Interestingly, your article seems to support the CEO's "no managers" policy: > It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt say

Interestingly, your article seems to support the CEO's "no managers" policy: > It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes. Google gives its rank and file room to make decisions and innovate OP: > I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around whether or not I am allowed to have or hire any dedicated engineering managers So Google, by design, had some managers with 30 direct reports. And they thought that went well. Meanwhile the above CEO wants the VP-engineering to manage 40 direct reports. The numbers are slightly different but they are in the same ballpark. I find the OP's response not very convincing. The above CEO isn't trying to build a no-hierarchy org. He wants his tech-leads to also double-up as mini-managers, with dedicated managers only at the VP/director level. I personally know of at least 1 other very successful company with a similar policy. The great thing with startups is that they are a low-risk avenue for experimenting with new ideas. Including new organizational-cultures. If Google and other early pioneers hadn't experimented with cultural changes, we would still be working in suits and drab gray offices. The CEO could have done a better job of explaining his vision to the VP before they joined the company. But besides that, I'm glad there are startups out there experimenting with radically new ways of working.