Management structures at major tech companies (2011) [image]
goomics.net
goomics.net
"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." — Melvin E. Conway
The other thought that I have had is management is kind of like inverse tSNE. At the extreme, one is mapping a single dimension (NPV of the company) to high dimensional space (people doing stuff). No wonder it is so hard.
Case in point, Amazon vs Netflix. At Amazon, every decision requires approval of someone higher. Engineers can come up with ideas, but they have to write it up, get it approved, and then get budget assigned for that particular project from management. Even Principle Engineers have to get approvals for their own ideas and projects. And if they have ideas for new company goals, they have to send that up the chain through their management to the leaders (maybe skipping a level or two).
Netflix on the other hand has the same org structure as Amazon, but operates completely differently. Management provides context, not approvals. They say, "these are the goals we are trying to achieve". Then they leave it up to the engineers to implement it however they think is best. And if they need more budget, usually the way it works is that engineers spend the money first and if it's too much someone asks them to find ways to reduce it. And if the engineers have ideas for better company goals, they send that directly to upper management. At Netflix you never have to go through a chain of management to get things done.
Perhaps that is not what is indicated by a traditional org chart (who reports to who), but the "real" org chart does have vertices (people) and edges of different kinds. The most important factor is the amount of time that you control. 1.0 means you completely control your own time, 10.0 means you completely control the time of 10 people. The real org graph is what I am referring to.
Interesting that Amazon is as bureaucratic as it is. Isn't it Bezos himself that came up with the "multiple paths to yes" concept. I suppose, some things are inevitable in an organization once someone has the power press the stop button one's income.
Are you referring to the "1 > 2, but 2 > 0" idea? That's compatible with the Amazon bureaucracy, which just requires finding a leader to sponsor the project even though it might end up redundant with another org's effort.
It is pretty obvious in some ways. Once a company has reached a certain level, there will be many status quo forces that emerge because hey, things are “good enough” for some.
I'm not sure there's was ideal org-chart.
Especially when you take Conway's Law into account:
> Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
I suspect that depending on what technical system you want to build, different designs are good. So you better shape your org like the design you want to achieve, because that's the only one you can ship.
That said, the larger the company, the bigger the problem and the harder it is to change direction when your organization is messed up. And as a company grows, an organization that was optimal can become a disaster.
A 100k employee organization is always going to have some parts of itself that are going to feel glacially slow. But there are companies that big that still deliver great products, while others seem to only exist due to inertia, as they couldn't build anything new that people wanted at any speed. But as Microsoft has sown us, a few organization and leadership changes can turn a company that at some point looked undead into relevance. Companies like Google and Meta are large enough that, even if we made the leadership completely incompetent, the companies would probably be valuable enough to survive for decade, just on inertia