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Comment by abuzzooz | Hacker News Reader

Jason seems to imply that managers are useless when he says "We do not have room for people who don't do the actual work".

I think this is very naive of him, and a little selfish. He's enjoying the title of "President" which, to me, is a purely managerial position. I doubt if he considers himself useless, but he's happy to label other managers useless. I might be wrong, but it seems that he's either too selfish to see other people take away some of his control or he's afraid to tackle the problem of a growing company. Both of these will have negative consequences in the future.

Just for the record, over my 14+ years in a technical field, I have been a manager for 5+, and have given up that title twice before to focus on more technical work.

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He's enjoying the title of "President" which, to me, is a purely managerial position.

I doubt that what he does in that position is purely managerial. I think you may have a hard time seeing why they value what they do if you impose your own viewpoints on them.

Perhaps you're right. With a smallish company, it's possible for everybody to jump in and do whatever needs to be done. As a company grows, though, this will become impossible. Many a great company in history have suffered spectacular deaths simply because they couldn't scale correctly with their success.

In my opinion, it will be impossible to have 200 employees with a flat structure.

I don't care about what 37signals might/could look like at 200 employees. We have 27 employees today and we grow slowly. We're optimized for today. If we have to change down the road we will, but there's no sense in spending even 5 minutes worrying about if what we do today will work when we're 10x as big.

> What we learned is that adding a dedicated manager and creating a hierarchy is not the only way to create structure.

I think the misconception with the article is that the title (and focus) is "Why I run a Flat Company" as if this should be the standard for modern business. This works for 37signals, because (1) you have actively chosen to grow very slowly when you could have otherwise grown much faster and (2) you've had the fortune and ability to attract some very good people. Many businesses don't desire to do number 1 and find it very hard to do number 2.

Jason is a designer by trade, and is routinely involved with the design of 37signals' products. In the same vein, DHH is a partner in the company, but still writes code (as I understand it).

To clarify... "President" isn't a title I use, it's a title often ascribed to me as the founder of the company. Whenever anyone asks for my title I tell them we don't have titles. If they require one for whatever they are writing, I say you can say president or founder if that works, but I'd prefer if they didn't say anything other than founder since founder isn't a title as much as it is a fact.

Re: design. Yes, I design. It's the primary thing I do. Design, sketch, work on product simplification, design/think about user experience, etc. DHH still codes as well (he's working on some nice enhancements to Highrise right now, in fact). Both David and I would prefer to design and code all day, but it's not always possible. Lately it's been more possible so we've bee doing it more often.

> To clarify... "President" isn't a title I use, it's a title often ascribed to me as the founder of the company.

I apologize if I got things wrong. I was just going with whatever is here: http://37signals.com/about

"Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals."

and

"Jason co-wrote all of 37signals books, and is invited to speak around the world on entrepreneurship, design, management, and software."

with that kind of workload, I assumed you wouldn't have enough time for anything else. I never said whatever you do is useless. Far from it. Non-technical work that is focused at growing a company is more important than any technical work. After all, what can you do with an insanely great product that you can't sell because you didn't prepare for it properly?

Good catch there. Gonna pull that president mention.

Re: speaking. Not speaking anymore. Really enjoying getting back to product design.

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