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| ▲ | Bhilai 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals. https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man... | | |
| ▲ | aorloff 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes this was a joke. Apparently not a well enough known joke, because a bunch of people took me seriously | |
| ▲ | candiddevmike 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IMO, this could be solved by having a finance team with good workflows and a real human resources team/psychologist on staff that would handle all of the interpersonal drama. It's an interesting anecdote but I don't think it was that great of an attempt or structured well enough to work. | | |
| ▲ | buran77 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > this could be solved With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight. Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the same structure. And it's hell to deal with that when formally all have the same authority so none can override each other, but one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he wants. Do you think someone far away from everything you do will have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about the budget you requested, about the strategic decision you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have any say, they're not the boss. Your logic is no better that those pretending today that a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just replace all the programmers. |
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| ▲ | tasty_freeze 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why not get rid of job titles and just have people do whatever needs to be done? Because no one person is good at everything, and even if you managed to build a team of people who were good at everything, it is inefficient to make everyone keep up with all details of every aspect of the company so that they can be productive in an arbitrary role at the drop of a hat. Giving people a role allows them to specialize their knowledge and concentrate all their efforts into their area of expertise/competence. Managers fill a role. Sure, some managers are bad, and some workplaces have seemingly mostly bad managers, and it leads to cynical opinions about how managers are busy-work-making dolts who don't understand anything. Some employers have mostly good managers and I feel sorry for you if you have never had the experience. I'm 40 years into my EE career and I have always deflected efforts to make me a people manager or a project manager. I like being a grunt in the trenches solving problems at the bottom level, and a good manager increases their reports' productivity by shielding them from needing to deal with project management crap. I would have retired already except I've been blessed to have good managers for the past 20 years, while my managers have been attending umpteen resource allocation meetings and all the attendant report-making that requires. | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Been there, done that. It brings its own set of chaos and office politics. The shadow org structures can be worse than the official ones. | |
| ▲ | oblio 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because social animals have hierarchical social structures. | | |
| ▲ | hackable_sand 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | We also have flat social structures, what is your point? | | |
| ▲ | oblio 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Really? How often and for how many people? Which ones dominate and are more frequent, flat or hierarchical? Which ones do we use for our most complex endeavors |
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