DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
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DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
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Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#2At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#3At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
That's one of the reasons to keep your company small.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#4At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
If the company does start to become bigger, and groups in charge of certain aspects of the products start to form, is it possible to still apply this model on the smaller formed groups?
Then the weekly leader of each group meet and therefore encourages employees to maintain the "bigger picture" of the product.
Is this doomed to fail? what do you guys think?
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#5As much as I like the idea of not having middle managers, I think it's impossible at a certain point. I mean, Google would love nothing better than to do away with middle managers altogether, and they have them. I think the best counter-point comes from Joel Spolsky: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#6As much as I like the idea of not having middle managers, I think it's impossible at a certain point. I mean, Google would love nothing better than to do away with middle managers altogether, and they have them. I think the best counter-point comes from Joel Spolsky: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...
Thank you for sharing that article, Jason. :) Paraphrasing Joel Spolsky in response to DHH:
A final thought: You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a founder about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set up and operate.
I sometimes wonder why DHH and Spolsky are so different. DHH speaks as if what he says is law, will work for everyone, Spolsky seems to constantly pad his advice with warnings about context.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#7At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
That's one of the reasons to keep your company small.
It's also a reason to make sure your middle managers are not paper-pushing bozos.
The idea that a middle manager has to be an entity that generates meetings, paperwork, stupid rules and hot air is prevalent, but by no means necessary. Hard to believe, but trust me - the good ones see their role as exactly the reverse.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#8My only issue with that approach is that of holiday days.
I can see so many ways that that can go wrong. To me, the reason it works seems more like peer pressure than enjoyment of work.
I love what I do, I love coding, and I also know that I love taking a week out to not care about everything I do at work. If I was in a system like that, I'd feel kinda pressured to keep up with my colleagues and not let the team down. Not by my friends and officemates, but by the knowledge that if I take a week off, that's a week they've got to handle the work I'd do. There's rarely a 'good' time to take holidays, especially in smaller teams.
It could work, it is certainly possible, but it seems an unnecessary area where pressure can occur when a team is under stress. To be honest, I think it could work better with the caveat that everyone has to take a certain minimum level of holiday.
Sick days however make perfect sense.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#9As much as I like the idea of not having middle managers, I think it's impossible at a certain point. I mean, Google would love nothing better than to do away with middle managers altogether, and they have them. I think the best counter-point comes from Joel Spolsky: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...
Thank you for sharing that article, Jason. :) Paraphrasing Joel Spolsky in response to DHH: A final thought: You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a founder about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set up and operate. I some…
In this case, DHH seems to have provided the appropriate hedge:
> You might be thinking, "This is crazy -- it would never work at my company." And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or division.
Re: DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees
#10At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
If the company does start to become bigger, and groups in charge of certain aspects of the products start to form, is it possible to still apply this model on the smaller formed groups? Then the weekly leader of each group meet and therefore encourages employees to maintain the "bigger picture" of the product. Is this doomed to fail? what do you guys think?
Yes, that's what the "Scrum of Scrums" idea is meant to solve, in exactly that way:
http://www.xqa.com.ar/visualmanagement/2009/08/scrum-of-scru...