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Comment by jseban | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this, this is the way every hierarchy work, and how every single job/management role is functioning. It's to solve the problem of communication overhead growing exponentially with larger groups of people. Why does this make you sad? And is it better to have a dysfunctional organisation where people float in and out of poorly defined roles and everyone tries to do everything? Does that really make you more happy? I don't get this emotional take on specialisation.

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It is better to have a functional organisation where people float in and out of roles defined by the expectations of others and everyone is capable of judging basic business tradeoffs, yes.

That, in my experience, makes people happier. They get to focus on important problems, help people they know, and develop their well-roundedness as human beings.

I think you might be underestimating the amount of overhead that is added by a heavy bureaucratic hierarchy.

That sounds incredibly amazing. Utopian.

But I doubt it is possible even if all humans involved are incredible. You still need coordination.

It's not that far off from my experience in a research organization.

We underestimate the commitment of others to helping the organization that pays for their food's success (even though we feel the commitment). Coordination is needed but if you trust and empower the ICs you can communicate a high level vision and then just look out for major problems and opportunities rather than micromanaging the people who are doing roughly the right thing.

It's a model that doesn't work everywhere but it can lead to increased creative output, happiness despite lower wages, less need for middle management, and other benefits to an organization.

Yeah this annoys me to no end how tech people pretend that they have casually invented peace on earth, and act like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Of course large groups of people simply just get along perfectly and efficiently without any coordination" Yeah right.

It's the people who are dysfunctional who thrive in these environments because they don't have to be accountable, so their issues just disappear, and people who actually function and take their job seriously will burn out and go insane in the chaos.

Large groups of people with a common goal can coordinate within themselves. They don't need to hear "do X, now do Y" from someone else.

And if they do, they can appoint that someone else on their own -- it's how the world's free countries operate, after all; and a country is bigger than a company.

The only reason people think this doesn't work for companies is that they haven't experienced the "common goal" part -- management bureaucracy discourages caring about the common goal, instead focusing on encouraging obeying direct orders.

(And then it goes on to redefine "obeying orders" as "coordination" to prevent anyone from seeing what's going on.)

Well you have the burden of proof for these extraordinary claims, in what way is this different from the pitch of a cult?

What would you consider sufficient evidence?

Not that I can't come up with a lot, but if it's trivial to prove I have less work to do.

The book "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet is basically along these lines. He worked to turn a poorly-performing submarine in the US Navy to one of the best. The gist is that he enabled autonomy and shared vision to reduce the top-down heavy handedness that they were usually used to, allowing for more efficient decision making.

That's a gross generalization, and it is still very hard to conceptualize, but thought provoking.

I've worked under these circumstances before. It's not at all utopian, but I was definitely much happier. And yes, it is a bit cultish, but who cares? I'm an adult and I know it's just a job—If some cultish behaviour helps people who otherwise wouldn't care to know each other work together, then I'm all for it. It just requires transparency.

And of course, that isn't for everyone. I know people who hated working like that and left, and that's totally fine. Just don't be dismissive that there are other ways.

And if they do, they can appoint that someone else on their own -- it's how the world's free countries operate, after all; and a country is bigger than a company.

That's still a "manager" someone to manager better coordination. The point here is that such a role is required to get work done.

Sure, there are weird things that happen when the manager stops being a bottom-up appointee and starts being a top-down ruler. Heck that is incredibly common. But that does not mean we should do away with central figures that handle coordination. You still need those central figures.

You need coordination. You don't necessarily need hierarchical coordination.

Coordination without any kind of hierarchy has N!/2 complexity. That gets overwhelming way to soon. Have an idea that requires everyone else to change something. N!/2 conversations to have. (Or one big meeting with the same sort of complexity). Need to change your approach to match what others are doing, gotta make a 1-on-1 connection. If they need to change their approach, they need to coordinate with others, continue for a long time.

If you want any kind of efficiency You need to have small-ish teams. I'd guess about 10 people. But lets say 50. You need to chunk up work so that teams can work in parallel. You need central oversight to coordinate the teams. This can be just a group meeting of team leaders, but the big picture should not be lost. And you need to make some decisions from this central picture.

All of this very quickly leads to hierarchy.

Isn't hierarchy standing in for encapsulation here? Companies interact with one another in a coordinated way with neither a hierarchy, nor needing to know what every other company is doing

This reminds me of a very interesting comment on the engineering and management practices at Intel [1]: "I often called Intel an 'ant hill', because the engineers would swarm a project just like ants do a meal."

I've seen it happen at smaller scales, great engineers in flat hierarchies without direction might not be the best idea from a business perspective...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31571560

Who says they have to be "without direction?"

Only in a very hierarchical organisation are the lowest levels without direction -- because the higher levels maintain their position by keeping important information secret.

If the important information (market signals, experiment outcomes, financial data, etc.) is made available to everyone, and everyone receives a sliver of training in interpreting it, any group of engineers worth their salt can make responsible decisions in the right direction. (Often much better than a small set of executives would.)

I like the idea, and I've seen it work for teams focusing on a single project/product. What's unsolved for me is how to scale this.

Interpreting data takes time, figuring out a strategy that spans multiple projects and years takes time... not sure this is workable to do individually. I'm all for being transparent with goals, that would be a given for me in any kind of organization - hierarchical or not. But somebody needs to keep up with the ideas of the engineers, customer requests, business goals and changing markets to put everything into an actionable strategy. In bigger orgs this is an ongoing process and requires full-time dedication... It would be really hard (but very interesting) to come up with a process to 'crowd-source' those things from 100+ engineers, skipping the middle-management positions.

Is a hierarchy the right way to organise a company?

communication does not have to happen from manager down to lower manager and then manager to reports. Why can't one guy at the top just email everyone (and even that does not have to be top down, answers received from God on the mountaintop but can be part of an active conversation (cf Torvalds).

One way of looking at this is hierarchy works well for an organisation where the people are doing most of the actual work (ie an army fighting). It does not have to be the right solution where the actual work is code that will then do the actual work (ie Google's ad market place is run day to day by the code. when Google makes a chnage then they are to all intents releasing a new company that does things in new ways.

once upon a time you had the same people in the same roles and then turned to them and said you are going to (sell ads) in a different way. the distinction between an organisation and what it does was blurred. but with code there is a clear distinction.

I even go so far as to say that coders are the new managers - managers used to be needed for designing an organisation that would perform.

I’ve been thinking of coding as management too.

Considering the senior GIS focused dev at my work: to do what he does, but in the 70s he’d be a VP of a division of analysts and mapping techs. In 2022: he’s a programmer/maintainer on a project.

The co-op ramping up on the same program? Back in the day she would be a senior analyst on the management track under the VP. In 2022: a junior coder we can assign tickets to, with senior dev not as a boss/superior but as a guide.

Computer programs automate business processes that would require large orgs and rigid hierarchies 50 years ago.

>Is a hierarchy the right way to organise a company?

I think so.

I've twice worked as a software engineer for flat organizations (once as a subcontractor, once as a normal employee) and I really, really dislike it. Strong leadership is important.

There ends up being chaos, uncertainty, and a distinct lack of accountability.

It is sad, because the hierarchy is not solving that problem, instead the problem is moving down the hierarchy.

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