31–40 of 110 posts
I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.
The 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,…
>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…
Actually, if you look at the situation, it was the very nature of having a Founder involved. If there were no Founders or other powerful people, then that wife's all edged bullshit never would have taken off. Holacracy is not Bullshit.
>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…
Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.
"When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill
it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally
held power (rich white men)."
Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?
To 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 th…
Managers' higher pay isn't some kind of conspiracy squatting in the industry. It's the result of market forces. Those outside pressures will not evaporate simply because we do not like them. Pay grades are telling us things we do not wish to hear: - engineers are more replaceable than their managers - management staff are consistently difficult to find
Look at the acquihire prices engineers are getting these days...
I think that a holacracy, like most things dealing with human beings and their behavior, is dependent on the specific human beings in question with regard to whether or not it will succeed.
On a slightly meta level, it is interesting why the startup/development culture seems to flock to articles like this, saying "such-and-such thing can never work as a solution to people problems because it didn't work here" - we see this crop up on HN constantly, pro- and anti-, with things like working from home, pair programming, etc. Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?
> When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power I've never really given this issue much thought, but it sounds reasonable. Illusions can be dangerous, including the illusion of equality. I was instantly reminded of the famous commandment in Animal Farm : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" . It now seems alm…
That is the major failing with a lot of the companies doing this. The belief that everyone shares the same ideals and it will work itself out without requiring very strict constraints and process.
All that happens is that the inequalities are layered behind façades, becoming a lot harder to address and resolve than if a traditional power structure was used.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" :) )
I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.