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Comment by a_square_peg | Hacker News Reader

I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.

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That is a beige flag at worst. Every organisation has unwritten power structures that (often) exclude newcomers. Some organisations also have additional written power structures that (often) exclude newcomers.

While you're correct, my experience has been that the unwritten power structure is much stronger in places where there is no written power structure.

Where there is a written power structure you can usually appeal to it and eventually get something done. Where there exists no written power structure at all, you're out of luck unless you can quickly figure out what the power structure is.

A written power structure is a low resolution map. It's not perfect, but it gives you some idea of where to start making sense of things. A flat organization is never actually flat, but it also has no guideposts at all to show you even the rough outlines of the real hierarchies.

I worked in an organization with a low written structure. Creating unwritten structure is necessary consequence - each it happened as a reaction on serious dysfunction. And each time it improved things. And what you learned each time is that if you dont keep power, things will get very bad again.

Imo, that is argument for written structure. Written structure is easier to talk about openly talk about, reason about and fix. Unwritten structure is inferior consequence of its lack.

This is analogous to the 'unlimited' vacation policy. Now instead of following a codified and shared standard the employee has to negotiate every vacation day and consider how it impacts their standing in the organization.

The red flag is being delusional or dishonest about the existence of implicit power structures, not their mere existence.

>especially in a start up

It's an example that Zizek has often given. The startup boss is more insidious than the old school boss because he's "just your pal". The traditional boss you can rebel against, in the startup you can't because duh, you have no boss, so what are you complaining about? It's a way to disguise power.

Another thing is that it's also a way to dodge responsibility, as you see in tech. When a Japanese company fucks something up, you'll often see CEOs take salary cuts and sincerely apologize in front of the public. No need in startup land, nobody was responsible.

Indeed, flat or unstructured social organizations are going to lead to abuse if not coupled with some explicit philosophy that ensures that the group doesn't devolve into "might is right" or ingroup/outgroup thinking. Anarachists as in OP have one such philosophy and corresponding actionable processes to prevent abuse in unstructured groups.

So yes, the startups or orgs have to very explicitly lay down processes, otherwise the red flag is probably warranted.

Exactly. For those who need to understand what this can look like, I wrote up a detailed case here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...

Wow - that was painful to read because I can relate so much. Thanks for sharing. Another aspect of such dysfunction is the diffusion of responsibility that comes with it. The stubborn people who pushed for a particular solution rarely suffer ill consequence because the decision was technically made as a group.

I think a functional engineering decision process is more akin to a veto process. Someone, say Olivia in your example, would be tasked with selecting the language for the job and submitting the technical rationale for it and the relevant authorities (e.g. CTO or product owner) would sign off on the decision. They will normally have the power to approve or reject but not to impose certain solution. In a traditional hardware engineering, this is how it's done, where an engineer submits a design and it needs to be approved by relevant subject matter experts in various domains, such as material, thermal, structure, safety etc.

In Germany it just means it's a bad place to have a career in. Thankfully most HRs will happily advertise it in the job description making it easy to dodge.

There's a big difference between "flat"/shallow and "flat"/we don't have job titles.

Good organizations allow interactions without too many gates. Which is what the good kind of flat refers to.

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