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Comment by duckfang | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 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).

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.

Our company implements Holacracy which largely solves this problem.

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