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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find:

> Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning managers in the spring.

It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat organizations.

Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure works?

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Yeah I agree with you I didn't find much of anything useful beyond this one other bit that added another, small explanation for moving away from bossless:

> While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance. “Without even a minimal layer of management, it was difficult to have some of those conversations and to get people feeling like they understood what was expected of them, and that they were getting the support that they needed in order to do the best work,”

No information about what the current structure is, how it's working out compared to the last one nor really any satisfying answers for why the initial bossless failed (I mean I can certainly guess but they went through it, it would be nice to have more data).

My guess?

The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a) raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on opportunities.

This.

Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!" PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe how they are now addressed.

We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.

So, translation is actually:

  blorp blorp! 

  money money! 

  blorp blorp! 

  feed me, seymour!

Yay! I feel reassured that everything is going smoothly, just as planned, and 10% growth as usual.

One could quickly argue that PR articles that skip the details, and make designs to produce the sensation of graphs that "go up and to the right," are a clear indicator that pleasing investors produces a bland gruel of profiteering corporations as ineffective at doing anything useful besides "making money," as is flatlander management, at providing direction to employees (read: millennials) who can't adjust to the sensation of not being subordinate to micro-managing overlords.

I came here to say the same thing, since flat structure companies have always fascinated me and I generally still feel like it would be a good experience to work for one, I wanted to know what exactly led them to this decision. Instead only two things were listed as potential reasons: the gender issue and that employees didn't have a person to talk to about their performance or conflicts. The title is very misleading as I'm sure these couldn't be the only drivers. That's a huge cultural shift.

I don't know what led GitHub to this shift. At GitLab we want to maintain as flat of a structure as possible but we always wanted everyone to have exactly one boss and 4-10 reports per boss. For us the reasons are that:

1. You want someone to evaluate your and your team's performance. Not getting feedback on this is demotivating.

2. You want someone to help you get better and plan your career (all of our managers are skilled in the area of work of their reports).

3. You want someone to go to with problems: individual execution, team execution, collaboration with another team, and (inter)personal ones).

For more information about our reporting structure see https://about.gitlab.com/team/structure/ and our leadership principles see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/

I'm curious if there's a way to accomplish those things without a single designated boss. For example, having coders taking turns every week or two being the person people go to for typical boss purposes. Of course some people just aren't good leaders or have no desire to be, so maybe some people can have a promoted status they get over time, allowing them to be in the "pool" of managers chosen on a biweekly basis.

There can be many factors to play around with. After everyone on a team has had the chance to be manager couple times, the team could vote for who should be the manager for the next month. Etc, etc. The idea is to still give a team the sense of control, rather than feeling that you're imposing a boss on them.

Rotating the boss would expose people to more advice. Like switching dance partners during a dance lesson the rate of learning would increase.

However, I think a boss is more like a person you go teach a dance workshop with that a person that participates in it. Maybe the intern can have a new mentor every week. But I see some obstacles doing this do experienced team members.

It is already hard to find people that are both an expert at the work and a great boss. Finding multiple bosses in a team seems hard.

Frequently your boss needs a long term view on your activities. Career planning, performance reviews, and performance improvement plans are multi-month affairs.

Coordinating with other bosses and team also happens via social capital. Having to deal with a new persons for all other teams every month might be hard.

I know about a dev team that does Holcracy: https://github.com/lab-coop/lab-governance

I can't offer that insight so instead, my analysis of what actually happened at github. May enlighten to why this article exists at all, and is so thin.

http://hintjens.com/blog:111

welcome to the brilliant world of Tech Industry journalism, where 2 year old Twitter controversies are what pass for investigation and background.

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