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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?

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That is how large INCOMPETENT organizations are run. And yes, large organizations have a trend towards incompetency.

Walk into a meeting, look around. Add up everyone's per hour salary. That is what having that meeting costs. Now look around and consider what each talking about the relevant bits to everyone else would take until a decision was made without the meeting. That's potentially how much more not having the meeting costs.

You'll conclude two things. Meetings are crazy expensive for the organization. Meetings can be worth it when the alternative is even more crazy expensive. But the meeting should be as efficient as possible. And you want people to only be in them when there is positive value from doing so.

I just ran a standup. I do this every day. 8 people for 15 minutes. Let's suppose their average salary is $50/hour. That's a $200 meeting. I spend another 30 minutes per day summarizing it, making notes available, and elsewhere keeping a status page up to date so that other people don't have to ask about that meeting.

That extra work keeps another 5 people from showing up. That keeps me from having to have another set of meetings with those people. That keeps the meeting from ballooning to 30 or 45 minutes per day.

In a good organization you want everyone thinking about meetings like I just did. Yes, lots of meetings are needed. Yes, important people will spend most of their time in meetings. But make it efficient. And eliminate any meeting, and any person from any meeting, that doesn't pull its weight.

I don't see how your point is anything against a 'corporate structure' with multiple layers of heirarchy. You are just describing how to run a good one.

My point is against justifying having more meetings and deeper hierarchies over time on the basis of, "Oh well, that's how large organizations should be run."

Organizations should be run with the necessary minimum of meetings, hierarchy and administration. Universities have entirely lost sight of that. And our response should not be a complacent excuse that this is how it should be for any organization of that size. Our response should be to call them out on being severely incompetently run, with no excuse other than the self-aggrandizement of useless bureaucrats.

Competent self-managing sub-organizations.

Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.

A 'sub-organization' is just an alternative description of a heirarchy. Those sub-organizations will have to come together to make macro decisions, like which departments need more funding, how to handle building expansion and shared facility use, etc.

In my experience, smaller flatter organizations rarely require a synchronous large meeting for those issues.

Our largest organizations don't have pervasive hierarchy and meetings which break down at extreme sizes. Markets for example are self organizing around price. Countries may or may not be even larger scale organizations.

You can find smaller scale versions that operate on similar principles. https://hbr.org/2013/11/hierarchy-is-overrated

A market isn't an organization, and how would a university organize itself like a market?

Your begging the question by assuming things without hierarchy are not organizations. Look at the shifts in say the Chinese economy as overall planning was reduced and it was far from a 100% binary transition. Or in a larger scope countries are organizations with leadership but rarely low level direction.

As to Universities Students already self organize around major creating an internal market. Some Universities try and limit the sizes of various Majors, but that's far from necessary. You generally allow professors to seek outside funding for post docks etc without command and control oversight.

You could use internal markets to make various decisions such as funding allocation. Though self organization is often just as efficient.

Net result, you can easily have a University without a president/CEO. Their are even plenty of historic examples of this.

Markets aren't organizations.

US Doctors are a clear counter example. The group chooses it's own members and kicks people out.

I would disagree that's a market.

Doctors are not recruited and trained like McDonald's workers. The barriers to entry and barriers to retention put current and potential doctors in direct competition with each other. The field also deals with people moving on to something else.

So, it looks like a duck and smells like a duck to me.

That doesn't sound like a market at all.

There’s a notion that much of the hierarchy that exists in the world is unnecessary, and perpetuated only because it’s the status quo. A university for example doesn’t strictly need to manage the professors - you could have a very large university where the professors primarily manage themselves, with only a small administrative group. An organization arranged in this way wouldn’t need many meetings.

How would you decide budgets for those professors? How would you determine which departments are growing and where you need more resources? How would you budget things like building expansion, maintenance, shared facilities?

A student and faculty congress. There is precedent for this, many such bodies already have authority over millions of dollars.

I think it's worth trying. A 100% faculty based university, with student employees and contractors doing the more low level administrative work. The faculty would take on the high level admin work, e.g. the IT or CS departments managing computer systems in partnership with the students.

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