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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Sure. The company I work at has always been remote-only, and I've been at it for over 5 years.

We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.

Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.

We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.

It's, honestly, kinda awesome.

Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.

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> We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.

To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.

I think it works fine for smaller organizations with less than 50 people. It may not work so well with companies that are rapidly going and already stretching their culture to its limits. It still greatly depends on who is running the company, what the goals are, etc. At your average tech company, mentorship and autonomy matter way more than someone assigning you a direct manager that simply checks boxes on some annual review form. I believe in a strong technical leadership model while keeping the "management hierarchy" flat. E.g. having "direct reports" becomes important when you have enough people that upper management can't give someone dedicated time. There are plenty of ways to keep things flatter and not fall into the traps of having a traditional management hierarchy. It simply takes some thought. You can't absolve your organization of needing management by simply declaring yourself "flat", but there are benefits to how agile an organization can be the flatter they can get, IMO.

This is definitely an issue in any team or organization. Unless you're smaller than 10 employees, eventually office/career politics will dominate. It's inevitable human nature.

This is the frustration I have with my current role. The company is great and the team is awesome. But getting to work on anything that interests me is impossible. All of the great, fun projects go to other team members. The issue compounds itself because now that I don't work on the stuff that I'm good at / want to do, people on my team have pigeonholed me into Team Garbageman (person who does the projects that nobody else wants).

Our company implements Holacracy which largely solves this problem.

Any time I read "flat hierarchy" in a job posting I feel the urge to run. That may be true contractually, but there is _always_ a hierarchy.

Yes, and it comes with the opposite problem of hierarchy - working for a manager who has 30-50 direct reports and no time for you or anyone on the team.

Same here. I've worked at a few companies like that, and it's always a ton of office politics with senior employees never being held accountable because they're not technically in charge. It's a prime example of "some are more equal than others".

Thanks for sharing, I think the "no hidden discussions" idea is important. I had a few internships in the before times, and I learned the most by pulling up a chair to other engineers / researchers who were already talking about something, and just listening to how they talk through problems. In my remote job I don't really get a chance to eavesdrop on someone's zoom call.

I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!

If you don’t mind me sharing, I’m also building something for making discussions more transparent and discoverable. https://AsyncGo.com just launched and I’d love to hear your feedback.

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