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Comment by silentfish | Hacker News Reader

> A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

This is a way to create a clusterfuck. Nothing is worse than having people barging in from other departments going over managers' heads and imposing their own priorities.

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I'm a huge fan of this. But it relies on your co-workers having commons sense, the ability to logically reason, and to have the ability to judge priorities on their own.

This is how a company should operate. Where everyone is on the same team, working to solve the most pressing problems, and working on what on what justifiably blocks the company from it's most critical goals.

Again its critical to hire non-idiots, and this works great. Hence why people who do things without rationally justifiable reasons get fired from Tesla regularly.

I disagree: I have seen so many situations where a simple piece of information turns into a game of Telephone and a political football, resulting in absurd delays.

That's not the same as imposing different priorities, it's just a question of "I need X in order to do Y".

Provide some examples of when this happened, why it caused harm, and to what degree the harms from this sort of thing outweighed the benefits.

One would generally assume that if someone from another department is commenting on something, particularly if they are a lower level employee, they are generally doing it because they genuinely believe there is some kind of important issue.

And even if it turns out that it isn't important, the time spent briefly annoying someone is generally going to be much less costly than overlooking an issue of actual importance.

I think it depends on the sensitivity/urgency of the matter. Its better to avoid chain of command in urgent matters that an employee might feel slows down production for example. In other cases common sense dictates going through the chain in order to avoid chaos as you describe.

Or worse, a senior-ish person barging in and imposing priorities.

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