111–120 of 497 posts
That's how you produce nothing, but a lot of it.
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you :-)
Valve - the PC gaming giant and owner of Steam - is very famously a flat organization. Their Handbook for New Employees[1] that goes into detail about how they operate has made its way out into the world a few times as well. [1] - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...
The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the…
If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.
> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Build a coalition of people who work in various departments, legal, marketing, research, etc. with enough momentum that could be enough to earn the credibility required. Another possibility is straight up democratic voting. These large investments place the company in financial peril, so maybe everyone should have a day. There are many ways to organize, hierarchical top-down control is useful but overused.
Ultimately someone has to approve the expense. Who makes that decision?
I seem to recall that the central takeaway from the essay tyranny of structurelessness is that when one affects to dispose of an official, formal and acknowledged power hierarchy, it simply reappears as an unofficial, informal, actively disavowed, and even more paranoid version of its former self.
Similar to how if governments get too weak, you end up with warlords/gangs just taking their place, power abhors a vacuum and all that.
Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
I'm here at Bayer right now and that is pretty much what is happening. The RIFs are finishing up and my team leader is now my peer. Our boss now has 10x the reports. Even a 30 minute 1:1 with everyone would take his entire week. And some people just need (or want ) to be told what to do. You can't have everyone be a Steve Jobs and dream up things with nothing concrete getting done. I believe this is just a smokescree…
> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs.
One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.
Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
(However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)