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Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

>I never had to manage anyone in our startup, even though I was the president. The other hackers were my peers, and would have given me the raspberry if I'd tried to "manage" them. We operated by consensus. And the rest of the company reported to our experienced COO, who was also more of a peer.

Operating by consensus and not valuing the role of "manager" only goes so far. It may work when you're a few people living together, but I think it ultimately leads to cultures like Google's, where every decision requires a room full of engineers to agree.

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There's a flaw in his reasoning here that comes from working with extremely talented people. When you work with such people process is frequently irrelevant, because no matter what process is used they will find some way to get things done and done well. This can lead you into a false sense of victory about whatever process you happened to be using, even though it was the people who were the decisive factor in success.

The real problem with consensus is that all members have to be well above average in several categories (skill, experience, communication, risk/fission making, passion, determination, etc). That is much rarer think most suppose (cause the only startups/teams You hear about are the ones with that, the rest fail and are never known). It is impossible to scale.

At scale you try to find above avg leaders who know how to solicit input and sell ideas.

Yes, you're right. I was implicitly assuming the startup never gets big enough that you have to become a real manager. Obviously in the unlikely event the startup turns out to be Google or Facebook, consensus may no longer work.

>I think it ultimately leads to cultures like Google's, where every decision requires a room full of engineers to agree.

What is this fantasy Google? The Google I interned at was highly hierarchical, with enough meddling managers to drive this whole thread insane.

Agreed. It's essentially design by committee, which may work well when there's only a handful of you, but consensus of several individuals is difficult to reach, and the obvious or safe choice is accepted with little insight or vision. Committees create divisiveness and perpetuate a loss of vision. They exist only because individuals are taught that consensus is more important than making the right decision.

Are you saying that Google is anything other than one of the world's most wildly successful companies of the last decade?

No, he is saying operating by consensus doesn't scale.

"Scale" is a funny word. It doesn't scale in terms of decision making speed. But it does scale in terms of decision making quality. Obviously if social cohesion within the group is too high, or if the people present cross too many hierarchical levels, the group won't use its diversity to make excellent decisions. But if done properly, including more people in decision making results in good decisions.

This is one of the ways that you can get over narrow-minded specialists making decisions that work for them but screw everybody else.

Google has had both success and failure. The successes have paid for the failures and then some, but the failures did happen.

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