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Comment by jsmcgd | Hacker News Reader

Hierarchy may be superior but I think it might be a bit early to declare holacracy a failure. Presumably there are a multitude of successful holacracies that we aren't hearing about because they are actually working.

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Valve is a prime example of this.

Though, I'm guessing Gabe Newell has a ton of defacto power, and you hear plenty of complaints from people that minor bugs and issues go unhandled because they aren't sexy to work on.

Jeri Ellsworth's accounts of working within Valve and the issues with the structure there were pretty widely published after her firing. She mentions a fair few more problems then just unsexy bugs being ignored it's worth a listen.

As far as I can tell, it's reasonably sustainable for company size of n < (something). At some point (low-mid 2 digits?), you end up with too many lines of communication.

Agreed. I won't hold them up as a paragon, having only heard anecdotes, but Valve seems to be an example contrary to Github. Could be completely wrong - would love to here from some Valve guys about how traditional HR issues are dealt with there (the answer may just be, "through HR" :) )

I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.

And probably as long as a company is small enough, people who work there can just accept a hidden structure just as well as they can accept an articulated one as long as it doesn't cause too many problems for them.

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