Leadership without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
That's one of the best quotes I've ever come across. And it's a great counterpoint to the idea that programmers should be isolated from the business/strategy, as opposed to participating in it.
Still, I'm not sure that "ranking" is inherently bad, as long as it's just division into junior/senior/etc developers for salary purposes. I mean, there's always going to be a ranking based on salary, even if that's not made public. Job titles can be considered a form of partial salary transparency, no? And just because you have multiple job levels, doesn't mean that quotas are necessary.
It would be better if it talked about the good things to do in as much depth as the bad things.
A gelled team completely focused on the work is the peak of creative organization. What's not clear is how to build structures that keep hitting that peak as the organization grows. I think the answers to this are evolving bottom-up from experimentation in startups. (It has to be startups because organizations can't much change their DNA.) What I like about these slides is that they come from that layer of experience and point in a direction that feels right, at least to me.