Comment by Bhilai

Comment by Bhilai 4 days ago

6 replies

View on Hacker News

> A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...

candiddevmike 4 days ago

IMO, this could be solved by having a finance team with good workflows and a real human resources team/psychologist on staff that would handle all of the interpersonal drama. It's an interesting anecdote but I don't think it was that great of an attempt or structured well enough to work.

Reply View 3 replies
  • buran77 4 days ago

    > this could be solved

    With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight.

    Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the same structure. And it's hell to deal with that when formally all have the same authority so none can override each other, but one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he wants.

    Do you think someone far away from everything you do will have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about the budget you requested, about the strategic decision you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have any say, they're not the boss.

    Your logic is no better that those pretending today that a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just replace all the programmers.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • metaketra 3 days ago

      I think it could work if it was designed for it from the ground up. Google's experiment's lasted months, and was, what seems like a whim of the owners, where as a lot of the workers probably expected a traditional company.

      Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure from what I've heard, and it's working pretty well for them, but they've also had it for a long time.

      So if you have a company, that works like that from the start, that people know it works like that, that it has support for it. You could make it work.

      I agree that forcing this structure everywhere wouldn't work, some people can work like this, others can't.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • buran77 3 days ago

        > Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure

        Valve has ~300 employees and operates in a field where they can afford more freedoms (try building large infrastructure projects with flat structures). Valve struck a good balance between autonomy for employees while still having some informal central coordination. Formally there are few bosses but in practice project managers and some people with seniority also act in those roles. At scale it can't work if you don't delegate any of the authority to smaller units.

        It's bad to have too many or too few layers. Sometimes the result looks the same, lack of coordination and inability to deliver consistently.

        Amazon has 1.5M workers. Can't imagine a flat structure working but I'm sure they were overdoing it with layers of management.

        Reply View 0 replies
aorloff 4 days ago

Yes this was a joke. Apparently not a well enough known joke, because a bunch of people took me seriously

Reply View 1 reply