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Comment by dzikimarian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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