Comment by metaketra
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.
> 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.