Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company • Hacker News Board

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#171

Post by tomkr » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:38 AM UTC

dailyrorschach wrote: post #45

tomlin wrote: post #33

What Jason Fried is expressing is something I've been pondering for a while. And I think we'll (hopefully) see more of it (sorry, manager-types). In my experience, managers in most departments have essentially taken the role of sheep-herders. So, I started to ask myself: why do I need a manager when I work well on my own, making smart, educated decisions that are based upon the ideals and successes of other smart, ed…

Though I am a dreaded project manager, I agree mostly to what you are saying. But in the field I work in, advertising, I do think that its necessary and that my value is additive. My responsibility is mainly to be a shit umbrella, so my creative and developers can do work, especially when we're all working on multiple clients. I'm not doing my job when I have to have them in meetings, in fact we don't meet save for f…

I like the shit umbrella metaphor. I have recently taken up some PM-type work, even though I am technically an engineer, and a junior one at that. Now it is mostly cleaning up some stuff and keeping other engineers out of the wind. Things like making overviews of calls in a certain time-period, and making sure contracts are set-up. Stuff that most developers could not be bothered with, but I enjoy it.

So for me doing PM work is actually more of a horizontal promotion, doing some different work because I like it, while I am definitely not "in charge" of any people now.

I guess my point is that even picking up PM work can be a horizontal promotion.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#172

Post by trailrunner » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 12:00 PM UTC

This "flat" system sounds very nice, and I really like this rotation of responsibilities and "managerial positions" to all members. I wonder though, if the same principle is applied to the CEO and Business Owners positions as well (both in respect of decisions and profits). If not it doesn't seem that flat to me.

So preaching "flat" while being a business owner sounds a little suspicious, because you are preaching everybody about flat while standing above them.

I hope 37signals is truly different (I cannot judge since I don't know crucial details), because if at some point after ten years the business is sold to a big corp, and everyone finds himself trapped below ten levels of management, without a career path, 4 day workweeks during the summers of youth will sound like a bad joke.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#173

Post by Uchikoma » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 1:20 PM UTC

My view on managers: Turn your org chart 180°. All managers are supporting those "above" them, this is their primary goal. Usually companies have this the other way round. This also means there is no problem with "useless" middle management (Scrum calls this manager type ScrumMaster).

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#174

Post by mayutana » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 1:52 PM UTC

How does such a model work for tasks where you need to perform long term planning? Similar to national elections, such a model could result in policies being changed every time a new manager is in place.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#175

Post by vacri » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 2:46 PM UTC

robryan wrote: post #167

vacri wrote: post #163

Skimming the comments, it seems a lot of people are missing a significant point - the employee is in customer service . Customer service is a dead-end job. It doesn't take long to get on top of your game, and there's really nowhere to go. Managers and marketers get new products and changing business conditions to keep them interested, developers get new tech to explore and tech debt to resolve. Customer service... is…

I dunno, they could get more involved in the product so that they can diagnose more simple issues without having to pass it on to one of the devs. They could get more involved in design based on the feedback that gets passed through them, they would have a good sense of what is well received and doesn't work well. For straight up customer service person you would be right, but I think there is a lot of room to move t…

There is still only so far you can go as customer support. I wear that hat in my current company (along with a few others, including planning) and no, there really isn't much depth you can get into with devs without becoming a dev. Most devs (not all) largely disregard customer support and feedback anyway, since support doesn't 'see the big picture' (a less charitable person would say 'because support works with existing products, and we've already covered that now-boring ground' - after all, how many laments do we hear of devs that have to work on 'maintenance' rather than new prod development :).

The key point is that even if you're interacting directly with the devs, you're still not really being proactive or learning concrete skills. The job is still pretty much reactive. If you're driven or feel the need to develop, there really isn't much to strive for. You're not the one that gets to figure out code, or create marketing campaigns. There's not really any ongoing feeling of "I made this!". And if you move into design/planning, that's not really support anymore.

I don't mean to rag on support - they are the ditch-diggers of the IT world - but if you're driven, then it's got nothing to offer you after a fairly short while.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#176

Post by vacri » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #23

pmjordan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engi…

The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

I fail to see how that will help keep a driven, ambitious person happy as a career frontline customer support staffer.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#177

Post by vacri » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 3:04 PM UTC

dailyrorschach wrote: post #45

tomlin wrote: post #33

What Jason Fried is expressing is something I've been pondering for a while. And I think we'll (hopefully) see more of it (sorry, manager-types). In my experience, managers in most departments have essentially taken the role of sheep-herders. So, I started to ask myself: why do I need a manager when I work well on my own, making smart, educated decisions that are based upon the ideals and successes of other smart, ed…

Though I am a dreaded project manager, I agree mostly to what you are saying. But in the field I work in, advertising, I do think that its necessary and that my value is additive. My responsibility is mainly to be a shit umbrella, so my creative and developers can do work, especially when we're all working on multiple clients. I'm not doing my job when I have to have them in meetings, in fact we don't meet save for f…

At my previous work, the head of R&D was an awful manager that couldn't light a fire under foot-dragging devs or keep things from going off-track (and software was routinely released in beta years late). But he had an amazing talent to shield his devs from the godawful CEO and other pointless distractions. This is a much unseen function of managers - shielding you from paperwork and interruptions that really aren't directly related to your job.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#178

Post by clarebear » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 3:09 PM UTC

Sarah Hatter, who is the employee described in this story, left an insightful comment that unfortunately showed up as a child of aless insightful comment and is therefore buried. Check it out here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2417278

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#179

Post by tomlin » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #131

tomlin wrote: post #33

What Jason Fried is expressing is something I've been pondering for a while. And I think we'll (hopefully) see more of it (sorry, manager-types). In my experience, managers in most departments have essentially taken the role of sheep-herders. So, I started to ask myself: why do I need a manager when I work well on my own, making smart, educated decisions that are based upon the ideals and successes of other smart, ed…

Managers can be useful to say "no" to business. Otherwise you have business asking for a new feature every other day. Even if the engineer says no, it's still an unnecessary distraction and time killer to listen to everyone's proposals.

This is a good point to bring up. I agree in theory that managers are useful in gate-keeping roles. The trouble is that very few managers actually possess the power to be gate-keepers. Investors, clients threatening to leave and other fast-paced blame-culture mentality all but strips away their usefulness. In my experience, this at times makes managers feel worthless, expire, or worse - erratic.

My take is, manager positions are ripe for buck passing (to and from), collateral pressure for performance and abuse. Maybe some people can deal with that type of nonsense but the number of those who can't certainly outweigh them.

I can see how a manager might feel by this message. My thoughts are: If you're providing a great service to your underlings and your clients than you're in no position of regret. Contrarily, if you feel sick to your stomach when you go to work everyday and you're proud of that to a point of defense or fear, maybe it's time to reevaluate.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#180

Post by mhartl » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 7:54 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #169

I've started companies that grew from 1 to 50 people. I find that business advice from 37signals is often quite naïve and I hope people treat it as a data point, not as a set of guidelines. Managing a company below 25 people is relatively easy. You can still talk to most people every day, you can gather them all in one room, information flow is unrestricted. But staying under 25 people means for most companies that y…

It's distressing how often, especially among technical people, the equality

    flat == good

is taken as a given. Hackers have a healthy skepticism for arbitrary authority, but we often erroneously extend that attitude to hierarchical structures in general. In the limit of large numbers of people, hierarchies are the only structures that scale; moreover, they can do so over many orders of magnitude, from small businesses with 10^2 people up to huge organizations with 10^4, 10^5, or even 10^6 people (such as GE, IBM, Walmart, or the U.S. military).