This sounds pretty ideal, and I think it's a smart move for a startup. But you're talking about a startup. I think it's an unavoidable feature of organizationa

This sounds pretty ideal, and I think it's a smart move for a startup. But you're talking about a startup. I think it's an unavoidable feature of organizational growth to start to accumulate "idle hands" - aka bloat, aka the Bozo Explosion. Finding a way for a startup with a simple hiring cycle to reduce HR is one thing; finding a way for Apple or Intel to avoid it is completely different, and you'd have to solve the Bozo problem both for finding hirees and for over-hiring HR people. It's a self-perpetuating thing, too, once a company reaches a certain size. Put differently, what you say about a critical mass of "middlemen" is true; the problem is, any organization will reach that critical mass at some point, regardless of its original charter or team structure or composition. For me, this is just why it makes sense to always work for small-to-midsize companies and never for large ones.