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Comment by sili | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of keeping people closer to what they are good at. However I'm afraid this strategy will backfire on your employees if they are forced to leave to another company for whatever reason. In an environment where every company does not have this flat hierarchy it is strange to see a person who has spent 10 years in one place and has not advanced to some managerial position. New employer will think that he is unfit in some way (even though the opposite is the case) and will probably not even give the person a chance to explain themselves.

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We're optimizing for having the best work environment today. Prioritizing what some employer somewhere else might think a decade from now over improving working conditions today seems like a bad trade.

I don't understand why this has to be a binary choice. The real issue at hand appears to be that people get promoted to positions for which they are not well-suited, and then stay there, because they do a lousy job (agree that this sometimes happens... although eventually they probably get fired).

What if "promotion" doesn't necessarily mean domain over other people, which seems to be the other issue. There can only be one SVP of Technology, for example, in most organizations.

What if, like in school, you get "degrees" for achieving things within the organization? If you launch a major new product successfully, you achieve a "master programmer" honor, and the associated pay benefits. This doesn't necessarily give you any right to control others in the organization, but it rewards employees for stellar performance. They can then put that on their resume if they go to another company.

I would argue it is a little short-sighted to say that the company can exist in a vacuum, when every other company in the world, for the most part, operates with a title. That doesn't mean you have to play that game within the company, but you should at least accommodate employees' concerns that they work for you for 10 years, and then can never get a comparable job because it looks like they never advanced. If they stay in your good graces, it probably isn't an issue, since I'm sure you will give them a good recommendation. But if not, they could be in big trouble when they go to find a new job.

If anyone ever faces this thought-experiment problem when they leave 37signals, I'll be happy to bestow them a non-managerial fancy title of their choice. If someone leaving 37signals thinks they need to have a "Master Programmer" title, they'll get that. Problem solved.

I realize that particular suggestion regarding degrees is a little Mickey Mouse. My point was simply that it is quite risky for them to have to rely on your good graces when they leave the organization. What if you're not around to bestow that promised title 10 years from now? What if after a string of successes, that employee makes a mistake and tanks a product, and gets fired on bad terms? This system works fine internally, especially for management. It adds a lot of risk for employees, and that risk escalates the longer they are with the company. I'm not telling you I have the right answer, but I think it's worth considering.

What's the risk? That I don't take a job sometime in the future from a short-sighted HR drone who can only judge me based on my resumé? If the lack of an archetypal career path on my resumé is a barrier, it's probably not a job worth having.

There are a whole host of intangibles that will probably break down by individual employee. An employee may have to move to a different location for personal reasons where the only option is a job that hires via HR drone.

A large part of management structure in the first place is to try to insulate the organization against changes at any level. Want to replace the entire C suite and the board? No problem... business goes on as usual. With this structure, the company becomes highly dependent on the people at the very top. Any changes there might have the effect of blowing up the whole organization, because there are only a few people who are unquestionably in charge. I think there are lots of benefits from trying to reshape the corporate org chart, as I mentioned in another post, but it is also dangerous to be overly idealistic in terms of how your employees regard this structure and the risk they place on working under it. If most of them feel its appropriate, then I suppose there is no problem. However, I wouldn't automatically assume that's the case, just because they have chosen to work without a title. Also, a large part of their continued work at the firm may have to do with their relationship with you personally, which may put the long term viability of the business at risk.

The hypothetical company you've described here sounds very irrational to me: discarding a candidate with 10 years of experience (at a very highly regarded company, no less) without ever even speaking to the person.

Why should anyone optimize for the irrational job-hirers out there? This does not sound like a path to happiness to me. Besides I find it unlikely that the kind of person who is happy at a small company like 37s for 10 years would want to work at this hypothetical irrational company.

I'm the type of person who would work at 37signals. If I were to leave 37signals, any job that I would be applying to would have heard of 37signals and presumably my work there would speak for itself. If I got nixed because of detailed line-wise consideration of my CV I would take that as a sign that I was better off far away from that company.

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