Not to change the subject: Having just come out of a totally flat org that was pushing hard for 100% Holacracy I have to say if I didn't leave for other reasons it would have been that. It can be incredibly incredibly difficult to get things done in this environment and sadly made me feel like every day I had to wake up and battle my coworkers because everything was by committee. I'm all for collaboration, but I also believe at the end of the day someone has to be accountable and responsible for actions taken or not taken.
Holacracy is Bullshit
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Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#12The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers.
Which you have an incentive to keep, as you do not want to immobilize your good engineers, as per the Dilbert principle.
The problem is not holacracy itself. Plenty of companies are doing just fine using decentralized and autonomous organizational methods, including Valve and Flying Wild Hog.
The problem lies in having a culture of apathy and immaturity. Not having managers doesn't mean one should not be able to forward complaints to an appropriate person and have the situation handled.
Also, ironically, in the GitHub debacle, it was a woman who rose up and disrupted the power balance.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#13The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers
I agree with this. However, in my experience, bad managers are really good at politics, and their aptitude with politics biases many organizations towards bad management. Holocracy isn't so much a knee-jerk reaction to bad managers, it is a knee-jerk reaction to bad politics. I would posit that if bad managers were never promoted, people wouldn't have the same holocratic ideals. They would just switch teams or switch companies, and be done with it. They can't do that, because sooner or later, Bad Manager Bob comes back as Bad Director Bob.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#14Hierarchy may be superior but I think it might be a bit early to declare holacracy a failure. Presumably there are a multitude of successful holacracies that we aren't hearing about because they are actually working.
Agreed. I won't hold them up as a paragon, having only heard anecdotes, but Valve seems to be an example contrary to Github. Could be completely wrong - would love to here from some Valve guys about how traditional HR issues are dealt with there (the answer may just be, "through HR" :) )
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#15This public spat is good for the investors (a16z) at GitHub. Investors want structure and accountability, and holacracies don't have that. They may get better results (I'm on the fence) so GitHub is probably on a long leash, but this will be a topic when Ben Horowitz and the executives at GitHub sit down for their quarterlies. Wait, holacracies don't have executives...
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#16To me, Github's structure is largely an overreaction to the culture flaws elsewhere. Belief that managers are more valuable than doers, and thus paid more. Belief that engineers are infinitely replaceable. Belief that one should be paid proportionate to the number of people below them in the org chart.
Management has a purpose - but companies poor treatment of engineers over the years has blinded many engineers to this. A great manager ensures their people are pointed in the right direction, makes sure that they're not running into roadblocks, and frees up their people from dealing with bullshit so they can be the best they can be. This really doesn't have anything to do with "oppression", or whatnot.
Managing is orthogonal to engineering - and saying either is worth more than the other is simply wrong. If we can decouple the ideas of "managing" and "building" with systematically being valued / paid more or less than others, we'll have progress. Right now, most are erring on one side or the other.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#17>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people wit…
I think the point is more that bureaucracy exists, in the best case, to distribute power throughout an organization. Delegation of authority necessarily means a reduction in power at the top.
As an ideal, picture a "separation of powers" system - you no longer have a co-founder managing HR disputes in which they are the defendant, for example.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#18I think that a "no managers" system can work either with a very small number of employees ( The "GitHub Debacle" seems to be more an issue of a lack of professionalism and an unwillingness to confront serious problems (a bully non-employee spouse in the office creating trouble for what sounds like a good employee) before they came to a head.
> ...very, very talented people...
Tricky to hire only people who are very, very good at everything necessary for a healthy culture.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#19After Jeri Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she had said that the "flat organization" of Valve masked an informal but very real hierarchy that was made up of elites and their cliques. I realize that flat organization is not the same thing as holarchy, but it could be that they both are trading formal hierarchies for informal ones rather than dispensing with them.
Re: Holacracy is Bullshit
#20Manager != leader.
Managers can = leaders, but the two are not mutually exclusive.