A survey of CTOs: how flat should your organization be? | Hacker News Reader

A survey of CTOs: how flat should your organization be?

respectfulleadership.substack.com

15 pointslkrubner12 comments

All the creatives are worried that Gen AI will steal their jobs. Seems to me that the most likely candidate for replacement is the manager. Their primary job is summary and communication, an ideal fit for an LLM. If you already coordinate your company around Google docs, the AI has access to all the information about company's status, even all the emails.

managers are to babysit and oversee/command workers in a lot of orgs, LLMs cant replace that. People do "selfmanage" but mostly in highly skilled/selfagency profession like engineering, law, architecture, etc...

That's not true. Even if the LLM could do the same job - how do you hold it accountable? Managers can be held accountable for bad decisions.

And how does that help the company? So you can fire them and have to train up a new replacement to make new mistakes? Or, instead, promote the manager who made a bad decision? Besides, blaming the LLM is probably even easier! I definitely agree that you need to do post-mortems on mistakes, of course.

I disagree with the implication that flat structures "don't scale" or can never work. To be effective in a flat environment requires a fundamental shift in perspective. Hierarchy is so baked in to every other company, organization, and education system that people just don't know how to operate absent it.

ICs will need time to adjust to a flat structure, and some people will do anything to fight the absence of the restrictions they've always known. Hiring a bunch of senior ICs from traditional industry roles and saying "we're not going to have managers!" is always going to fail.

For a CTO/founder it's even easier: If you're building a VC-funded start-up where the plan is to grow fast exit in a few years — what's the point? Why invest the effort and energy to making flat work when the moment you get bought out the hierarchy is back anyway.

There are examples of stable large companies with flat org charts that do work, they're just not the hypergrowth scale-ups. The book "Reinventing Organizations" covers several in depth, and is a good intro to the topic. So my objection is the implication that a flat structure can never work, or that there is something fundamental about a flat org and human nature that means it's unstable. It is simply that it requires long-term investment to get right, and the market isn't setup to reward long-term investment.

"Hierarchy is so baked in to every other company, organization, and education system that people just don't know how to operate absent it."

That's partly because it works. It is proven. It is well-known. We have excellent tooling for it. There is absolutely no need to change it. Changing does not bring any advantages. You cannot point to any company and say "That company was an outstanding success because they were flat and rejected all hierarchy." If you run a business then do you want to make a political point or do you want to make a profit?

"There are examples of stable large companies with flat org charts that do work, they're just not the hypergrowth scale-ups."

So why waste any time with them? What is the advantage? What is your real motivation? You seem more focused on some political agenda than you are focused on making a profit.

> Changing does not bring any advantages.

Sometimes, progress requires fundamental change.

> So why waste any time with them?

Can you not envision a business model that is not a high-growth startup?

> What is your real motivation? You seem more focused on some political agenda than you are focused on making a profit.

What agenda do you think I'm focused on?

“progress requires fundamental change”

Progress towards what? Do you have some political goal? There is zero evidence that flatness increases profits. There is no company that we can point to and say “that company was successful because it was flat” (with the obvious exception of franchise models).

> Do you have some political goal?

Again, what political goal or agenda do you think I’m pushing?

Progress towards what? Do you have some political goal? What you've written does not make sense.

There is no flat organisation in business. Such a communist thing cannot exist in the context of capitalism. The lack of hierarchy can only mean one of three things: making decisions as a committee and bleeding time, money and ideas; having social hierarchies dominate and letting narcissism and sociopathy run wild, or descending into anarchy where profitable decisionmakers are gilded and unprofitable ones are pruned.

If you had actually read the article, you would have read

> So, flatter yes, but flat no.

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