Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Esophagus4

I think Google tried this a while ago (flattening the org).

It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.

View on HN

They did, I actually worked there at the time, my manager had 140 directs. It obviously didn't work.

But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.

Wow, holy smokes… 140 directs. Kind of curious: what did the differences look like on a day to day in that sort of org structure?

I met my manager when I joined once, then every 6 or 12 months for performance review (which was aggregated feedback from my peers that he took 2 minutes to talk through: "looks like you're doing fine, if you need anything, my EA can schedule more time").

PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.

If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.

Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).

Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.

I've never had close to 140 directs (or even friends) but did get close to 40 (direct reports; never had more than a dozen friends or so). Frankly, it sucks. I was (IMO) doing a terrible job, dropping balls everywhere and not serving the people I had a responsibility & emotional commitment to help. It came down to one of: 1. fail at what you truly believe is your job, 2. give up on what you believe, or 3. don't play the game. I picked #3 and quit, but most go with #2 and many are VPs and CEOs today.

That is insane, Block seems to be very poorly run. The headcount still seems bloated, they'll blame AI and layoff more people for their own incompetence.

After reading a book about the history of Twitter ("Hatching Twitter"), I got the impression that Jack Dorsey is a disturbed individual with a poor grasp on reality. So it's not surprising that Block is poorly run.

If every manager initially had 5 reports, a quick geometric series shows that eliminating all managers would save you 20% of headcount. Of course, managers tend to get paid more, so maybe you'd save a larger fraction of wages.

I wonder if that's the main concern or if communication / coordination costs are the larger concern

Yes [1]. Of course, it was a total failure.

1: https://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/goog...

It only works if the person at the top is a real visionary. And you’re talking about a handful of people on earth who have this frankly.

I’ve heard Jensen Huang has like 60 directs, but they are all senior enough to report to the CEO of NVIDIA, so the theory (I think) was that they needed less direct supervision.

I think the charisma at the top masks what's happening internally though. I've never experienced - or learned post factum - of a mesiah leader who didn't have at least one amazing administrator operating in their shadow. Does Dorsey have this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com