This is well-said. To add some anecdata, I work in a “managerless” organization. It sucks. It’s hard or impossible to make certain changes because nobody has an

This is well-said. To add some anecdata, I work in a “managerless” organization. It sucks. It’s hard or impossible to make certain changes because nobody has any authority to do things that aren’t necessarily politically sexy (e.g. fixing bad security or setting up asset management). There’s also this expectation that if you want to do something, you can just do it. This sounds great on paper, until you realize that doing things like managing infrastructure is a full-time job for an entire team, and not a “once in a while” position for someone with little experience. I’d love to go the extra mile, but I only have 40 hours or so in my work week, and I’m busy with my actual assigned tasks. There needs to be a good balance (obviously too much red tape is counterproductive). Having managers can be nice when it explicitly assigns roles and responsibilities to a group, because that means not only are there dedicated people for certain tasks, but presumably they have a modicum of power to get things done. It also makes it plainly obvious whom you talk to if you need, say, a new laptop, or a printer set up, or a VPN account. Without managers you get company-wide emails like “who controls our website? I need to update something.”