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Comment by flyhighplato | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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