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> My guess is no and there is still a hierarchy, however obscure. This is my suspicion as well, and my experience with "flat" organizations. Hierarchy and powe
by klodolph 4y ago
> My guess is no and there is still a hierarchy, however obscure.
This is my suspicion as well, and my experience with "flat" organizations. Hierarchy and power dynamics are phenomena that occur in organizations. If you do not create the power structure on purpose, it will arise spontaneously, as your organization grows. If you try to suppress power structures, the power structures will hide themselves.
This isn't some conspiracy theory stuff. It just means that in any organization, some people will have some authority--because they are liked, maybe because they get things done, maybe because they know things, maybe because they've just been around a long time. These people end up getting kept in the loop for decisions, not because anyone is directed to keep them in the loop, but simply because it's the way things are done. If you try to do something outside this power structure, you may encounter organizational resistance--if for no other reason than because you're doing things differently from everyone else. It is more difficult to navigate these kinds of power structures because there's still someone in charge, more or less--but it's not written down.
Sometimes you encounter a truly flat organization, but they tend to be very small. I don't think it scales well.
- the_af 4y agoAbout power structures arising spontaneously: indeed, that's the topic of a very insightful and well known essay about supposedly flat organizations (from the perspective of a feminist author), "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" [1] The gist is that in officially flat organizations, there always exists an unofficial hierarchy that arises organically, and that because it's unofficial it's unaccountable, unlike a formal hierarchy one could theoretically dissent with or challenge. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structureless...
- brnaftr361 4y agoYeah, but the obverse is equally important. Hierarchy and dynamics will also decay when there isn't a status quo built to support them at least that's how it works out in my noggin. I think the formalized hierarchy tends to ossify individuals, departments, processes and et cetera. Once that's established, it becomes rigid, and rigidity stops being fun and it stops being interesting.
- klodolph 4y agoWhat is the problem with "not fun" and "not interesting"? Why would I want an org chart to be fun or interesting? Usually, my goal is for anything "fun" and "interesting" to be either a direct responsibility at work, or something I do outside of work for pleasure.
- brnaftr361 4y agoThis is non sequitur, but I'll humor you: Don't work somewhere interesting. Walk the maze of the traditional establishment, and enjoy your quiet workday. There are so many opportunities for you to do that. Myself, I don't want to be driveling stupidly many hours a day over whatever apparati I might be charged with the operation of. I want stimulation and novelty. I want to be curious and satisfy it. I want to be confused and amazed. The many, many hours I'll spend at work, I want them to be edifying. Not some sacrifice to a faceless quorum of buzzards that I might live another day. This whole wage labor regime is a fairly new thing, and it hasn't been rightly tested in all its degrees of freedom. Something Hobbesian about the direction and shape it has taken, it's sad and cynical and skeptical but without faith.
- frutiger 4y agoThat’s a lot of words. But does it generate revenue?
- klodolph 4y agoI have to assume that you realize that this is all subjective. What you are describing sounds like the subjective experience of what you feel when you work in the traditional establishment. You feel unstimulated, but that's a product of your personality and your immediate environment. To put it another way... whether an environment is "interesting" depends on whether someone is interested. Choosing to leave a large organization gives you some freedoms and takes away others. It sounds like you value the freedoms that you get outside large organizations, and you have only harsh words for people who feel otherwise. Just to put this in concrete terms... let's say you are curious about compilers, or memory allocators, or network flow control algorithms. It tends to be only large organizations that will pay you to work on those things, and in order to my curiosity about those things, I would want to rub elbows with experts in those subjects. Those opportunities exist at the largest tech companies and in academia (and my experience is that academia is no less bureaucratic). For me, sometimes, navigating broken bureaucracies is a price that I pay to work on some really fascinating problems. The broken bureaucracy itself is a fascinating problem.
- scifibestfi 4y agoIt goes beyond human organizations too. Hierarchies are a natural structure and something we share with lobsters. That's how embedded they are and why suppressing them doesn't work. Life finds a way, hierarchies find a way.
- goldenkey 4y agoI heard that lobster fact from Dr Jordan Peterson
- Applejinx 4y agoLobster bro has not done well, either, so I wonder whether this is a 'fact' worth taking axiomatically. I suspect the reality is more of a dialectic between lobsterism and the intelligent undermining of hierarchy, because systems work better when the system thrives, not when the system is beholden to the biggest lobster in the pot :) the system's goals must surely be on a different level to the lobsters, and the system has to compete in turn with other systems… in a sense it's lobsters all the way up, but in another sense it's always necessary to balance the lobsterism with intelligence.