Undoing hierarchy at every turn is in the zeitgeist. We need to take some time to appreciate when it is useful. My belief is that it is useful for quick action and inevitable when human systems scale.
Some people are good in management, some aren't.
But if you're long enough in a job, you have to take on a management position to get paid more or to make decisions in your favor.
Yes the payment thing isn't a big problem in the IT sector, senior engineers often get paid as much or even more than managers. But the decision part is still a problem. Often you end up with stupid ideas you have to execute and the only way to change them is to get rid of the manager, because he won't consider he failed...
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance.
-Lao Tzu
The nice thing about being truly flat is that there's no boss to get rid of if they're not working out. You just decide not to work with them.
[Flat isn't totally wonderful and there are still issues with it which I don't care to get into right now.]
"How s plan becomes policy"
Question for folks: Do you really think this is happening or are people just talking about it? I've worked for people who talked a big collaboration/flat structure game, but when it comes down to important projects, all of the sudden, one guy is the decider, and he is only giving responsibility to his lieutenants, who have direct command over the people below. He can count on his hand the number of people who have true control over real resources, which makes it easy for him to reason about where costs are going.
Everyone tries to be nice about it, but my sense is that almost no one actually believes in giving serious responsibilities to a wide range of people. They have their go-to people, and everyone else has to prove themselves by following directions well and maybe they can get a position in that structure at some theoretical later date.
I haven't worked in very many different companies though, so I would love to hear if that's actually becoming a bigger thing in other places. I know Valve is different, but they seem more and more like an outlier to me.
So flatten your company structure however you like, there will be a social hierarchy in place as well because these are Humans we are talking about. The people who have interesting things to say about this will talk about how this is the real power of a flat structure, that the social hierarchy is much more dynamic and re-arranges itself on demand and multiple context dependent hierarchies will exist all inter-relating. Your static and slow to adapt org-chart hierarchy just gets in the way.
Of course there are a lot of cons as well as the pros, you will get cliques, introverts, regardless of ability, will be disadvantaged, these subconscious social hierarchy building behaviours incorporate all those ugly human prejudices we know are maladaptive, etc.
But overall I find it a really interesting argument.
The thrust of it was that without an explicit hierachy, informal hierachies in social structures always emerge. Those informal hierachies are much harder to navigate and much more likely to opress than explicit ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
From a feminist perspective some complaints are that lack of structure creates a vacuum in which sociopaths and bullies can run free. Also it doesn't have the capacity to enact top-down diagnostic and corrective action to combat institutional or otherwise widespread behavior deficits (for example discrminatory or sexist attitudes.)
It's in the Zeitgeist because people are coming to understand how monumentally stupid it is to continue operating in this horrific way - both in terms of overall efficiency and in terms of human suffering.
The proof that hierarchical systems do scale is in the military. They operate in absolute hierarchical fashion. In the past they did so with very limited communication, with headcounts unimaginable in today's organizations.
Pointing in the vague direction of an exemplar system and describing it a positive argument does not constitute an argument.
Neither does saying "hierarchies do not scale well", or "no they don't", without providing any evidence. So at least you are both "arguing" on the same level: unsubstantiated opinion.
Ahem. Ever hear of DNS?
Distributed is what you want to have for a) robustness (because redundancy means the work can be redirected to agents that are still alive) and b) adaptability (because system can restructure itself locally without the need to coordinate with the entirety of it).
Of course you want to apply those two recursively, e.g. hierarchies that encompass many peers at each level, etc., but that doesn't change the point. Frankly, the whole field of distributed computing is one big proof that hierarchies are good and desirable.