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Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

That sounds incredibly amazing. Utopian.

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

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.

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.

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

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