11 ms·

Why we removed bosses at Treehouse

123 points by samscully 13y ago

chadwickthebold 13y ago
When Valve gets invoked like this, it's not always a positive thing. There was a good post about Valve's flat management structure about half a year ago [1], which raised several interesting points. Seriously, check out that post, and read up on 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017748
- mercer 13y ago
  That's exactly what my reservations are about this approach. Perhaps the problem is not so much that they chose a management-less structure, but rather that they imposed a new approach top-down. Hierarchy isn't always bad, nor are managers. I mean, the army (special case perhaps) probably wouldn't function without it. Perhaps in companies that can experiment in this manner, a better approach is to try and organically grow models that fit that specific company. As another commenter mentioned, you could start with giving developers x% time to do whatever they want, and scale up from that. Then regularly review any metrics that matter to you (the boss), and adjust. The way I see it, humans in any context need structure of some kind. Why not focus on having people that are good at feeling the needs within the company, and grow structures from there. Maybe some parts of the company actually need hierarchy, and maybe others don't.
cloudflare 13y ago
Similar lack of structure exists at CloudFlare.
- aet 13y ago
  How does one get fired at CloudFlare? Who evaluates employee performance?
dscrd 13y ago
Is it just a coincidence that I never hear again of a company that declared something like this?
- randomdata 13y ago
  W.L. Gore and Associates, the company behind the Gore-Tex brand, uses a similar management structure and has since the '50s.
  - ryancarson 13y ago
    and they have 9,000+ employees!
- mattlutze 13y ago
  Other than Valve, of course. HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877674 Their new employee manual: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
  - enjo 13y ago
    SEMCO, to me, is the best example of this. While they haven't fired all of their managers, they are a very large company doing self-management in a whole bunch of different verticals. Books by the SEMCO founder, Ricardo Semler: Maverick - http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl... The Seven Day Weekend - http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-ebook/dp/B000PDYVXE/ref=sr_1_2 http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-...
- Edmond 13y ago
  No it is not...Ideas like this generally don't scale, it may work while they are still small. Flat organizational structures are nothing new, many big companies practice this to a certain extent. For instance many IT consulting companies have armies of workers without the typical boss, but you still have executives/managers to actually run the companies. Some companies will promote flat organizational structures but really often it is just a euphemism for lack of career advancement opportunities. So instead of employees aspiring to move up the ladder they are encouraged to move laterally (try different roles).
thisone 13y ago
There are degrees. The company I'm with as a senior dev, has less than 25 people, yet I've got 4 layers of management above me. If everyone is as professional and as dedicated as everyone else, and if conflict resolution and communication is easy between all people at the company, I can see the "no management" approach working.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Wow, my jaw just dropped open. Less that 25 people and 4 levels of management? How can you operate with that much bureaucracy in a small company? Very slowly, I'd imagine.
  - etherealG 13y ago
    all depends how involved each layer is. perhaps the top layer never even speaks to the other 3 more than a yearly meeting.
    - Sharlin 13y ago
      And how does the top layer make any decisions then, without being aware of what's happening in the company? If they only make decisions that can be made by participating in a single meeting per year, it doesn't really make any sense for that layer to exist at all. Continue recursively. If there really are four layers of management in a company with 25 employees, that basically means each manager has zero, one or two subordinates. I really cannot see how that could work very well at all.
      - etherealG 13y ago
        i was thinking ownership for a top layer, but that could be true for lower ones too. but i see your point, ownership and management are different things.
  - thisone 13y ago
    It's ended up that I treat my line manager as a normal co-worker who happens to sign off on my leave. I go to his boss when I need to discuss technical implications of decisions I'm making for the products. Next layer up is more of a filter between the CEO and the company. Who works on what comes down directly from CEO. It's tons of fun. Edit: my last salary review, 6 people were invited to it (including me).
dingaling 13y ago
Part 2 discusses more about forming projects and clarifies that whilst there are no 'formal' managers to cajole people into doing things, there still need to be 'sticks' to hold groups together. http://ryancarson.com/post/61606695537/how-to-set-priorities-create-budgets-and-do-project http://ryancarson.com/post/61606695537/how-to-set-priorities... I think it's interesting that beneath the tagline of 'people work on whatever they want' there is actually an expectation that peer pressure will prevent this; once you're onboard with a project, you are expected to stay and contribute otherwise you will be penalised in your quarterly reviews. So manager-in-person has been replaced with manager-in-peers. This is also the means by which people are discouraged from working on solo projects; since no-one can really rate them at review time, they'll slip down the rankings. As usual, however, no discussion about how boring regulatory things are done. Edit: actually that last statement was incorrect, sorry . If there is such a need then management is imposed: There isn’t any top-down prioritization (unless we are required by law to act on an issue or some “red alert” type work is required, which should be rare)
- adventureloop 13y ago
  I would imagine if the solo project benefited peers greatly, they could still score well in the peer review. Think of someone building a powerful internal tool. It does mean that any endeavor that doesn't produce quickly would be a bad candidate for a solo project.
pc86 13y ago
EDIT: One of my points was mistaken. See the end. I've seen this is several posts of Ryan's and it continues to bother me (from Part 3 of the linked series): > Everyone is hired at Treehouse at an industry-standard salary level that matches their job description. Most of our team is distributed and outside of expensive outlier markets (like Silicon Valley or NYC). > The only way to get a salary increase is by performing consistently well in reviews. We don’t have a profit-sharing plan or bonuses (other than the sales team which has a traditional sales team bonus structure). To me this is a way to pay people as little as possible. The "industry-standard salary" for a position like developer increases year over year by more than the rate of inflation. But without even standard cost-of-living increases, it sounds like working at Treehouse for any measurable about of time will put you in a worse financial position than if you bounced around. EDIT: It seems they do offer cost-of-living adjustments but only for employees who are performing well (not that I'm advocating giving raises to poorly performing employees, but we're talking about 1-2% to cover inflation here).
- jburwell 13y ago
  You need to have two increases annually. The first is an market/cost of living adjustment that person's salary increases commensurate with prevailing market. To my mind, this adjustment always works in favor of the employee. Therefore, if the market actually paid less for a job this year than last, then the employee would receive no adjustment. All employees receive these adjustments no exceptions. The second is a merit increase based on their performance. This increase is analogous to a traditional raise. An employee may or may not receive a merit raise based on the incentive system the company has put in place. Waiting to address poor performance until annual reviews is a horrendous anti-pattern. When an employee is performing poorly, it should be addressed as soon as it is identified. Therefore, a poor performance review should never be a surprise to anyone. Provided that the poor performance did not emerge near the end of the annual review cycle, truly poor performance reviews should be rare because the issue should have been resolved (either by the person correcting the problem or the company and the person parting ways).
  - loceng 13y ago
    So in a bubble market where salaries are potentially inflated, and then the market crashes, yet salaries stay the same? Isn't this a problem?
infinity0 13y ago
Of course, there will be lots of criticism that such schemes "don't scale". This is a BS red herring that detracts from the real issue. The general idea is for companies to be run as a democracy, like how governments are. IMO this is even more important than Basic Income. You spend 1/3 of your life working under these conditions, so why shouldn't corporations be democratic? As for "implicit hierarchy" or "informal authority", yes that is partly the point. Not for positions of absolute authority to be ill-defined by top-down management which don't reflect reality; but for recognition and respect to be awarded based on actual merit. Cliques and inappropriate peer pressure might form (as claimed by articles about Valve not too long ago[1]), but you can deal with that another way, instead of resorting to hierarchy and absolute authority. How do democratic governments work? That could be how corporations work. [1] Whether or not actually true is a side point; the things it described certainly could happen and therefore are theoretically interesting
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 13y ago
  > why shouldn't corporations be democratic Probably because it doesn't work as well as the alternative. There are examples of this working here and there, but not many. The good thing about companies, as opposed to governments is that it's pretty easy to swap one out for another, without physically going anywhere. You can even start your own and try it out!
  - infinity0 13y ago
    "Probably because it doesn't work as well as the alternative" is pure conjecture. The real reason is historic. In 200 BC, the only example of anything close to democracy would have been Ancient Athens. edit: it's still not that easy to start your own company, and the common advice these days is to "not try a new structure", so your argument doesn't follow there either.
    - davidw 13y ago
confluence 13y ago
You'd be surprised how fast rank gets pulled when the money stops flowing. Management structure is basically irrelevant at a company that's doing well. It's only under stress that you understand why the military has a strict hierarchical structure. It's to prevent organizational collapse under extraordinary conditions.
- toadi 13y ago
  In the military you are trained to go into extraordinary conditions. The reasons for this exercise is to stay out of the extraordinary 'issues'.
- undershirt 13y ago
  I'd like to read more about this. Do you have any sources?
chockely 13y ago
This makes sense for projects, but how does it work for the perpetual parts of running a business. Who takes care of payroll, tax filing, keeping the infrastructure running, etc.? Are these perpetual, "projects?" If anyone has any experience with this, please share.
- arethuza 13y ago
  You can outsource payroll, general accounting and tax stuff fairly easily. Serviced offices give you rooms, desks, chairs, someone to answer the phone, toilets, kitchens, physical security etc.
probablyfiction 13y ago
Someone needs to say something about that hideous layout. It's mobile-first and I had so much wasted real estate on my screen. So annoying.
- bauer 13y ago
  http://readability.com/articles/droi9kvk http://readability.com/articles/droi9kvk
corry 13y ago
I initially felt positive about this -- and I don't doubt that it's working for them -- but I have the nagging feeling that there would be a break in the accountability chain. I can imagine a board meeting where an investors asks "so why are you behind on your customer growth this quarter?" and one of the founders says "no one at the company thought those projects were worth doing this quarter, and we're only 'guides' to the planning process so we can't ensure that something like that gets done." Or a customer asks "why didn't you patch that security hole that we knew about last quarter?" - "no-one thought that project was as worthwhile doing this quarter as a bunch of cool but ultimately less-valuable features, and we are only 'guides' to the planning process so we can't ensure that something like that gets done." There has to be someone setting specific overall goals and being accountable for hitting them. (Edit: at least if I was an investor / customer / employee of the company, I'd feel better if that was in place) I'd be curious to hear more about how that's handled!
- andreaja 13y ago
  It's feels great to be able to blame managers when something goes wrong, but that's the only real difference between having or not having your 'accountability chain'. And if your company is structured to have someone to blame when things go wrong, you're not really building for success. I get that everyone is afraid of prioritization going out the window without managers, but in my experience (and ymmv), managers are no better than productives at prioritizing. Grown-ups are used to taking responsibility.
- waylandsmithers 13y ago
  At a company I used to work for which espoused the "upside down pyramid" model-- not quite a complete removal of managers, but a scheme in the same vain. A great idea in theory, but in practice, the company operated like any other, but it seemed the main purpose was to relieve mgmt of (some) accountability in a snafu.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
A manager's primary goal should be to make themselves superfluous as much as possible. Whether that can be attained for the full 100% depends not in a small part on the type of business your in. Doing away with managers entirely is not a one-size-fits-all solution. I also can't fail to notice that like this example, most of these attempts start with horror stories about a failing management / organization. Just because doing completely without management is better than the previous situation, doesn't mean that there isn't a middle ground which might work even better.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  > A manager's primary goal should be to make themselves superfluous as much as possible. My experience is that most managers have climbing the ladder as their primary agenda. Making themselves superfluous almost always does not align with that goal.
MSSU 13y ago
Sounds great ... call me in 10 years and let us know how it went. Somehow, I think the company will be acquired & re-orged, dead, or someone will take over who re-injects managers. It's sad, really, because in principle, I agree.
r0h1n 13y ago
While I hope this continues to work out for Treehouse, I'm not sure I agree with Ryan's problem statement: "In my experience, managers’ responsibilities were … - Communicating messages from top to bottom - Settling disputes - Managing careers - Keeping their teams motivated and happy - Shielding their teams from things they didn’t think they needed to know" I think that's a pretty narrow definition of management, esp. things like "communicating messages from top to bottom". While I don't disagree with the fact that a significant component of management, esp. large parts of middle management, can be done away with, I don't think any reasonably complex and growing organization can do away with management altogether. A great manager (who may also play a part as an individual contributor) can channel & amplify an organization's creativity and innovation. S/he will also ensure there is an alignment b/w the organization's high level strategies and the individual contributions being made. Much as we'd like to think that tech workers are unusually self-motivated or that online tools can fully substitute people management, in my experience neither are the complete truth. Further reading: - How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management: http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana... - The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7000.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7000.html - Be a Minimally Invasive Manager: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/be-a-minimally-invasive-manager/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/be-a-minimally-invasive-manager... Fair disclosure: I'm an MBA...biases, warts and all.
- snambi 13y ago
  Hey, he is the founder/ceo, so he should know what his managers did. It may be different from bosses in other companies. But, it sounds roughly correct.
  - dworin 13y ago
    Knowing what his managers did is one thing, knowing what his managers should have been doing is another. The problem is that there's a difference between what's on his list and what the best managers do, and what an organization needs from managers. Which might be why he was having the problems in the first place.
sturadnidge 13y ago
Bryan Cantrill from Joyent delivered a really good session at Surge this year on a similar theme, Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers. Well worth watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI
modoc 13y ago
I love the idea of this, but am not sure how this works when you have things like on-call rotations, support hour coverage, unpleasant tasks that need doing (late night deployments, etc...). If you let everyone self manage, and no one is handling support tickets during your published support hours, who's fault is that? How do you make sure that the least aggressive/most agreeable person doesn't get stuck with all the 3 AM deployments? Have a manager solves those problems, and I'm not sure how they'd get handled in a flat structured company. Without ownership and accountability for specific responsibilities and/or deliverables, I think that the least pleasant jobs would get dropped...
at-fates-hands 13y ago
Its interesting as someone who's worked at two companies and run four others, I'm surprised he missed one of the most basic jobs of a manager: Sets objectives. The manager sets goals for the group, and decides what work needs to be done to meet those goals. Also, when you have a flat structure, what incentives are there for people to aspire to anything other what they're doing now?? While I can appreciate his leap of faith, I'm not sure this will work out long term.
- falcolas 13y ago
  I agree with you about missing a basic job. > Also, when you have a flat structure, what incentives are there for people to aspire to anything other what they're doing now?? However, I feel that this makes the mistake of believing that the only way people want to ever grow is into management. For myself, this is absolutely not the case. There really do need to be other ways to grow other than into management.
  - webjprgm 13y ago
    Personally I do not want to grow into "management" because I don't want the job of managing people and careers. But I do want to grow into guiding product direction and picking my own projects. At most companies those two are linked. The more tenure/respect you have the more you can influence managers, but the managers still have ultimate say on the product direction. Because of this I keep thinking about whether it would be worth the hassle of being a manager just so I could have the control I want. It also makes being a startup (co-)founder very appealing because I'd be much more involved in what development gets done. Except then it would add even more overhead on top of managing people, since co-founders also manage finances, legal, PR, and take on risk. I agree there needs to be a better way for people to grow. That's why I'm interested in flat structure experiments.
    - at-fates-hands 13y ago
      >> I agree there needs to be a better way for people to grow. That's why I'm interested in flat structure experiments. I worked at a startup who got bought by a large corporation. We had already had a flat structure: Manager Team Lead Senior Developer Developer As soon as you moved to Senior Developer, your development ceased. Which lead to essentially a flat structure for developers since most didn't want to go into management. The only option was to quit - which happened frequently and increased turn over. This lead to another crisis of how to give developers a role besides management to aspire to. They came up with two roles. One was a "research and development" role and the other was an "application development" role. This lead to another crisis. When you have a large team of developers and only two roles to aspire to - you again have another flat structure. Too many people for too few spots put them right back where they started. If you didn't get an "R&D" or "App Dev" spot, developers got frustrated and left. It created more politics and backstabbing and "cliques". If you knew the manager, you got preferential treatment to get into these now prized roles. It actually created more problems than it solved. In order to get around this, you have to build a hierarchy structure, not just new roles. This include title changes as well as increase in pay, increase in responsibilities, etc. You can give developers a non-management track, but it as to be structured, and give people a sense they are achieving their goals and not feeling like they're being marginalized or just another cog in the wheel. This is why I'm not sure flat structures will work. When you reduce the ceiling of achievement for everybody, what else is there to look forward to?
peeters 13y ago
To me, the core issue here isn't specifically about management, but about allowing their developers to follow their intuition. I think a great way to do that is to set aside a time for developers to work on whatever they want to (within the scope of the project). Feel like your test coverage is lacking? You get X% to work on that. Some technical debt always been bugging you? Use your X% on that. The beauty of this approach is that it can start as an experiment, say 10% (or a day every two weeks), but then migrating to an environment where employees set most of their work queue is just a matter of adjusting X.
puppetmaster3 13y ago
In my experience programming is a dead end job, as is any work that creates 'output' (ex: a marketing document). To progress, you should be a parasite, and not work. Just create meetings and emails to stop others from working. They decide what you should work on and when you should be done by, how motivational. Am I a salve? The career goal and company goal are 2 different things. Unless you remove the parasites that have no output. So good job removing managers. I have a start up, I am a founder and I'm doing the same thing!
mseebach 13y ago
This is a link-baity title. They have clearly not done away with "bosses", as the two co-founders clearly are and remain bosses. They have just decided that between the two co-founders, they don't need more management, they can rely on self-management, which is completely sensible.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  As long as someone is handing out performance reviews, bonuses, and raises, there are bosses. This obviously includes the people with the checkbooks, but it also includes the advisers, formal and informal.
notjustanymike 13y ago
Is this -the- Ryan Carson of YouTube pre-roll ad fame? Because I still see them EVERY SINGLE TIME.
auctiontheory 13y ago
I paid for an annual subscription to their web design classes and thought they were horrible - I've subsequently found free resources that are much superior, like Codecademy. Maybe some good managers could have helped by taking the unpopular stand of "guys, this sucks, we need to do better."
hexis 13y ago
Another way to remove bosses is to work for yourself and co-ordinate with others through prices.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I find it interesting that this starts with : As we added more people to the team, we noticed something disconcerting: rumors, politics and complaints started appearing. This suggests that Ryan has confused "leadership" with "management". Good leadership means that people are all working to the same goals, good management means that people are working efficiently. If you want to fix rumors, cliques, and back stabbing. Look to your leadership. If you want to get more done with the same number of people look to your managers.
- goldvine 13y ago
  If you want to fix rumors, cliques, and back stabbing...it's not a leadership problem. It's a people problem! Hire better people that won't engage in petty crap like that...
  - crygin 13y ago
    It's been my experience that those negative social phenomena are emergent with any sufficiently large group of people. You need structural components in place to prevent them, or you need to not grow.
    - goldvine 13y ago
      I'd rather not grow ;-)
      - alttab 13y ago
        So youd rather fail? Or stay lifestyle?
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    At some level it is always a people problem :-). But my experience has been that people trying to get things done (leading) who are being interfered with by other people trying to get other things done (also leading) can trigger conflict. And if you've taken a conflict management class, all of the kinds of things we think of as 'office politics' are variations on low level conflicts in action. You "fix" that by putting everyone on the same page going in the same direction. That is leadership. If you've got someone who comes in at 10AM and leaves at 4PM and takes a 2hr lunch break. But they start no rumors, nor backstab, nor empire build, that is a management problem.
saosebastiao 13y ago
There are many flaws with contemporary management practices, but its existence is not a flaw. You would do much better by not tying pay/promotion to management. When that happens, you explicitly create a whole level of organizational politics that is contrary to the organization's goals.
ryancarson 13y ago
Thanks for posting this. It's been fun to document how #NoBoss actually works day-to-day. My hope is that other companies will try this.
ransom1538 13y ago
Stock the fridge with tons of beer, pay young 20 something engineers tons of money, then remove accountability. Also, the "non-boss" founders should just walk around talking to who they like the best. This will drive the company towards a better product.
adregan 13y ago
I'm curious about the on boarding process for a new hire—green or experienced. When you go flat, whose responsibility is it to show the new person what to do and how to do it?

123 points by samscully 13y ago

When Valve gets invoked like this, it's not always a positive thing. There was a good post about Valve's flat management structure about half a year ago [1], which raised several interesting points. Seriously, check out that post, and read up on 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017748

mercer 13y ago
That's exactly what my reservations are about this approach. Perhaps the problem is not so much that they chose a management-less structure, but rather that they imposed a new approach top-down. Hierarchy isn't always bad, nor are managers. I mean, the army (special case perhaps) probably wouldn't function without it. Perhaps in companies that can experiment in this manner, a better approach is to try and organically grow models that fit that specific company. As another commenter mentioned, you could start with giving developers x% time to do whatever they want, and scale up from that. Then regularly review any metrics that matter to you (the boss), and adjust. The way I see it, humans in any context need structure of some kind. Why not focus on having people that are good at feeling the needs within the company, and grow structures from there. Maybe some parts of the company actually need hierarchy, and maybe others don't.

cloudflare 13y ago

Similar lack of structure exists at CloudFlare.

aet 13y ago
How does one get fired at CloudFlare? Who evaluates employee performance?

dscrd 13y ago

Is it just a coincidence that I never hear again of a company that declared something like this?

randomdata 13y ago
W.L. Gore and Associates, the company behind the Gore-Tex brand, uses a similar management structure and has since the '50s.
- ryancarson 13y ago
  and they have 9,000+ employees!
mattlutze 13y ago
Other than Valve, of course. HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877674 Their new employee manual: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
- enjo 13y ago
  SEMCO, to me, is the best example of this. While they haven't fired all of their managers, they are a very large company doing self-management in a whole bunch of different verticals. Books by the SEMCO founder, Ricardo Semler: Maverick - http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl... The Seven Day Weekend - http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-ebook/dp/B000PDYVXE/ref=sr_1_2 http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-...
Edmond 13y ago
No it is not...Ideas like this generally don't scale, it may work while they are still small. Flat organizational structures are nothing new, many big companies practice this to a certain extent. For instance many IT consulting companies have armies of workers without the typical boss, but you still have executives/managers to actually run the companies. Some companies will promote flat organizational structures but really often it is just a euphemism for lack of career advancement opportunities. So instead of employees aspiring to move up the ladder they are encouraged to move laterally (try different roles).

thisone 13y ago

There are degrees. The company I'm with as a senior dev, has less than 25 people, yet I've got 4 layers of management above me. If everyone is as professional and as dedicated as everyone else, and if conflict resolution and communication is easy between all people at the company, I can see the "no management" approach working.

jnbiche 13y ago
Wow, my jaw just dropped open. Less that 25 people and 4 levels of management? How can you operate with that much bureaucracy in a small company? Very slowly, I'd imagine.
- etherealG 13y ago
  all depends how involved each layer is. perhaps the top layer never even speaks to the other 3 more than a yearly meeting.
  - Sharlin 13y ago
    And how does the top layer make any decisions then, without being aware of what's happening in the company? If they only make decisions that can be made by participating in a single meeting per year, it doesn't really make any sense for that layer to exist at all. Continue recursively. If there really are four layers of management in a company with 25 employees, that basically means each manager has zero, one or two subordinates. I really cannot see how that could work very well at all.
    - etherealG 13y ago
      i was thinking ownership for a top layer, but that could be true for lower ones too. but i see your point, ownership and management are different things.
- thisone 13y ago
  It's ended up that I treat my line manager as a normal co-worker who happens to sign off on my leave. I go to his boss when I need to discuss technical implications of decisions I'm making for the products. Next layer up is more of a filter between the CEO and the company. Who works on what comes down directly from CEO. It's tons of fun. Edit: my last salary review, 6 people were invited to it (including me).

dingaling 13y ago

Part 2 discusses more about forming projects and clarifies that whilst there are no 'formal' managers to cajole people into doing things, there still need to be 'sticks' to hold groups together. http://ryancarson.com/post/61606695537/how-to-set-priorities-create-budgets-and-do-project http://ryancarson.com/post/61606695537/how-to-set-priorities... I think it's interesting that beneath the tagline of 'people work on whatever they want' there is actually an expectation that peer pressure will prevent this; once you're onboard with a project, you are expected to stay and contribute otherwise you will be penalised in your quarterly reviews. So manager-in-person has been replaced with manager-in-peers. This is also the means by which people are discouraged from working on solo projects; since no-one can really rate them at review time, they'll slip down the rankings. As usual, however, no discussion about how boring regulatory things are done. Edit: actually that last statement was incorrect, sorry . If there is such a need then management is imposed: There isn’t any top-down prioritization (unless we are required by law to act on an issue or some “red alert” type work is required, which should be rare)

adventureloop 13y ago
I would imagine if the solo project benefited peers greatly, they could still score well in the peer review. Think of someone building a powerful internal tool. It does mean that any endeavor that doesn't produce quickly would be a bad candidate for a solo project.

pc86 13y ago

EDIT: One of my points was mistaken. See the end. I've seen this is several posts of Ryan's and it continues to bother me (from Part 3 of the linked series): > Everyone is hired at Treehouse at an industry-standard salary level that matches their job description. Most of our team is distributed and outside of expensive outlier markets (like Silicon Valley or NYC). > The only way to get a salary increase is by performing consistently well in reviews. We don’t have a profit-sharing plan or bonuses (other than the sales team which has a traditional sales team bonus structure). To me this is a way to pay people as little as possible. The "industry-standard salary" for a position like developer increases year over year by more than the rate of inflation. But without even standard cost-of-living increases, it sounds like working at Treehouse for any measurable about of time will put you in a worse financial position than if you bounced around. EDIT: It seems they do offer cost-of-living adjustments but only for employees who are performing well (not that I'm advocating giving raises to poorly performing employees, but we're talking about 1-2% to cover inflation here).

jburwell 13y ago
You need to have two increases annually. The first is an market/cost of living adjustment that person's salary increases commensurate with prevailing market. To my mind, this adjustment always works in favor of the employee. Therefore, if the market actually paid less for a job this year than last, then the employee would receive no adjustment. All employees receive these adjustments no exceptions. The second is a merit increase based on their performance. This increase is analogous to a traditional raise. An employee may or may not receive a merit raise based on the incentive system the company has put in place. Waiting to address poor performance until annual reviews is a horrendous anti-pattern. When an employee is performing poorly, it should be addressed as soon as it is identified. Therefore, a poor performance review should never be a surprise to anyone. Provided that the poor performance did not emerge near the end of the annual review cycle, truly poor performance reviews should be rare because the issue should have been resolved (either by the person correcting the problem or the company and the person parting ways).
- loceng 13y ago
  So in a bubble market where salaries are potentially inflated, and then the market crashes, yet salaries stay the same? Isn't this a problem?

infinity0 13y ago

Of course, there will be lots of criticism that such schemes "don't scale". This is a BS red herring that detracts from the real issue. The general idea is for companies to be run as a democracy, like how governments are. IMO this is even more important than Basic Income. You spend 1/3 of your life working under these conditions, so why shouldn't corporations be democratic? As for "implicit hierarchy" or "informal authority", yes that is partly the point. Not for positions of absolute authority to be ill-defined by top-down management which don't reflect reality; but for recognition and respect to be awarded based on actual merit. Cliques and inappropriate peer pressure might form (as claimed by articles about Valve not too long ago[1]), but you can deal with that another way, instead of resorting to hierarchy and absolute authority. How do democratic governments work? That could be how corporations work. [1] Whether or not actually true is a side point; the things it described certainly could happen and therefore are theoretically interesting

deleted 13y ago
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davidw 13y ago
> why shouldn't corporations be democratic Probably because it doesn't work as well as the alternative. There are examples of this working here and there, but not many. The good thing about companies, as opposed to governments is that it's pretty easy to swap one out for another, without physically going anywhere. You can even start your own and try it out!
- infinity0 13y ago
  "Probably because it doesn't work as well as the alternative" is pure conjecture. The real reason is historic. In 200 BC, the only example of anything close to democracy would have been Ancient Athens. edit: it's still not that easy to start your own company, and the common advice these days is to "not try a new structure", so your argument doesn't follow there either.
  - davidw 13y ago

confluence 13y ago

You'd be surprised how fast rank gets pulled when the money stops flowing. Management structure is basically irrelevant at a company that's doing well. It's only under stress that you understand why the military has a strict hierarchical structure. It's to prevent organizational collapse under extraordinary conditions.

toadi 13y ago
In the military you are trained to go into extraordinary conditions. The reasons for this exercise is to stay out of the extraordinary 'issues'.
undershirt 13y ago
I'd like to read more about this. Do you have any sources?

chockely 13y ago

This makes sense for projects, but how does it work for the perpetual parts of running a business. Who takes care of payroll, tax filing, keeping the infrastructure running, etc.? Are these perpetual, "projects?" If anyone has any experience with this, please share.

arethuza 13y ago
You can outsource payroll, general accounting and tax stuff fairly easily. Serviced offices give you rooms, desks, chairs, someone to answer the phone, toilets, kitchens, physical security etc.

probablyfiction 13y ago

Someone needs to say something about that hideous layout. It's mobile-first and I had so much wasted real estate on my screen. So annoying.

bauer 13y ago
http://readability.com/articles/droi9kvk http://readability.com/articles/droi9kvk

corry 13y ago

I initially felt positive about this -- and I don't doubt that it's working for them -- but I have the nagging feeling that there would be a break in the accountability chain. I can imagine a board meeting where an investors asks "so why are you behind on your customer growth this quarter?" and one of the founders says "no one at the company thought those projects were worth doing this quarter, and we're only 'guides' to the planning process so we can't ensure that something like that gets done." Or a customer asks "why didn't you patch that security hole that we knew about last quarter?" - "no-one thought that project was as worthwhile doing this quarter as a bunch of cool but ultimately less-valuable features, and we are only 'guides' to the planning process so we can't ensure that something like that gets done." There has to be someone setting specific overall goals and being accountable for hitting them. (Edit: at least if I was an investor / customer / employee of the company, I'd feel better if that was in place) I'd be curious to hear more about how that's handled!

andreaja 13y ago
It's feels great to be able to blame managers when something goes wrong, but that's the only real difference between having or not having your 'accountability chain'. And if your company is structured to have someone to blame when things go wrong, you're not really building for success. I get that everyone is afraid of prioritization going out the window without managers, but in my experience (and ymmv), managers are no better than productives at prioritizing. Grown-ups are used to taking responsibility.
waylandsmithers 13y ago
At a company I used to work for which espoused the "upside down pyramid" model-- not quite a complete removal of managers, but a scheme in the same vain. A great idea in theory, but in practice, the company operated like any other, but it seemed the main purpose was to relieve mgmt of (some) accountability in a snafu.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

A manager's primary goal should be to make themselves superfluous as much as possible. Whether that can be attained for the full 100% depends not in a small part on the type of business your in. Doing away with managers entirely is not a one-size-fits-all solution. I also can't fail to notice that like this example, most of these attempts start with horror stories about a failing management / organization. Just because doing completely without management is better than the previous situation, doesn't mean that there isn't a middle ground which might work even better.

Iftheshoefits 13y ago
> A manager's primary goal should be to make themselves superfluous as much as possible. My experience is that most managers have climbing the ladder as their primary agenda. Making themselves superfluous almost always does not align with that goal.

MSSU 13y ago

Sounds great ... call me in 10 years and let us know how it went. Somehow, I think the company will be acquired & re-orged, dead, or someone will take over who re-injects managers. It's sad, really, because in principle, I agree.

r0h1n 13y ago

While I hope this continues to work out for Treehouse, I'm not sure I agree with Ryan's problem statement: "In my experience, managers’ responsibilities were … - Communicating messages from top to bottom - Settling disputes - Managing careers - Keeping their teams motivated and happy - Shielding their teams from things they didn’t think they needed to know" I think that's a pretty narrow definition of management, esp. things like "communicating messages from top to bottom". While I don't disagree with the fact that a significant component of management, esp. large parts of middle management, can be done away with, I don't think any reasonably complex and growing organization can do away with management altogether. A great manager (who may also play a part as an individual contributor) can channel & amplify an organization's creativity and innovation. S/he will also ensure there is an alignment b/w the organization's high level strategies and the individual contributions being made. Much as we'd like to think that tech workers are unusually self-motivated or that online tools can fully substitute people management, in my experience neither are the complete truth. Further reading: - How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management: http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana... - The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7000.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7000.html - Be a Minimally Invasive Manager: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/be-a-minimally-invasive-manager/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/be-a-minimally-invasive-manager... Fair disclosure: I'm an MBA...biases, warts and all.

snambi 13y ago
Hey, he is the founder/ceo, so he should know what his managers did. It may be different from bosses in other companies. But, it sounds roughly correct.
- dworin 13y ago
  Knowing what his managers did is one thing, knowing what his managers should have been doing is another. The problem is that there's a difference between what's on his list and what the best managers do, and what an organization needs from managers. Which might be why he was having the problems in the first place.

sturadnidge 13y ago

Bryan Cantrill from Joyent delivered a really good session at Surge this year on a similar theme, Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers. Well worth watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

modoc 13y ago

I love the idea of this, but am not sure how this works when you have things like on-call rotations, support hour coverage, unpleasant tasks that need doing (late night deployments, etc...). If you let everyone self manage, and no one is handling support tickets during your published support hours, who's fault is that? How do you make sure that the least aggressive/most agreeable person doesn't get stuck with all the 3 AM deployments? Have a manager solves those problems, and I'm not sure how they'd get handled in a flat structured company. Without ownership and accountability for specific responsibilities and/or deliverables, I think that the least pleasant jobs would get dropped...

at-fates-hands 13y ago

Its interesting as someone who's worked at two companies and run four others, I'm surprised he missed one of the most basic jobs of a manager: Sets objectives. The manager sets goals for the group, and decides what work needs to be done to meet those goals. Also, when you have a flat structure, what incentives are there for people to aspire to anything other what they're doing now?? While I can appreciate his leap of faith, I'm not sure this will work out long term.

falcolas 13y ago
I agree with you about missing a basic job. > Also, when you have a flat structure, what incentives are there for people to aspire to anything other what they're doing now?? However, I feel that this makes the mistake of believing that the only way people want to ever grow is into management. For myself, this is absolutely not the case. There really do need to be other ways to grow other than into management.
- webjprgm 13y ago
  Personally I do not want to grow into "management" because I don't want the job of managing people and careers. But I do want to grow into guiding product direction and picking my own projects. At most companies those two are linked. The more tenure/respect you have the more you can influence managers, but the managers still have ultimate say on the product direction. Because of this I keep thinking about whether it would be worth the hassle of being a manager just so I could have the control I want. It also makes being a startup (co-)founder very appealing because I'd be much more involved in what development gets done. Except then it would add even more overhead on top of managing people, since co-founders also manage finances, legal, PR, and take on risk. I agree there needs to be a better way for people to grow. That's why I'm interested in flat structure experiments.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >> I agree there needs to be a better way for people to grow. That's why I'm interested in flat structure experiments. I worked at a startup who got bought by a large corporation. We had already had a flat structure: Manager Team Lead Senior Developer Developer As soon as you moved to Senior Developer, your development ceased. Which lead to essentially a flat structure for developers since most didn't want to go into management. The only option was to quit - which happened frequently and increased turn over. This lead to another crisis of how to give developers a role besides management to aspire to. They came up with two roles. One was a "research and development" role and the other was an "application development" role. This lead to another crisis. When you have a large team of developers and only two roles to aspire to - you again have another flat structure. Too many people for too few spots put them right back where they started. If you didn't get an "R&D" or "App Dev" spot, developers got frustrated and left. It created more politics and backstabbing and "cliques". If you knew the manager, you got preferential treatment to get into these now prized roles. It actually created more problems than it solved. In order to get around this, you have to build a hierarchy structure, not just new roles. This include title changes as well as increase in pay, increase in responsibilities, etc. You can give developers a non-management track, but it as to be structured, and give people a sense they are achieving their goals and not feeling like they're being marginalized or just another cog in the wheel. This is why I'm not sure flat structures will work. When you reduce the ceiling of achievement for everybody, what else is there to look forward to?

peeters 13y ago

To me, the core issue here isn't specifically about management, but about allowing their developers to follow their intuition. I think a great way to do that is to set aside a time for developers to work on whatever they want to (within the scope of the project). Feel like your test coverage is lacking? You get X% to work on that. Some technical debt always been bugging you? Use your X% on that. The beauty of this approach is that it can start as an experiment, say 10% (or a day every two weeks), but then migrating to an environment where employees set most of their work queue is just a matter of adjusting X.

puppetmaster3 13y ago

In my experience programming is a dead end job, as is any work that creates 'output' (ex: a marketing document). To progress, you should be a parasite, and not work. Just create meetings and emails to stop others from working. They decide what you should work on and when you should be done by, how motivational. Am I a salve? The career goal and company goal are 2 different things. Unless you remove the parasites that have no output. So good job removing managers. I have a start up, I am a founder and I'm doing the same thing!

mseebach 13y ago

This is a link-baity title. They have clearly not done away with "bosses", as the two co-founders clearly are and remain bosses. They have just decided that between the two co-founders, they don't need more management, they can rely on self-management, which is completely sensible.

humanrebar 13y ago
As long as someone is handing out performance reviews, bonuses, and raises, there are bosses. This obviously includes the people with the checkbooks, but it also includes the advisers, formal and informal.

notjustanymike 13y ago

Is this -the- Ryan Carson of YouTube pre-roll ad fame? Because I still see them EVERY SINGLE TIME.

auctiontheory 13y ago

I paid for an annual subscription to their web design classes and thought they were horrible - I've subsequently found free resources that are much superior, like Codecademy. Maybe some good managers could have helped by taking the unpopular stand of "guys, this sucks, we need to do better."

hexis 13y ago

Another way to remove bosses is to work for yourself and co-ordinate with others through prices.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I find it interesting that this starts with : As we added more people to the team, we noticed something disconcerting: rumors, politics and complaints started appearing. This suggests that Ryan has confused "leadership" with "management". Good leadership means that people are all working to the same goals, good management means that people are working efficiently. If you want to fix rumors, cliques, and back stabbing. Look to your leadership. If you want to get more done with the same number of people look to your managers.

goldvine 13y ago
If you want to fix rumors, cliques, and back stabbing...it's not a leadership problem. It's a people problem! Hire better people that won't engage in petty crap like that...
- crygin 13y ago
  It's been my experience that those negative social phenomena are emergent with any sufficiently large group of people. You need structural components in place to prevent them, or you need to not grow.
  - goldvine 13y ago
    I'd rather not grow ;-)
    - alttab 13y ago
      So youd rather fail? Or stay lifestyle?
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  At some level it is always a people problem :-). But my experience has been that people trying to get things done (leading) who are being interfered with by other people trying to get other things done (also leading) can trigger conflict. And if you've taken a conflict management class, all of the kinds of things we think of as 'office politics' are variations on low level conflicts in action. You "fix" that by putting everyone on the same page going in the same direction. That is leadership. If you've got someone who comes in at 10AM and leaves at 4PM and takes a 2hr lunch break. But they start no rumors, nor backstab, nor empire build, that is a management problem.

saosebastiao 13y ago

There are many flaws with contemporary management practices, but its existence is not a flaw. You would do much better by not tying pay/promotion to management. When that happens, you explicitly create a whole level of organizational politics that is contrary to the organization's goals.

ryancarson 13y ago

Thanks for posting this. It's been fun to document how #NoBoss actually works day-to-day. My hope is that other companies will try this.

ransom1538 13y ago

Stock the fridge with tons of beer, pay young 20 something engineers tons of money, then remove accountability. Also, the "non-boss" founders should just walk around talking to who they like the best. This will drive the company towards a better product.

adregan 13y ago

I'm curious about the on boarding process for a new hire—green or experienced. When you go flat, whose responsibility is it to show the new person what to do and how to do it?