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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

I've always been curious about claims that such an approach inevitably doesn't work. I feel like my intuition tells me it could with the right people and variation on the concept. But it's probably difficult. Even the best managers I've seen usually have blind spots on how the team is running.

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Tons of very proficient people are simply not interested in responsibility that comes with flat structure.

Because of that such company will either stay small (probably leaving ambitious people with unfulfilled ambitions) or change along the way, because you simply will not find enough people to make it grow.

Many ambitious people thrive in a flat environment, though. That's one reason some people like startups.

It's been a few years since I pondered this, but I used to spend a lot of time thinking on this subject. I think for it to be successful you need a lot of the type of person that prefers to work in such an environment, and to make effort to keep it that way. That might mean staying small staffed, but I'm not totally convinced it even needs that.

A good boss is a BS shield, that enhances productivity. I enjoyed startups when I was younger, but now I like to be focused. Fighting fires for a living can result in broad experience, but also less deep work, which can “stunt growth”. At least that’s my opinion/experience. They were also the most fulfilling, that completely disappeared 8 years of my life.

I think not all startup experiences are the same. I had a startup experience that had lots of deep, focused work and not putting out fires. That sort of holy grail is one thing that had me thinking about this topic and how to buck conventional wisdom about what type of environment is inevitable, or what can't work.

But where is the room for ambition in a large company with flat staffing? If you, completely independently, build something adding $2 million of revenue at e.g. Google, you've increased the company revenue by 0.0007%. Even hundreds of millions of dollars remain but a decimal point. The company is simply so large that even if you achieve amazing things, they're going to be largely irrelevant. So the only real avenue for ambition is climbing the ladder of hierarchy. But when that ladder doesn't exist?

One could argue that social economic systems, at scale, are functionally similar to a massive corporation operating on a flat environment. And you end up with a similar issue there. "Company" ambition doesn't really have a viable path forward, and so the optimal solution is to just coast by - and direct your ambition towards your own personal stuff. Or even set the ambition aside, and just enjoy life. At least until the consequences of everybody operating under a similar system of demotivation kicks in.

Some interesting approaches that companies are taking around this are described in Matt Parker's book, "A Radical Enterprise" for example, companies being made up of many microenterprises.

Once you can break away from many traditional imaginations of what a business is and how it should run there are some interesting possibilities.

Very challenging and easy to get wrong though I'd guess.

https://itrevolution.com/articles/radical-enterprise-pioneer...

My intuition is basically its like networking. Using broadcast on a shared medium works fine for small groups, but in big groups it overwhelms. Similarly, in small groups flat structure is fine, but eventually in large groups you have to spend 110% of your time managing relationships and stakeholders, which simply isn't practical.

And that is true even if the group is the best people possible. The only way would be to have no disagreement, but then you would probably be creatively dead.

To put another way, i suspect communication scales quasi linearly with managers, but at least quadratically without.

I think you're probably right. I've seen it work at small companies. What it doesn't do is scale to large companies, which is the heuristic most growing companies use for any decision. You'd have to say "we'll grow no larger than our flat structure can sustain, even if it costs us billions," and who is going to do that? Not saying it's a good thing, in fact the opposite — optimizing for scale is the source of many of our woes as an industry, in my grumpy opinion.

Even assuming those "right people" exist, you'd need a hiring process that could pick them out, and they'd need to want to work for you.

And hope they never change. Say something happens in one of their lives and they no longer contribute anything. Getting rid of them would be exactly what the OP post is criticizing.

Isn’t ~50% of people working at companies with less than 10 people?

Somehow that works, so maybe that suggests ~50% of employees at a business could be in self-organising units of less than 10 people?

It works for attorneys and accountants. It’s an approach with ups and downs. The biggest down being it’s harder to scale.

Interestingly though attorneys and accountants charge by the hour to customers. So their individual value to the group is easy to quantify and measure.

And while they may have support staff, they typically "work alone" in the sense that there's one partner per account, so very little oversight or management is needed.

The primary purpose of this "collective" is to create a "brand" of sorts. Ernst and Young has more prestige than say Franklin and Franklin. This draws in higher paying customers.

I feel like there are sufficient differences in this kind of business to a typical software business that the comparison is not especially useful.

Which is not to say that a coop can't work, just that the comparison to accountants and lawyers doesn't work.

Attorneys: associates, junior partners, senior partners, managing partners, named partners. Does not look like flat structure to me.

Like I said, growth is hard.

My brother is an attorney in a small practice of 6 attorneys. They are all partners, share ownership, and rotate who the managing partner annually.

Technically there is nothing preventing you from stacking 10 eggs on top of each other, If you balance it just right, they won't move assuming no outside forces.

Realistically, you may as well talk about it as something that can't be done. If anything, it's probably easier to stack eggs than to get more than 4 people to work collaboratively without the current incentives and rules making it all hold together.

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