Here's the thing about "management work": it turns out you don't necessarily need management to do it.
Setting priorities? This can be done through consensus.
Making sure schedules are met? Don't have schedules. (1)
Hiring? Have everybody do it.
Giving out raises? Set up a deterministic system and forget about it.
Giving feedback? Everybody can do this.
Running meetings? Don't have meetings.
Communicating with the other parts of the company? We have technology for this.
1) EDIT: forgot my footnote. Of course, we're in sort of a fortunate situation here, and not every company can just not have a schedule.
Did you forgot a footnote (1)? I'm curious to read more.
Every other job I've had uses some sort of stressful review as part of the salary process. You get a good review, your raise is bigger; bad review, smaller raise. This seems like it works, but it actually doesn't.
What's the goal of a review? To provide feedback. Shouldn't you be interested in feedback so you can get better, not just so you can get paid more? If so, shouldn't you be getting it all the time, instead of twice a year?
What's the goal of a raise? To keep you from being effectively paid less (because the cost of living keeps going up), and to make sure you feel satisfied with how much money you're making. There's nothing in there about making sure some people feel less appreciated than others. So pick a percentage number, preferably one that's above COLA, and just give everybody that. If that's not enough, your base salary isn't enough.
Note that none of these goals overlap. Feedback and salary don't really have common goals. If you're trying to get people to do better work by dangling the salary carrot, you're taking away intrinsic motivation – see DHH on mixing open-source and money, he did a good job with this topic – and you'll end up with less performance and motivation, not more.
If you're staying in a stable role and productivity, then you need COLA.
If you're improving, in time you become significantly more valuable both to the company and to outside market, so you deserve much larger compensation than back in the years when you were a fresh-out-of college newbie.
> To keep you from being effectively paid less (because the cost of living keeps going up), and to make sure you feel satisfied with how much money you're making.
Which, to me, implies they have different base salaries for different positions. So when your "career progresses" you get a different (predetermined) base salary. Orthogonal to raises.
The best managers I've had are more like facilitators than bosses.
People could form ad hoc teams to reduce the exponential growth (instead of having such teams pushed on them by management), but then it's not a flat hierarchy anymore. Instead it's a self-organizing construct which may or may not be better than actually designing a proper org. structure.
Authority, however, is totally different. It's the power to make someone do something they don't want to, and we try our darnedest to avoid that kind of situation. (Also note that "having authority" is different from "being authoritative".)