of a big organization, you're never really sure who has authority. Someone lower on the org chart might call their friend who is an SVP from some other branch of the company, they fly in to have their say... it's all politics, no matter what the org chart says.

booleandilemma 10y ago

I once worked for a company with a very flat organizational structure. It was just the CEO and thirty people underneath him. Every day I had 10 people coming to me with issues they all thought were critically important. I was being pulled in every direction and I couldn't focus on anything. It was a complete mess. Now I work at a company where I have one boss, and he acts as a funnel for all the work that comes into our department. I'm never going back to a flat company again, if I can help it.

forgottenpass 10y ago
Not to say it's an unimportant difference, but the only difference is that your boss knows how to say "no" to immediate requests for you time and you don't.

samscully 10y ago

Depending on the business, there is usually a requirement for a coordination role. Whoever that coordinator is needs to have the authority to make a final decision in order to be effective. If companies want to avoid tyranny in the workplace then perhaps it would be better to have bosses but allow a majority vote of direct reports to fire them. Give 360 reviews some actual teeth.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

One of the ways I see manager's having a very positive impact on a product is by managing the (sometimes) competing interest of users versus engineers. As engineers, we can sometimes become obsessed with updates/refactors/optimizations that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. A user doesn't care about your cobwebs and dirty laundry, but as an engineer it's so hard not to obsess over these optimizations. It's so easy to forget that users don't care about the same things as you. At the same time it's maddening when you feel like you're working with a house of cards and your manager asks for a third story. I see a lot of conflict here, and this imho is what separates good technical managers from bad ones. They understand the competing interests and are able to prioritize work in a way that works best for everyone.

collyw 10y ago
> that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. The reason I want to refactor is to make the code easier to read and maintain and more likely to be bug free. It doesn't have any meaningful impact on the user experience, but it is making the software a lot better and keeps running costs lower and allows new features to be added more easily.

exstudent2 10y ago

And yet during the flat org structure time period Github was an innovation BEAST. It was one of the most creative technology companies I've ever seen and changed the way we do development. Since more structure has been put in place, innovation seems to have come to a screeching halt. The product feels old, new features are hard to come by, bloat and cruft are everywhere. Maybe they hired too many people for the job at hand?

technomancy 10y ago
I think you'll find the slowed pace happened a good deal before the managers came in if you look at the history more closely.

gosukiwi 10y ago

Those were simpler times, when GitHub focused on making a better product rather than organization, money-making and avoid getting sued by feminists.

bluenose69 10y ago

The genius of github is git. Did a manager help Mr Torvalds construct that?

pluma 10y ago
If GitHub was only git, we'd be talking about Gitorious (or Gitweb, or...) having hundreds of employees, not GitHub. I've heard people describe GitHub as the "Facebook of Open Source" and that's not as absurd a statement as it may seem at face value. GitHub is basically the SourceForge of Web 2.0. It's where you go for open source projects and it makes it easy to participate. I would hope to see GitLab succeed GitHub by virtue of being open source at heart (rather than just at the surface level) but as much as I love GitLab I'm not holding my breath. Either way, git is ultimately an implementation detail to GitHub's success. Git's success may have given GitHub the edge over BitBucket (back when BitBucket was hg-only and GitHub was git-only) but it feels like the inverse is also true.

mathattack 10y ago

The link to Medium's experiment is interesting too. https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9#.3xupsu3mh https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-mediu...

hoodoof 10y ago

Seems kinda childish to me to not want management.

collyw 10y ago
Try working a couple of months in my previous workplace and i am sure you will change your tune.

ilaksh 10y ago

Gitlab is cool but with things like webrtc, ethereum/swarm/ndn, gittorrent etc. out there eventually we will be able to get away from servers and definitely having one company in charge of storing all of the code is not the most ideal final solution.

yuja_wang 10y ago

I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone? Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
Can you elaborate?
- brobinson 10y ago
  I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos containing "problematic" language which were ignored.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    Not just that repo -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250
    - brobinson 10y ago
      I'm honestly so jaded by the injection of language policing into everything that all I can do is sigh nowadays.
kornish 10y ago
Seems unlikely that an organization of GitHub's size would overhaul the entire management structure to deal with problems brought about by a single employee (or even a few).
catwell 10y ago
No, it's almost the opposite. This kind of thing started happening for the same core reason they added management: because of the Tom Preston-Werner / Julie Ann Horvath scandal two years ago. It made them understand the importance (and risk for the business) of such issues, so added HR and middle-management with a focus on them. As a side effect we ended up with things like this happening. The people with an agenda are not random employees in a flat company here, it's the management.

linuxhansl 10y ago

Interesting. I just talked to a friend of mine who is actually a lawyer. He told that in his firm of 300 everybody is a partner and nobody has a boss. Instead they periodically elect a body of 20 (or so) partner to deal with compensation, bad partners, sets policies, etc, etc. My buddy says that all the partner are fairly self-driven grown ups, and usually do the right thing. Rarely is there any action needs to be taken by that elected body. They do have a "CEO" in name to represent the firm to the outside, but with no other powers otherwise. And obviously you need some HR department. Immediately I wondered whether one could run a software company like that. Seems that GitHub drove it a little too far on the no-structure route. I wonder if they could have done what this firm does.

blahi 10y ago
Law firms are very different in how they generate revenue and operate than every other company. There is no basis for comparison.
- mifreewil 10y ago
  Probably similar to a software consulting firm, but yeah different than a software product/service company.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  The more I talk to lawyers the more I like the way they operate. Is there really no way to steal a lot of that structure for our field?
  - blahi 10y ago
    Sure if you are an application developer (like an integrator, BI, ERP, etc). Make cooperatives. But they won't be flat. You still have a boss - your partner. Every partner is like a mini company and they share resources and partners vote on future direction. It's not that rare actually. The ad agency conglomerates operate similarly. So do management consulting firms which are increasingly getting into tech consulting. Don't know how Accenture operates, but I would think it would be very similar. Ditto for Capgemini, Infosys, Cognizant, the list goes on.

spajus 10y ago

Next step: TPS reports.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Flat management structure is not the problem, is it? Someone always has more of a say in what gets done for whatever reason- seniority, skill, charisma, anything. What should really be flat is the pay scheme: pay every worker 1/n of the company's assets at the end of each financial period. That means anyone who wants more money must work to make the company prosper as a whole. Employees should also have the chance to decide who gets hired (because they have a motivation to hire only the people they think can increase their own pay). Btw, I'm totally willing to try this in my own company one day. And if it doesn't work- who the hell cares. Most companies fail for much more common reasons than their management or pay structure anyway.

darkmarmot 10y ago

Are they still using the Code of Conduct that explicitly allows "reverse-racism, reverse-sexism" etc. for members of marginalized groups?