Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
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Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#2Love the idea of rotating "managerial" or "lead" person in a small group.
I'm on a small team within a larger organization that we support (in dev and tool usage). A challenge for us is that people in the larger org are used to having a manager to route their requests to.
I may give a rotational approach a whirl. But right now, one of my primary roles is as s&!t umbrella and I don't want to overly burden my real producers.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#3I really appreciate the idea of having a career path that doesn't involve moving "up" to management. I'm a developer because I love development, and my own personal hell is managing a team and never getting to code.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#4While I totally buy what this espouses, I think it is probably incredibly hard to scale. They are doing well if they keep things flat(ish) for 26 employees. I can't really see it working at all for > 50.
And while they may not have anyone with the job title CTO, I'd be very surprised if DHH was anything other than the de facto CTO.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#5Love the idea of rotating "managerial" or "lead" person in a small group. I'm on a small team within a larger organization that we support (in dev and tool usage). A challenge for us is that people in the larger org are used to having a manager to route their requests to. I may give a rotational approach a whirl. But right now, one of my primary roles is as s&!t umbrella and I don't want to overly burden my real prod…
So what he is essentially saying is, they're an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, and all the decision of that officer must be approved at a bi-weekly meeting by a two-thirds majority.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#6I believe some sociologists found that personal relationships begin to break down at about 150. Beyond that it is very difficult to maintain meaningful interaction in person. Online relationship numbers are much higher so maybe a distributed team like 37Signals can get away with this for a while longer.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#7I really appreciate the idea of having a career path that doesn't involve moving "up" to management. I'm a developer because I love development, and my own personal hell is managing a team and never getting to code.
Imagine how the engineers at Google think now that they're "back in charge" (/sarcasm) I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose and asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#8What about creating a career path that doesn't involve moving people into management? One that involves more prestigious titles (e.g.: sun had a 'sun fellow' title), and significant salary growth (20% here and there isn't significant, imho)
As the organization grows, i can't see a totally flat structure working - you're going to end up with people who have been there 5 years, wake up one day and realize they have the same role and similar salary to what they had where they started, realize they have no career path with their current employer, and will move on.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#9While I totally buy what this espouses, I think it is probably incredibly hard to scale. They are doing well if they keep things flat(ish) for 26 employees. I can't really see it working at all for > 50. And while they may not have anyone with the job title CTO, I'd be very surprised if DHH was anything other than the de facto CTO.
Its a different industry, but take a look at Semco SA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
Their industrial democracy approach has scaled quite well, with 3000 employees.
Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company
#10What about creating a career path that doesn't involve moving people into management? One that involves more prestigious titles (e.g.: sun had a 'sun fellow' title), and significant salary growth (20% here and there isn't significant, imho) As the organization grows, i can't see a totally flat structure working - you're going to end up with people who have been there 5 years, wake up one day and realize they have the…
"you're going to end up with people who have been there 5 years, wake up one day and realize they have the same role and similar salary to what they had where they started"
1. The people who are worth the most to us are the people who do the best work. We pay accordingly. "Management-like" salaries go to the best workers.
2. You assume people want different roles. Some people do, but we work hard to hire people who love their craft and want to keep crafting. A programming being pushed away from programming, just because they've been at the company for five years, is not the desired path for most programmers who really love programming. Same goes for designing, etc.
Speaking of titles: We tend to avoid those too. We've had a good bit of debate inside the company about this, but we're sticking to staying as title-less as possible. I don't think they're worth it in the long term. They set up boundaries between people that I don't believe are necessary. Might that change if we had 100+ people? It could, but I'm concerned with the now instead of the imagined future.