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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/

Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it

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As humans we do have built-in hardware for forming informal cliques, so this could be seen as leveraging our built-in strengths (although you have to consciously work against some of the built-in cognitive biases that people have so it might be a risky thing, maybe not worth it).

The flat org of fb I described is not really flat the way Valve is. Valve is truly flat from what I understand, whereas the one at facebook is not but encourage people to behave like it is.

I think I read that it's not flat since a few years back anyway

This is an old observation: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I would argue it does work in practise, at least with a higher success rate than a formal authority hierarchy.

How is it even remotley like communism in USSR? Russian empire had the same governance structure since the time of the Golden Horde to present day e.g. very hierarchal top down ...

Right there in the title - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Soviets are worker's councils and the individual republics are supposed to have some degree of autonomy on paper. For at least a couple of months in 1917, some amount of collective decision making did happen, although (as you stated) with virtually all Russian governments, it quickly devolved into one-man personality cult enforced by brutality and the machinations of the NKVD.

Can we really expect an employee who was fired to paint the most accurate picture though? What are the thoughts of folks that left on good or neutral terms?

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