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Comment by leftcenterright | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a small company with about 50 employees where self-organizing teams was the norm in tech departments. It was comprised of mostly senior developers and researchers though so they mostly were able to avoid rabbit-holes themselves and prioritize as needed. I don't think such teams have shown to work in bigger companies though. Does anyone else also have insight or experience with self-organizing teams?

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A former company I worked for was what I call "intentionally disorganized": other than high-level direction, management was completely hands-off, and everyone was expected to self-organize and manage their own work, typically among loosely-organized teams with no formal accountability.

Some people seemed to thrive there, but for me it was a devastatingly bad fit. My ADHD (clinically diagnosed) certainly played a major part in this. With everything being up to the individual, it was too easy for me to get caught up in all the myriad things a proper org structure provides, but that I had to do myself: prioritization, assistance with career growth, feedback loops, and the like. Everything was a struggle, and I was ineffective to the point that I was fired.

As much as we like to decry middle management in tech, this is the purpose, in my opinion, of good middle management. They should be the API between a self-organizing team and the broader organization. They're a glue layer that helps preserve team autonomy in a context where cooperation and coordination have become more important.

What constituted organization; what did the team look like and do before and after?

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