Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-06/why-github-finally-abandoned-its-bossless-workplace

by lnguyen • 10 years ago

259 245 10 years ago

wutf• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

kaosjester2• 10 years ago

I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether).

That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.

initram• 10 years ago

Ever lived in a condo with an HOA (Home Owner's Association)? You get the opposite problem. One person, household, or small set of owners wants to be in power so they can make changes that benefit them, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the HOA so they can't be blamed when something goes wrong and because they're too busy with their lives. So a vote is held, most people don't show up, and even if they do, they don't want to do the jobs themselves so they vote for the people who want it, and the result is usually terrible.

RonanTheGrey• 10 years ago

I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one.

Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.

TheCoelacanth2• 10 years ago

The biggest problem is that the business owners want management to represent their interests; if they were elected by the workers, they would more naturally represent the interests of the workers. It might work out in a worker's co-op where the workers and owners are the same people.

Jemmeh2• 10 years ago

I don't want my job to include voting people off the island and MORE office politics and meetings. Please no.

fsloth6• 10 years ago

The only thing that works against cliques in democracy as you described is to have sufficient number of people at each level. The large parliaments are there specifically to block too strong unilateral cliques forming. A democracy full of tiny squabbles is a working democracy - a democracy in unilateral ageeement on all matters really is not a democracy anymore.

Jtsummers2• 10 years ago

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The full article. Her point seems to really boil down to this:

   We cannot decide whether to have a structured or
  structureless group, only whether or not to have a
  formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be
  used any longer except to refer to the idea it
  represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
  which have not been deliberately structured in a
  particular manner. Structured will refer to those which
  have. A Structured group always has formal structure,
  and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It
  is this informal structure, particularly in
  Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.

And she continues on, the next section is particularly, interesting, describing how these elites she refer to create a network of communication which others aren't party to.

I really recommend reading the whole thing. It's a pretty interesting article and, I think, gets at the problems (solvable in some or many cases) in any large organization, structureless or not.

EDIT: And do read the article. It's much more than just the snippet I included. That's just her thesis, the rest explains it better and the consequences of insisting on informal organization.

smacktoward2• 10 years ago

The problem is that the skills required to win votes generally don't have a lot to do with the skills required to be competent in any field other than electioneering. So elections don't end up quickly revealing and demoting the incompetent people so much as they do raising up people who are competent at electioneering, regardless of their competence or lack thereof in other matters.

An example from history. Elections are actually how volunteer units in the early days of the American Civil War selected their officers. Every soldier got one vote, the whole regiment got together and cast their ballots, and the guy who got the most votes got to be the commanding officer. Very democratic!

With just one problem: in almost all cases, soldiers voted overwhelmingly for officers who promised not to make them do all the tedious army stuff they hated, like drilling in formation and practicing their marksmanship... which it turns out are actually very important things for a unit to do, if it wants to actually perform in combat. So these units had a bad habit of dissolving into mobs of terrified amateurs (and therefore getting slaughtered) the moment they entered battle.

Eventually it was decided that it was more important that army units be able to function in combat than that they be democratic organizations, and the elected "soldier's friend" officers were kicked out and replaced with hardasses. The soldiers hated them, and swore under their breath every time they were called out to drill yet again. But they learned how to fight.

serge2k3• 10 years ago

Isn't that what reviews are for? If you have substantive reasons not to like your boss then giving them a lousy review is easy.

A manager who is getting lousy reviews from engineers is going to face difficulties with the higher ups.

sitkack3• 10 years ago

A little fascism goes along way.

Jtsummers2• 10 years ago

The opposite of anarchy isn't fascism. Read the author's full paper, it's got a lot of insight into the workings of organizations in general.

rdoherty• 10 years ago

I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability.

I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

(One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.)

if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge.

That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.

jevanish2• 10 years ago

It seems like what people forget is that whether you have structure or not, it takes effort to make it work well. You can't just throw someone a job title in leadership and assume they'll do a good job.

Leadership by example, training, adhering to values all matter. It just so happens that use a tried and true system of actual structure gives you a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.

Could a flat org work? Maybe? So far, it seems like every company that tries and gets to scale has serious problems. Maybe it makes sense stick to innovating on your core business, and sticking to business best practices in your processes. (A recent post by the former Cofounder/CEO of Brightroll digs into this: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lesso...)

danso2• 10 years ago

It'd be cool to see an internal study, at least within the engineering group, of how commit activity/issue resolution changed before and after the new structure. On an aggregate basis, at least.

sidlls• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate on why you think that would be useful?

danso2• 10 years ago

Ostensibly the decision to change structure is to improve productivity. Does it? And if so, how does it affect/improve it? Commit activity is as granular/quantifiable a data source as we have to analyze it.

Obviously, the analysis shouldn't be limited to the mere quantity of commits. I'm more interested in if the activity becomes more "regular" than sporadic. Or if long-neglected (i.e. boring) issues get more attention than they did before.

Ensorceled• 10 years ago

I presume as a raw (if somewhat flawed) measure of productivity.

morley• 10 years ago

I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find:

Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning managers in the spring.

It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat organizations.

Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure works?

BinaryIdiot• 10 years ago

Yeah I agree with you I didn't find much of anything useful beyond this one other bit that added another, small explanation for moving away from bossless:

While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance. “Without even a minimal layer of management, it was difficult to have some of those conversations and to get people feeling like they understood what was expected of them, and that they were getting the support that they needed in order to do the best work,”

No information about what the current structure is, how it's working out compared to the last one nor really any satisfying answers for why the initial bossless failed (I mean I can certainly guess but they went through it, it would be nice to have more data).

caminante• 10 years ago

My guess?

The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a) raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on opportunities.

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

This.

Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!" PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe how they are now addressed.

We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.

metaphorm3• 10 years ago

welcome to the brilliant world of Tech Industry journalism, where 2 year old Twitter controversies are what pass for investigation and background.

TheGRS• 10 years ago

I came here to say the same thing, since flat structure companies have always fascinated me and I generally still feel like it would be a good experience to work for one, I wanted to know what exactly led them to this decision. Instead only two things were listed as potential reasons: the gender issue and that employees didn't have a person to talk to about their performance or conflicts. The title is very misleading as I'm sure these couldn't be the only drivers. That's a huge cultural shift.

sytse2• 10 years ago

I don't know what led GitHub to this shift. At GitLab we want to maintain as flat of a structure as possible but we always wanted everyone to have exactly one boss and 4-10 reports per boss. For us the reasons are that:

1. You want someone to evaluate your and your team's performance. Not getting feedback on this is demotivating.

2. You want someone to help you get better and plan your career (all of our managers are skilled in the area of work of their reports).

3. You want someone to go to with problems: individual execution, team execution, collaboration with another team, and (inter)personal ones).

For more information about our reporting structure see https://about.gitlab.com/team/structure/ and our leadership principles see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/

PieterH• 10 years ago

I can't offer that insight so instead, my analysis of what actually happened at github. May enlighten to why this article exists at all, and is so thin.

http://hintjens.com/blog:111

nathanaldensr• 10 years ago

Can GitHub--a company with 600 people--really be called a "startup" anymore (as termed by the article)?

civilian• 10 years ago

There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being inflated, I think there's "startup inflation".

In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we ended up with something like: > A startup is a company that is new company, less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment.

So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency? Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get commoditized.

Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high-growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional business startups".

fsloth6• 10 years ago

I think the brief description is a company in search of a new scalable business model.

If the business model is not new then the business can be categorized as X (grocery chain, real estate dealer, machine shop, etc).

rrdharan• 10 years ago

Are they still seeing exponential growth?

skylan_q• 10 years ago

600 people

Holy smokes. I didn't know it was already that large. What are they doing with 600 people that they were unable to do with 30? I haven't seen anything novel come out of there for a long time. Maybe Atom?

TheCoelacanth2• 10 years ago

Sales, marketing, operations and customer support would all need to add people as the size of your customer base grows, not just as you start adding new functionality.

amptorn• 10 years ago

Well, if their primary source of cash is investors rather than actual business...

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

Most of the people I've talked to who "reject management", they really reject "bad management".

metaphorm3• 10 years ago

to be fair, that is _most_ management. good management is quite rare, unfortunately.

kabdib2• 10 years ago

And much of the "good" management I've encountered is actually about protecting your people from the bad management around and above you in the organization.

Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things.

fsloth6• 10 years ago

I know this is the stereotype but is that really so? In my country (Finland) only third of managers were recently estimated to be incompetent in some way or another - a considerable part - but hardly most (this was a fairly reputable study). I would love to have statistics from elsewhere.

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

I suspect there is a fair amount of survivorship bias[1] in one's personal analysis of management. For me, the managers I can easily recall are the bad ones. Something about how anger makes a deeper mark in your memory than joy does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

GrumpyNl• 10 years ago

Its just agile/scrum for management. How is that working out for you guys? Do you get things finished?

h4nkoslo• 10 years ago

Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant politically-vetted governance.

"the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn’t be solved by the masses. While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance"

nate_martin• 10 years ago

"flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time.

icehawk219• 10 years ago

In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.

adekok• 10 years ago

That reminds me of the story of university walkways:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=P...

In short, students walked over the grass, despite the "keep off the grass" signs. The solution proposed by university president Dwight D Eisenhower was "Why not let the students take whichever route works, and then build the walkways over the bare patches?"

The same could apply here. If the rank & file see person X as being necessary / useful, then give that person an official title and responsibilities.

cookiecaper• 10 years ago

This organic emergence of an informal structure is what many anti-management advocates use to justify their stance. They say there is no need for formal bureaucracy when people will automatically follow natural leaders and good ideas.

While I appreciate the philosophical sentiment, I think it's both a little naive and a little jaded.

Naive because in practice, there are real disputes, and someone needs to be in a position to resolve those disputes and keep things organized. When the structure is informal, even with great technical people (and often this occurs more often with great technical people), effort will often be spent on duplicate tasks, and the differing implementations will compete for mindshare internally. While that's not always a problem, there are times when the structure needs to be directed so that more important corporate goals can be achieved. If the employees can't operate with unity, they may find the whole company unified with them on the unemployment line in the not-too-distant future.

It's naive because good ideas are not always received well by self-interested actors, especially when you're dealing with people of mixed experienced levels and backgrounds, as any company with more than a few employees is. The manager's role is to make a critical analysis of the proposal and make what is frequently a difficult choice about what will be in the organization's long-term interest.

It's also naive because there needs to be a designated official who represents both you to the company and the company to you. That representation ensures you always have someone to voice your concerns and needs to. It ensures that you understand what the company wants you to be doing instead of having to try to pull it out of the ether, come out with the wrong thing, and find yourself in sudden political turmoil. It ensures that you have an appointee who can advise and represent your cause in sensitive personnel matters, and argue for the value you bring to the company. A good manager serves many very important organizational functions besides just determining technical direction.

Jaded because such a massive majority of managerial structures are so comically broken and useless, that traumatized workers don't understand how they could ever be useful for anything and just want to chuck the whole thing out. Believe me, I beyond sympathize with this, but I don't think it always has to be that way. This is part of why finding a good corporate fit is very important for the job seeker.

Any time you get more than 3-5 people in a room, a political pecking order will naturally arise. That force needs checks and controls to keep everyone safe. Benevolent, mindful leadership from good, fair judges is critical to the success of any group of humans, whether organized into a corporation, nation, tribe, family, or other. We can't discard that principle just because it's hard to find qualified leaders.

jevanish2• 10 years ago

This is exactly what Wistia found: https://wistia.com/blog/ditching-flat

"We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.

Every company has a structure. If you don't explicitly define your structure, then you are left with an implicit one, and that can stifle productivity. We had hoped that being flat would let us move faster and be more creative, but as we grew, we ended up with an unspoken hierarchy that actually slowed down our ability to execute."

gchadwick• 10 years ago

Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time

Are they that effective at Valve though? Seems it's not bad enough to cause the company serious damage but are they doing much nowadays? Yes there's the Vive but that's in partnership with HTC who may be providing a lot of the top-level direction.

I get the feeling Valve is coasting along on the Steam cash cow and could be doing a lot more with the people and resources they have available.

nitrogen4• 10 years ago

An example of a flat structure failure is the complete lack of a new episode of Half Life.

ftlio2• 10 years ago

People forget how hard-fought the battle for Steam really was. Half-Life 2's release on Steam nearly broke them. One word for it could be "coasting", but another might be "reaping" the rewards of choosing to fight that battle long before anyone else believed it was winnable.

And they're not really coasting. They're at the forefront of broadcast gaming, competitive gaming, whatever you want to call it. I've watched Riot grow, and Blizzard falter in that industry, but I'm damn near positive that Valve has the better framework for the long-term.

Edit: I also think that Valve's primary product is "not having to deal with industry standard financing and deadline problems so we can make games that are actually good without burning out like everyone else does."

__s• 10 years ago

We can all appreciate Vulkan

Negitivefrags• 10 years ago

They are maintaining three of the largest free to play games in the world. Revenues from those three games is said to rival that of Steam itself.

serge2k3• 10 years ago

I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve

Valve seems like the poster child for upsides and downsides of this system.

They release cool games, make lot of money, Hats!

On the other hand, steam is still really clunky and their customer service has historically been horrible.

was_boring• 10 years ago

So terrible that I quit using them all together. My account got into a state were I could not buy any games, and after weeks of customer service emails which lead no resolution and only canned responses, I just gave up on the platform enterily.

I've never tried so hard to give a company my money and have them so actively refuse it.

blakeyrat• 10 years ago

Valve's "flagship" software product Steam is full of bugs and terrible usability. (The ability to change font size went away when they switched to HTML rendering, and has never come back. Font size. A desktop application which is extremely likely to run on high DPI monitors where you can't adjust the font size.)

I've had a customer service request in for about 4 days now. I know that if/when it gets replied to, the person who replies won't read what I typed and I'll have to explain it again and wait another 5-6 days to get any action. (Before you ask, it's about a DLC that isn't part of their refund policy, so I can't simply refund it.)

Based on Steam's example, I'm not a fan of this concept. They're popular because they have a lot of network effect, not because Steam's any good.

figgis• 10 years ago

And this has been going on since it's inception, and I am hoping it finally bites them in the butt.

Every single other marketplace even slightly similar to Valve has support that outshines Valve in every single way possible.

EA with their Origin client launch did a fantastic job with customer service and making sure they are keeping as many people that actually use Origin, happy. (yeah we all love to hate them, but they got this one right.) I thought it would go to crap quickly but from my (admittedly limited) experience and what I have heard it is still great.

I am actually scared that should my steam account get hacked I will lose everything. I've used steam for many many years. I've put more money than I should have into it (400+ games) and now I have to be extremely careful that nothing I do screws my account because there is a very good chance that it will go unresolved and I will be out all of that time/money.

Whenever I look to get a game, I buy them any way I possibly can outside of steam before I turn to their platform.

I believe there is time for Valve to turn it around. There are many things they have certainly done right. They've done a great job pushing for Linux, especially since I moved to linux only gaming over a year and a half ago. They've helped Indie developers and modders bring their creations to a unified platform.

mahyarm• 10 years ago

So why did steam win compared to other online game stores?

And why do they continue to do well with their game offerings?

makomk• 10 years ago

Having heard stuff from people who work there I really don't buy the idea that Valve actually has a flat corporate structure. Maybe it looks that way if your name is Gabe Newell, but it sure sounds pretty hierarchical to me (maybe even toxicly so).

jim-greer• 10 years ago

It is rumored not to work well at Valve either. Once you get past Dunbar's number, subgroups form. It's better to make them explicit. Otherwise you tend to get cliques, which are probably worse than hierarchy:

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

Pica_soO3• 10 years ago

So what is the strategy to go to keep as much flatland as possible? Split it up into several small companys and one that is basically managing as a external entity the coordination of those smaller flatlanders?

hodgesrm2• 10 years ago

My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves.

One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

(Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)

dboreham2• 10 years ago

Exactly. Hard to make a kid clean and tidy their room (source: parent, also engineering manager for n decades..)

pavlov• 10 years ago

Do you work for one of those companies that hire only 22-year-olds who can answer irrelevant computer science questions on a whiteboard, and then you wonder why it's hard to get engineers excited about business goals rather than endless tinkering with algorithms and languages...?

amackera• 10 years ago

Hard to believe but most of the engineers I've worked with were actually adults, and didn't need to be treated like children.

Animats2• 10 years ago

That's a general problem with open source projects. It leads to being at version 0.9x forever, and bugs not getting fixed.

dasmoth3• 10 years ago

Very much depends on the project.

Staying at 0.9 can just mean having very high standards for 1.0.

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

That's exactly the kinds of things I wish that I could do. In my experience it's mostly managers that want you to push features without any documentation and filled with bugs.

wnevets2• 10 years ago

Even if it isn't the managers themselves that personally want to skip those things, their boss wants the next feature.

talmand• 10 years ago

I second this. Well, the pushing features part but hopefully documented and without (many) bugs. But features for the sales team is considered important.

I usually like researching and fixing bugs, especially when they are mine. But compare business value between bugs versus new features and guess which one wins the most.

AsyncAwait2• 10 years ago

I am a junior developer, but my experience so far has been exactly this; arbitrary deadlines, poorly defined or no technical specification and worst of all, no room for testing or documentation, yet still somehow expecting it to happen in the end.

asimuvPR• 10 years ago

They also might expect documentation and thorough testing when things break. This forces an inverse relationship where the engineer has to manage the manager by documenting interactions and then having the manager acknowledge them. Otherwise the manager will push and blame the engineer when things go sour. Its a sad dynamic that is rather common. You sort of get used and good at it with time. It is not exclusive to software, though. Its everywhere because most people can't manage.

nrinaudo• 10 years ago

I agree with part of your sentence only. Managers, especially professional ones (as opposed to ones that were promoted from the kind of position they end up managing) do tend to push for client-facing features with little thought to the accumulating technical debt.

It's been my experience, however, that when left to their own devices, developers tend to either learn new things or refactor code that's getting too hard to maintain. And both are important, critical even, but certainly no help in getting up to date documentation, fixing "painful" bugs, or writing good tests. In fact, they can even be counter-productive in that respect: heavily refactored code will invalidate at least part of its documentation and tests.

bobbytherobot• 10 years ago

I've had this and I have good managers.

I worked outside of the Bay Area before coming here. I can tell you that the Bay Area tech has the worse managers. They drink the Kool-Aid way to hard out here.

nitrogen4• 10 years ago

On rare occasions it's the opposite, though; I've tried in some places (as a developer) to advocate for deeper business needs, but the development manager is totally focused on the easy and fun stuff. In that case a flat developer group would've had better long term results.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

Yes. Similarly, I've also found that people who say "I'm too busy working to bother measuring what I'm doing" are the ones most in need of measurement. (Same with "Too busy to communicate" and "Too busy to meet")

There are reasons for coordination and trust, otherwise 100% of the workforce would be independent contractors.

johngalt• 10 years ago

Flat orgs are an overreaction to the traditional top heavy big corp structures. Where each staff member is reporting to multiple unsynchronized management chains. Nothing is more frustrating that having to be caught in the middle of three managers who all disagree with what the priorities should be, and refuse to mediate it amongst themselves. Not to mention the infighting once your company is over 1000 people and you start having boss A demand all your time specifically to frustrate boss B's plans.

All of the above is non-fun. I'll do all the boring documentation, monitoring and change control and say thank you. I'm not trying to be harsh on managers (I am one), but I can't blame people for overreacting.

ACow_Adonis• 10 years ago

Apologies, but it has to be said: in my professional experience, it's the management that stops technical people fixing bugs, completing documentation, fixing infrastructure, providing good upgrade paths, refactoring, etc.

LaurentVB• 10 years ago

Isn't it true then that: good manager > no manager > bad manager ?

lifeisstillgood4• 10 years ago

We desperately need to find new organisational forms - it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships

However the transition is hard. Democracy is nice but companies are too close to the daily life of people to allow a vote every four years and let others decide policy

GitHub could have experimented with new ways of deciding policy (voting) - and I would argue that it's likely they would have got things like "write good docs" voted in anyway.

And it would be interesting to see how one handles voting on issues like "gender bias"

But we will all have to have companies like this one day - otherwise where do the big value wins come from. We can't keep inventing technology of the 21 C and hope they overcome the management hierarchies of the Stone Age

fsloth6• 10 years ago

"it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships"

I think you are confusing structure and culture. I've always worked for the past decade under a boss and retained autonomy and spiritual ownership of my work. Yes, a boss can be a micromanaging asshole but going full anarcho-syndicalism usually just means that politics will happen, structures of influence and fealty will form and the end result is still a tree of authority.

lifeisstillgood4• 10 years ago

The problem is you have no - absolutely no - right to influence policy and business decisions; decisions that vastly overwhelm the impact your good or bad coding will have on the value produced by the company.

I had to look up anarcho-syndicalism and no I don't think that's what I mean. I mean democratic participation of the whole company in the decisions affecting the whole company.

Edit: unfair to say no influence. Fair to say no "right" to an influence.

pbhjpbhj4• 10 years ago

the management hierarchies of the Stone Age //

We have the same general primary social structure - certain people have control of a lot more of the resources than others and don't want to cede that control.

Is there any wonder that we have those structures in organisations whose focus is "making a profit", ie ensuring unequal distribution of resources by increasing the control of resources for those who already have the most.

lifeisstillgood4• 10 years ago

There is a certain logic in capitalism - farmers who are a successful are good at farming. The history of taking farms away from farmers and redistributing the land is usually bad.

So I have very few issues with "making a profit", it's just that "fire is needed in the engine room, to drive the steam engines and turn the wheels. But one does not invite fire up to the cockpit and let it steer". Democracy should choose where to steer. Capitalism can provide the engine room.

kitd• 10 years ago

There are other forms of structural organisation than strict hierarchies.

One interesting one proposed by cyberneticist Stafford Beer was dubbed Syntegrity [1].

It involved relationships between workers structured like a bucky ball, where each person had direct influence over a number of topics, and oversight of a number of others.

The result was (in theory) an arrangement where everyone had some responsiblity, but there was no overall "leadership". In theory

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntegrity

lifeisstillgood4• 10 years ago

Thank you - but I think that the perhaps less complicated goal of achieving corporate democracy will be hard enough :-)

pluma2• 10 years ago

modern western democracies

Modern western democracies aren't democracies, they're republics. Part of the reason they aren't direct democracies is actually a thing you mention: in a direct democracy the 51% effectively rule over the 49% and there is no recourse for the minority to have their needs met.

Also, no need to re-invent the wheel. If you want a model where an organisation isn't led by a "self-appointed dictator", just look at cooperatives, or foundations like Mozilla.

dalke• 10 years ago

Republics can also be democracies. "Democracy" includes the many types of representative democracies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy .

Most of the people I've talked to who make the argument that a republic is not a democracy base point to Federalist #10. But Madison was comparing a "pure democracy" - "by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person" - and a "republic" - "by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place".

The section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism#Democracy_and_re... highlights how "democracy" now is something a bit more broad than was used 225+ years ago:

In contemporary usage, the term democracy refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it is direct or representative.[32] Today the term republic usually refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, who serves for a limited term; in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies, with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.[33]
The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticized democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy;

Animats2• 10 years ago

It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who really, really want to make computer games. (This is also why game developers tend to be exploited. See the EA litigation.)

It's surprising that it works for Zappos, which is just an online shoe store. Yes, there are people who are fanatical about shoes, but the business of selling and shipping them is not that exciting.

aChrisSmith• 10 years ago

Does it really? Valve is extremely profitable because of their particular role in the video games industry. But outside of Steam, is the company really a role model for success?

Is Valve's latest "new" IP DOTA2 successful when compared to the other set of MOBAs that have come out over the past few years?

Have Valve's forays into VR and hardware been successful compared to other companies in the space? e.g. the Vive, Oculus?

Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch? Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search, discoverability, etc.

I am not an expert, and may have my details wrong about Valve. But I don't think the company has been especially successful outside of being the only game in town for buying AAA video games online.

theschwa• 10 years ago

Just for some clarification on the VR side, the Vive is a partnership product between them and HTC. Valve did the R&D, and HTC did the manufacturing, adnd Valve helped Oculus get things off the ground as well. I'm not a gamer, so I can't speak to that world, but they are doing truly innovative things in VR.

SamReidHughes2• 10 years ago

Would Steam have happened if they had a different management structure?

depr• 10 years ago

I don't think success outside of Steam needs to be considered. Steam is their core business. The software itself is quite bad, but they're the dominant player by far.

Dota 2 I would estimate is #2 behind League of Legends, and it's too early to tell whether VR is working out, but guess which platform VR games are going to be delivered through?

(Besides Steam, their games are pretty successful: Half Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead)

majewsky• 10 years ago

Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch? Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search, discoverability, etc.

This may not be your main point, but have you ever used the Steam store? It's the only app store that I've ever encountered that actually gives me valuable suggestions, and thus the only one into which I've sunk a considerable amount of money. (At least 200€, probably more. In second place is Google Play, where I spent some 7 € or so on apps.)

Just look at the huge percentage of games that are only purchased and never played (or even downloaded) to see that Valve has absolutely nailed the Steam store.

Regarding the actual argument: I agree that for a company this large, the turnout in form of actual products (esp. games) from Valve is surprisingly low. But I'm not sure if that's even a bad thing: For some studios, it works well to release 10 mediocre games within a certain amount of time. For other studios, it works better to release only one extraordinary game in the same timespan.

sotojuan• 10 years ago

It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who really, really want to make computer games

...but there's no one to do good customer service and other boring but necessary things.

Honestly, I don't know what Valve does any more, or if they have to do anything. They can just all take a year-long vacation, schedule some sales, and let people make them money by buying hats, games, or gun skins.

oxryly1• 10 years ago

It turns out, depressingly, that good customer service is not correlated with business success in the games industry.

unabst5• 10 years ago

I've experienced first hand why businesses need bureaucracy, because I resisted building one. Turns out it's the same reason cars have 4 wheels. It just works.

Some workers require oversight to be productive, and for some it just helps. This means you get the most out of your work force, and can also hire workers who can't manage themselves. But managers also abstract trust and responsibility from multiple staff to one staff, help organize workflow, and ensure proper communication across teams. It's a simple matter of fact that some work is more fun, some people communicate better, and people don't organize themselves. Add to this the coaching and mentoring factor of a good manager, and it's a no-brainer.

Granted, what most employees fail to understand is if you have a manager, the company has already deemed you need one, and you're practically paying for your own overhead. Good managers are hard to come by, and are expensive. But businesses desperately need good managers because they solve most staffing issues. In other words, if you stop being complacent and just behave like a manager, chances are you will become one.

Here is how it's done: You start by managing yourself and removing your own overhead. Then you start taking care of other responsibilities because you can't help it. Know what needs to get done, understand the big picture, and just help accomplish it from the side. And when you provide relevant insight about how to improve something, put out a fire, or organize a project, you're already manager material. Your goal is to replace your manager without actually replacing him, without being the boss, without pissing anyone off, and without higher pay. You just made your bosses job easier, increased the value of everyone else, and ensured work got done. If your company doesn't give you a raise, you're at the wrong company.

Here is how it isn't done: You keep relying on your manager to keep you in check. You only accomplish your minimum requirements. You blame training for not being able to do anything else. You feel entitled for a raise just by being there for a long time.

Both of the above are exaggerated to emphasize two opposites, but most people are somewhere in between. Of course, if you're not manager material and you suck at your job, the likelihood is you will get fired, so it's perfectly okay to be complacent and just do good work. But the point is, you have your manager to thank for your straight forward and fairly comfortable job, and at the end of the day, his/her salary is practically coming out of yours.

dasmoth3• 10 years ago

What if you're looking for autonomy without becoming a manager?

unabst5• 10 years ago

You're a great worker. If you're autonomous, you're already good at managing yourself and your own work, so you're half way there. You're the person that would be high on the list of potential recruits for managerial positions if there was a shortage in your company. And you'd have to turn them down to maintain your non-managerial status and lower payroll.

If you have a group of people that can manage themselves, you have a group of potential managers. In other words, they're worth more than people who can't manage themselves, and the likelihood of them doing simpler tasks that can be done with someone more cost effective is greater. Meaning, unless you're allergic to non-autonomous people, it becomes a good business decision to just start managing some helpers instead of forcing everyone to help themselves. The quintessential helper is "the intern" (and they may be grooming you for a managerial role if they put you in charge of one).

Also, if you're an entrepreneur you're a manager. If you can't manage people, you have no business trying to build a business.

It's also worth noting public education systems do not produce managers. The teacher-student dynamic is similar to the manager-worker dynamic. They don't teach you in school that you could learn whatever you want on your own and that the teacher is mostly there just to make sure you get your work done. It's pretty much the same with managers.

dbbk• 10 years ago

Start your own business?

thomasahle• 10 years ago

Your goal is to replace your manager ... without higher pay.

Sounds like you have the wrong job then.

unabst5• 10 years ago

Exactamundo. And if you're at a decent company, your manager's job entails promoting staff and recruiting managers. Maybe you'll even physically replace your manager so they can move on up.

Managers are in the meetings where they talk about other managers that suck or other departments that need more help. The whole point is to look out of place. And if they don't appreciate you, you need to take your value proposition elsewhere. And if you look out of place by sucking, you'll get fired.

jacalata• 10 years ago

If your company doesn't give you a raise, you're at the wrong company.

Sounds like if you'd managed to keep reading, you'd agree with the poster.

effie2• 10 years ago

You describe a consistent viewpoint, but of rather ideal workplace situation. In reality, instances of "your manager" go from "you have your manager to thank for mentoring and advice" to "he is constantly pushing you around and making threats for no justifiable reason, bringing zero value to your work". Unfortunately, there are managers who do not know how to communicate and do not know how to be a good leader.

unabst5• 10 years ago

Yes, of course there are managers that suck. After all it's just another job. There are companies that suck. Some are big enough to not have to care or notice undervalued talent. If you're talented, you don't want to be there.

But I think it's safe to say, if you're good enough to manage people, you have a job in America. Businesses lust for good managers. It's the only way to ensure work gets done with affordable labor, and many businesses can only afford affordable labor.

rubicon332• 10 years ago

I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience. This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers, despite those junior engineers often being very wrong.

The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment.

Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.

xorblurb3• 10 years ago

One of the problem is when the difference between technical leadership and management is not recognized. While titles can help, without a clear technical leader on top of that they are clearly not enough. And, most importantly, the titles must be in phase with the actual capabilities of people. Otherwise it is far worse than no title. And obviously, a good technical hierarchy can be quite hard to bootstrap in an organization where the culture was officially flat.

8ytecoder• 10 years ago

The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues - a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173

rubicon332• 10 years ago

Totally agree.

While I believe clear power lines, and titles, are important for business function, they should not come at the cost of respect, or a democratic environment which promotes conversation and compromise. You can definitely have both; Not all rigid org structures are authoritarian.

"Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about."

The problem I've seen is that unless an engineer sees his peer as having more experience (visa vi the title), then they often won't even give them the time of day. Even if their peer is 100% right, the junior engineer often believes themself right and is unwilling to budge. While the reverse can definitely happen, its generally less common.

mobiuscog• 10 years ago

Part of the problem is the way you stated it - a hierarchy of 'power'.

If you focus on a hierarchy of 'ownership' instead, it's much better for everyone.

There's a fantastic book (Extreme Ownership) that talks about how this is used within the US Navy Seals, and how it empowers the people doing the job, rather than dictating what they should do.

Decisions do need to be taken with regards to direction - they shouldn't necessarily enforce 'how' that direction should be achieved.

ricardobeat• 10 years ago

GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two-day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that’s expected to attract 1,500 attendees.

This can't be serious...

jdale27• 10 years ago

What do you mean?

makecheck• 10 years ago

The key is that every task must have EXACTLY ONE BOSS whose say is final when a decision is necessary.

A hierarchy works fine if it really is a hierarchy. It won’t work if the hierarchy has been poisoned with “dotted lines” or lots of unnecessarily-senior-sounding job titles that let senior people share control over project direction. I’ve worked in groups in the past where there were like 5 senior people trying to pull things in completely different directions, no one would tell us whose opinion really mattered, and we kept having to decide for ourselves.

paulddraper3• 10 years ago

Yep. A company shouldn't be Congress.

xapata3• 10 years ago

Eh. At every large company I've worked in or with, even if there's officially one boss, the reality is it's a committee. Worse, when in the middle of a big organization, you're never really sure who has authority. Someone lower on the org chart might call their friend who is an SVP from some other branch of the company, they fly in to have their say... it's all politics, no matter what the org chart says.

booleandilemma• 10 years ago

I once worked for a company with a very flat organizational structure. It was just the CEO and thirty people underneath him.

Every day I had 10 people coming to me with issues they all thought were critically important. I was being pulled in every direction and I couldn't focus on anything. It was a complete mess.

Now I work at a company where I have one boss, and he acts as a funnel for all the work that comes into our department.

I'm never going back to a flat company again, if I can help it.

forgottenpass• 10 years ago

Not to say it's an unimportant difference, but the only difference is that your boss knows how to say "no" to immediate requests for you time and you don't.

samscully• 10 years ago

Depending on the business, there is usually a requirement for a coordination role. Whoever that coordinator is needs to have the authority to make a final decision in order to be effective.

If companies want to avoid tyranny in the workplace then perhaps it would be better to have bosses but allow a majority vote of direct reports to fire them. Give 360 reviews some actual teeth.

matt_wulfeck• 10 years ago

One of the ways I see manager's having a very positive impact on a product is by managing the (sometimes) competing interest of users versus engineers.

As engineers, we can sometimes become obsessed with updates/refactors/optimizations that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. A user doesn't care about your cobwebs and dirty laundry, but as an engineer it's so hard not to obsess over these optimizations. It's so easy to forget that users don't care about the same things as you.

At the same time it's maddening when you feel like you're working with a house of cards and your manager asks for a third story.

I see a lot of conflict here, and this imho is what separates good technical managers from bad ones. They understand the competing interests and are able to prioritize work in a way that works best for everyone.

collyw6• 10 years ago

that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience.

The reason I want to refactor is to make the code easier to read and maintain and more likely to be bug free. It doesn't have any meaningful impact on the user experience, but it is making the software a lot better and keeps running costs lower and allows new features to be added more easily.

exstudent2• 10 years ago

And yet during the flat org structure time period Github was an innovation BEAST. It was one of the most creative technology companies I've ever seen and changed the way we do development. Since more structure has been put in place, innovation seems to have come to a screeching halt. The product feels old, new features are hard to come by, bloat and cruft are everywhere. Maybe they hired too many people for the job at hand?

technomancy• 10 years ago

I think you'll find the slowed pace happened a good deal before the managers came in if you look at the history more closely.

bluenose69• 10 years ago

The genius of github is git. Did a manager help Mr Torvalds construct that?

pluma2• 10 years ago

If GitHub was only git, we'd be talking about Gitorious (or Gitweb, or...) having hundreds of employees, not GitHub.

I've heard people describe GitHub as the "Facebook of Open Source" and that's not as absurd a statement as it may seem at face value.

GitHub is basically the SourceForge of Web 2.0. It's where you go for open source projects and it makes it easy to participate.

I would hope to see GitLab succeed GitHub by virtue of being open source at heart (rather than just at the surface level) but as much as I love GitLab I'm not holding my breath.

Either way, git is ultimately an implementation detail to GitHub's success. Git's success may have given GitHub the edge over BitBucket (back when BitBucket was hg-only and GitHub was git-only) but it feels like the inverse is also true.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

The link to Medium's experiment is interesting too.

https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-mediu...

hoodoof• 10 years ago

Seems kinda childish to me to not want management.

collyw6• 10 years ago

Try working a couple of months in my previous workplace and i am sure you will change your tune.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

Gitlab is cool but with things like webrtc, ethereum/swarm/ndn, gittorrent etc. out there eventually we will be able to get away from servers and definitely having one company in charge of storing all of the code is not the most ideal final solution.

yuja_wang• 10 years ago

I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone?

Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.

nommm-nommm• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate?

brobinson2• 10 years ago

I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos containing "problematic" language which were ignored.

kornish• 10 years ago

Seems unlikely that an organization of GitHub's size would overhaul the entire management structure to deal with problems brought about by a single employee (or even a few).

catwell• 10 years ago

No, it's almost the opposite. This kind of thing started happening for the same core reason they added management: because of the Tom Preston-Werner / Julie Ann Horvath scandal two years ago.

It made them understand the importance (and risk for the business) of such issues, so added HR and middle-management with a focus on them. As a side effect we ended up with things like this happening.

The people with an agenda are not random employees in a flat company here, it's the management.

linuxhansl• 10 years ago

Interesting. I just talked to a friend of mine who is actually a lawyer. He told that in his firm of 300 everybody is a partner and nobody has a boss.

Instead they periodically elect a body of 20 (or so) partner to deal with compensation, bad partners, sets policies, etc, etc.

My buddy says that all the partner are fairly self-driven grown ups, and usually do the right thing. Rarely is there any action needs to be taken by that elected body.

They do have a "CEO" in name to represent the firm to the outside, but with no other powers otherwise. And obviously you need some HR department.

Immediately I wondered whether one could run a software company like that.

Seems that GitHub drove it a little too far on the no-structure route. I wonder if they could have done what this firm does.

blahi2• 10 years ago

Law firms are very different in how they generate revenue and operate than every other company. There is no basis for comparison.

mifreewil• 10 years ago

Probably similar to a software consulting firm, but yeah different than a software product/service company.

jaggederest2• 10 years ago

The more I talk to lawyers the more I like the way they operate. Is there really no way to steal a lot of that structure for our field?

shandor• 10 years ago

This.

I previously worked for a company that does purely outsourcing work; they nowadays have a bossless hierarchy (apart from project leads, who are named anew for every project, and basically anyone willing can volunteer). It seems to work well for them, and I don't see why not.

Now I'm in a "product company", and the needs are completely different. Like has been stated elsewhere in this thread, when making products, there just has to be someone making the final decisions, i.e. being the product owner.

yitchelle• 10 years ago

That's very interesting way of running a company. Is everyone in the company a partner, including the secretary, researchers, interns etc? How are these folks "managed"?

By the way, I am not asking from cynical perspective. I run a project team, and I am working through on how much autonomy to give the team members.

JackMorgan• 10 years ago

I work at a product company that works in a very flat way. We accomplish our goals by having a product owner who doesn't actually have any direct authority over the technical team. The technical team is managed by a member embedded within who handles HR-style questions and otherwise works like a peer.

Technical decisions are made by majority vote.

The team handles uninteresting work like documentation, bug fixing, broken builds, and training with full-time promiscuous pair-programming.

This means that attitude and maturity are our most important attributes, as technical skill quickly will be taught while doing regular work. Several times in my career we've had to say to someone, "perhaps this isn't a good fit for you, why don't you start looking..." because they hate the exposure and boring work required to build a massive Enterprise system.

We almost always fix bugs and broken builds immediately, followed by product work. We spend 25% of our time fixing technical debt (this is typically the least fun work!).

Through all this we are able to ship release after release on time, adding in new features and regulatory standards with ease. It's given me hope it _can_ be done, but also that the circumstances to maintain it are almost impossible to force. It requires all the right people in all the right places to change a typical hierarchy into something like this.

smackfu• 10 years ago

Isn't every one of those partner lawyers a boss to one or more paralegals? And usually there are a bunch of new grad lawyers around trying to make partner, I'm sure they don't consider themselves equal.

spajus• 10 years ago

Next step: TPS reports.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 10 years ago

Flat management structure is not the problem, is it? Someone always has more of a say in what gets done for whatever reason- seniority, skill, charisma, anything.

What should really be flat is the pay scheme: pay every worker 1/n of the company's assets at the end of each financial period.

That means anyone who wants more money must work to make the company prosper as a whole. Employees should also have the chance to decide who gets hired (because they have a motivation to hire only the people they think can increase their own pay).

Btw, I'm totally willing to try this in my own company one day. And if it doesn't work- who the hell cares. Most companies fail for much more common reasons than their management or pay structure anyway.

darkmarmot• 10 years ago

Are they still using the Code of Conduct that explicitly allows "reverse-racism, reverse-sexism" etc. for members of marginalized groups?

Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace

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