Is this a good way to run a software company? [13 min vid] | Hacker News Reader

Is this a good way to run a software company? [13 min vid]

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12 pointsrguzman10 comments

Ha, I think this is great. People actually being expected to produce instead of just warming the chair from 9-5. I find the part of this video amusing where they are talking about how they encourage everyone to use a different desk everyday so that managers have a hard time monitoring them. I suspect this makes the manager focus on the important thing. That being the quality of the employee's actual work. Unfortunately so often people default to using a persons work schedule to determine performance because it is easier to look up from your game of solitaire every morning at 9 and check a desk than it is to actually understand what each individual does and it's value (or lack there of) to the organization.

I think it must get harder to run a company that way when you get a lot more employees. Once you become just another face in the crowd, there's not as much social pressure on you. The system might break down there.

I mean, I'd love to work in a place like that. And I'm sure lots of others would. After all, many of us are altruistic and hard-working people, which would work great in a culture like that.

Semco have over a thousand employees. I think in such a large organisation, it's a great system, because everyone is accountable. I think that the opposite of becoming another face in the crowd happens under Semler's system. You answer to those around you, rather then those ten floors up.

According to the video in the link rguzman below, Semco has 5,000 employees.

According to the title on this, page, however, they might be looking for sysadmins:

http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/content.asp?content=1

I think the idea is to have small units instead of one large bureaucratic tree or similar structure. That way each unit can exert the necessary social pressure. Like Hates_ 13 says, semco is pretty large and it grew and continues to run efficiently this way.

On the other hand, maybe as the company scales (say to the size of GM) what you end up with is a tree of "units" because something or someone has to coordinate the effort so that the company stays on track. At ~1000 employees this it is probably just higher management (e.g., Semler and his team) and the aforementioned units. However, at larger sizes there is probably too many units for a single management team to coordinate, so you start having "management units" and then "management management units" and obviously this goes nowhere logarithmically :)

So you are probably right, but there is plenty of room at the top.

It seems to me that if a company which manufactures a "solid product" can be run that way it must be possible to run a software company this way.

An interview with Semler: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gJkOPxJCN1w

It really depends on the quality of people you have. This is a really nice way to run a company. But for it to work, you need to get employees that care and are willing to do their fair share for the company.

Obviously. But in a software company, specially a startup, if you don't have good people you were doomed before you started.

On the other hand, the whole democracy thing and the employees having stake on the company may even take care of or at least counter balance having bad people.

I highly recommend his book Maverick.

Thank you. I've been meaning to read something by him but haven't put any thought into which book I should start with. I care mostly that it goes into detail about implementing what he preaches and keeps the pontificating to a minimum.

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