Once, I tried management in a traditional "tree" company for a summer. Among my reports were two individuals, one of whom was a pretty good coder who didn't wa

Once, I tried management in a traditional "tree" company for a summer. Among my reports were two individuals, one of whom was a pretty good coder who didn't want to talk to anyone, the other was an utter incompetent who could barely speak English (I have no idea how he was still employed). Both worked with closed doors and neither talked to anyone, and neither of these guys did very well on reviews [which I wasn't involved in, since I was just a substitute manager]. You didn't want to be either one of these people when the layoffs hit. Your own manager might go to bat for you, but nothing says "keeper" to other managers like a nice string of public and visible wins. If nobody knows what you are working on, that's a problem in any company. It's probably worse in a flat org, but it's still bad in a tree. Self promotion is necessary, at least to some extent. You could be a great engineer but in a tree structure you're going to get passed over for interesting projects because nobody knows what you can really do. In a flat org you'll ideally get feedback that you can work on before your ass gets fired, but you can't count on it.