How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers | Hacker News Reader

How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

firstround.com

48 pointsyarapavan49 comments

I tend to think of this approach as "a company that hasn't had a big HR incident yet".

One lawsuit from an sexual harassment will end this free for all.

I think you nailed it.

As Jo Freeman once said:

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."

Her comments were aimed at the feminist movement of the 1970s, but her essay is universal and everyone can gain from reading it:

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I don't quite buy it. I'll guarantee that there are figures who call the shots in the company, whether they are called "managers" or not.

Did you read beyond the headline? Pulled from the article he talks about this and pin points two ideas behind making decisions:

1. "Make everything explicit — from vacation policies to decision makers in each area."

2. "Distribute decision-making power and discourage consensus seeking."

Could you refine point two more?

I don't understand how you distribute decision making without consensus? In that scenario "leader" types would make the decisions for the group, right? And then it's not "distributed".

I guess I don't understand that point.

I don't really get it either. Or rather, I get it, and it seems like a great idea, but it seems fundamentally at odds with the full autonomy and lack-of-management ideas. The point, as I understand it, is to have single decision-makers, but have nobody be the decision maker for too many things. That seems an awful lot like it is just good management, but any time someone executes on a decision they didn't make, they aren't being autonomous.

Is the point perhaps instead that everybody makes all their own decisions and if there isn't consensus on how things are done, then they are just done differently by each person? If so, how do you pick technology and deployment stacks and keep a consistent design story?

My take was that "distribute" means everybody has some sort of decision making power, and the power to make all the decisions is not concentrated in hierarchical fashion. Those who wield the power to make a particular decision are then encouraged to make the decision themselves without garnering a consensus first.

Ah, that makes sense.

I have not worked under such a power structure, so I can't speak from experience. What I would wonder is how does one know where the power lies? It can more or less become invisible.

I gather it could become somewhat tribal --where while perhaps there are no titles power does reside somewhere. So here bad things are one's fault rather than say a boss's fault. How can you even vent? At least in set hierarchies you know who to blame. you know who the bad decision makers are you know who the asses are. But in this kind of structure it all more or less hidden but decisions are devolved and distributed.

I'm not sure I like the shadowy aspect of this structure. Then again, I haven't formally experienced it --except for informal groups and there you get cliques.

The key takeaway from the article is that Medium is still under 50 people. At that size, any sort of hokum management style will probably work.

Call me when you hit 200+.

Gabe Newell is on line 3.

Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people and multi-billions in revenue, it can work.

Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways.

Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy.

"We believe in flatness" usually is code for "we believe in the appearance of flatness".

Yet another chance to call out the highly relevant essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness":

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

It should be required reading for anyone pushing the "we don't need managers" line.

It's worth pointing out that the author was a Stalinist, and so thought the solution to the problem of hierarchies forming implicitly was to make those hierarchies explicit and enshrine them.

The article describes a real problem; it speaks to my experience and the experiences of my comrades; but it offers no real solution and is essentially a defense of the status quo. It doesn't preclude a better solution.

Agree with your points. I find that posting the essay is still quite valuable, though - as an industry we are still enamored with the mythology of structurelessness.

So yeah, her solutions may be pretty questionable, but IMO as an industry we're not even at the point of exploring solutions, considering that so much of our industry doesn't even acknowledge the problem exist.

Until then it's useful to keep flogging the essay until people accept that yeah, this problem actually exists.

Personally, I think that structurelessness is much more possible in "our industry" because it's so culturally, racially, sexually, and class homogeneous. It's worth noting that this article is about feminist activist groups, and not software companies. Software companies have both much more clearly defined goals and much better metrics of measuring their progress towards those goals than feminist activist groups do. That in itself is a gamebreaking difference.

> "Personally, I think that structurelessness is much more possible in 'our industry' because it's so culturally, racially, sexually, and class homogeneous ..."

Do you think this is a good thing? It is not.

> "Until then it's useful to keep flogging the essay until people accept that yeah, this problem actually exists."

I fully agree, but I'm pleased to note that this is the first such 'management is dead' story where multiple commenters have given salient counterpoints (small company, no HR/PR disasters to date, who can fire you, etc), rather than jumping on the bandwaggon.

> Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy.

My takeaway for Valve was they wanted self-organizing heirachies, but wanted to avoid people who's ambition was to "manage."

That is, people will naturally take leadership roles for a project, and at the projects conclusion, go back to the fold.

By requiring leaders to lead without authority, it demands a different kind of leader.

Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy.

But what about corporate governance that has formal structure and rules, but is governed in a democratic rather than authoritarian fashion?

There are more than two dimensions to this. Structure does not necessitate top-down command, and vice versa.

> "Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy."

It isn't really. The observations surrounding structurelessness suggest that true anarchy is impossible. In the absence of some type of hierarchy one will emerge anyways. The notion of a group of true equals with no authority over one another is a pipe dream.

Not to mention the notion of defined hierarchies makes no statement on what the hierarchy looks like, nor the system that determines who goes where.

Corporate structures are frequently democratic. The Board of a company is very explicitly such a structure. Not to mention that even without explicit democratic structures managers still answer to those they have authority over due to market forces (nothing says "you suck as a manager" like your team quitting). In this industry in particular, it's very, very hard to build an authoritarian bureaucracy.

I'm not sure where you're getting the authoritarian/anarchy divide from, that wasn't in any way implied by my post, nor do I believe either extreme is possible in our industry.

You're talking about "participatory management". It was a fad in the 50s that comes up again from time to time. It sounds like a good idea, but it actually ends up increasing bureaucracy. There's a good article that discusses exactly what you're talking about here:

http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.sh...

That essay is hilarious, it explains all these failures of companies doing participatory management half-assed, provides a few successful counterexamples of companies/divisions/plants that did it full-assed, and then concludes that the failures failed because they didn't take the changes far enough.

The Circles approach they describe in this article feels pretty structured. It includes clear responsibilities and authorities. It's less clear who defines those responsibilities and authorities, but I'll assume it's "collaborative" – and specifically it's supposed to be well documented and internally public, so there is some implicit peer review.

I've heard that Valve has horrific internal politics, though.

Possibly.

But they produce pretty amazing stuff.

And not just another CRUD webapp, or mobile app with nice UX.

That may be in spite of their internal arrangement rather than because of it. It's not something we can ever know.

No organization in the history of the world with hundreds of people doing anything remotely important or of consequence has been structureless. At least not for long.

Supplemental reading: THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Several comments on the thread seem to not have read the article. Specifically: while they do not have "traditional people managers", they have people they call "Lead Links" and "Domain Leads" who take on management roles.

It seems many are reading the title of the article and imagining a utopian experiment in total anarchy.

Giving managers titles that don't have the word "manager" in them doesn't mean that there aren't managers. Describing their responsibilities as being "mentor"-like rather than "managerial" doesn't mean they aren't, in fact, managing.

The headline is rather explicitly stating that Medium is building a company with "no managers," and then the article goes on to describe some rather transparently bad attempts at euphemistically calling "managers" something other than "manager." I think the commenters you're referring to can be forgiven because of that.

The article doesn't do a great job conveying how Medium is actually structured. I can only speak to how it was a year and a half ago (when I left), but the difference between a system like Holacracy and a standard hierarchical organization is that a person in Holacracy might hold roles in many circles at the same time and those roles are relatively fluid.

The whole point in a role is to define who has decision-making authority over some given thing and/or what that role is responsible for. Lead links come about when a role becomes too big for a single person and turns into a circle which has its own members. The lead link is there to represent the circle to the parent circle and to determine who is filling what roles. Other than that, the circle is largely self governing (roles, responsibilities, etc are all decided in regular governance meetings as a circle, not by the lead link).

There are definitely decision makers at the company, but they're not managing people per se, they just have authority over some area of the company. The whole people side is entirely independent and generally lives outside of Holacracy.

What you've described is a manager/supervisor->director->VP->SVP/C-Suite chain, but with different terms, (possibly) shorter tenure, and with a perhaps slightly more democratic allocation procedure.

It's a management structure, just billed as something else.

Management of work, not management of people, that's the key thing. Yes there's a hierarchy of responsibilities, but individual people live many places in that hierarchy which is what makes it different.

My impression from your comment is that there's still a chain of command, but different terminologies and durations. My prediction from this arrangement would be that - in time - you see the same people becoming 'decsion-makers' or 'lead-links' over and over again. In fact, one incentive might be to ensure that your own 'circle' continues to expand.

The main benefit I see is that incompetent links/managers wont last long, but it doesn't hinder the machiavellians (it's just another system to game).

Of course, this is the first time I've come across the concept of Holocracy so maybe something else mitigates the above.

How is this new? We've been doing that since 2011.

http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.MeshMa...

(I know this was just put on the wiki, that's because we're revamping it. I have gmail timestamps if you like).

I'm getting sick and tired of seeing in the news stuff that I've been doing for years, even told the relevant press outlets about, and getting crickets in return!

For one, it's new for them. Secondly, just because you been doing it since 2011 doesn't mean people don't like reading about how others are doing it. Where is your blog post?

Not new actually, Medium started with Holacracy either in late 2011 or early 2012. This article is about a year and a half old...

The idea of holacracy is interesting to me, but something tells me it's more about marketing than anything else. Holacracy seems to do the exact opposite of getting rid of managers. It's actually making everyone a manager of something.

And yet, it's billed as simply being a way of getting rid of managers. If that's all there is to Holacracy, then the entire idea is pointless. Reducing the layers of management is a means not an end.

Reductionism FTW.

Everyone who starts a company in their twenties thinks they are re-inventing the office environment (I know, I did it too). It turns out, your company is just small, it is in a cool industry where people are well paid, and if you step back you probably have very little diversity in your office. Everyone looks just like you. Not the most challenging human organizational structure to manage.

"It's crazy how, in our company that's entirely white dudes in their mid to late 20s, we don't really have many issues with sexual harassment, ageism, or racism. We've moved beyond those concerns!"

What I want to know is how do they make the difficult decisions.

When does someone get fired?

If there are not enough resources in the pot, then who gets to expand?

> He started spending one-on-one meetings talking to his reports about their lives, instead of their tasks, and productivity shot through the roof

Google famously published a study that said essentially the best managers were the ones who took active interest in their peoples lives.

For me, unless they are behavior/performance related, my 1:1's are always "their" time. Time for the employee to talk about whatever. That said, most of them feel like talking about work.

Valve always gets brought up as an example of a flat structure that works (and it already has been in this thread). Here's an interview with a former Valve hardware engineer describing how the system works in practice: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_e.... She likened the experience to high school, in terms of cliques that developed (which is about what you would expect). Her entire team got fired by Gabe Newell, which I kinda feel should answer any questions you have about whether there's actually a boss - whoever can tell you that you don't have a job tomorrow is in fact your boss, even if they don't want to acknowledge it. She agrees with what a lot of people have already said, that this works in small groups, but that it doesn't scale well.

Honestly, it sounded like a pretty crappy place to work, although she freely admits that she was bitter, and that it's very much a case of a disillusioned zealot. I've enjoyed working with most of the bosses I've had, and I've always thought that it's nice to have people who give you direction and quality feedback. I've had some really terrible bosses too, but the idea that since there are some bad bosses we should throw out the whole structure of management seems like a big over-reaction.

Is this going to be the next open office concept?

i'm not saying this kind of company cannot work, but i would like to see people doing it explicitly address the points in "the tyranny of structurelessness"

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I'm not seeing a lot of comments describing first-hand experience with a holacratic system, so I'll jump in.

I was a developer at Moveline (which shuttered, sadly, this past December). Around the start of 2014, the company adopted holacracy as its organizational model; while there were certainly other valid reasons to do so, but I know that it was in part motivated by the fact that another Las Vegas-based company, Zappos, was also an adherent. Over the course of the year, in addition to writing code, I also served as the elected secretary for the dev team and facilitator of the GCC (General Company Circle; top-most level of the hierarchy), attended holacracy training courses, and coached people throughout the company about the mechanics of holacracy and how to make it work for them. Suffice it to say, I was pretty immersed, so I feel like I can represent how things played out at Moveline fairly accurately.

The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk of change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and roles needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy. There were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems, and to getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up phase ended and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

As you might expect, there were established figures in the company who felt strong resistance to holacracy. Some of them held significant managerial power before the transition; others wanted a flatter, less formal approach. Those tensions came up fairly frequently in meetings and other conversations, and it created an atmosphere of not being quite satisfied with how things were being run (not that these people should have stifled their opinions, mind you). This problem was compounded when we entered a major growth phase, going from under 40 employees to over 100 in the span of a few months. New hires were unfamiliar with holacracy, necessitating additional training, but just as importantly they entered an environment where low-grade dissatisfaction with holacracy was palpable. If there's a lesson here, it's that adopting holacracy requires far more buy-in than you might expect. (For what it's worth, I'm not aware that anyone ever felt unable to voice their dissatisfaction at Moveline; we had a culture of open and honest talk, but identifying an issue isn't the same as solving it.)

A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a not-insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't really be fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months. Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just have to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first setup step effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate structure, and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where you can critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

The flexibility you get for achieving the new structure is touted as a feature, but the less marketable truth is that it's a double-edged sword. Holacracy is purposefully vague on where the authority for hiring, firing, and budgets will live. Lead Links aren't managers, but they are accountable for resource allocation that isn't defined elsewhere — and it's up to your company to figure out what limits are placed, who places the limits and how, what constitutes a "resource", and so forth. It's entirely possible for an employee to have zero roles — and it's up to your company to figure out whether that has any correlation to terminating employment, changing teams, hiring needs, and so forth. Furthermore, self-defining teams present an unfortunate opportunity for organizational thrashing; at Moveline, we saw major revisions to the structure around meta-org work (HR, facilities, finance, etc.) and our sales/support teams every few months. Those upheavals, while well-intentioned, degraded individual performance, disrupted internal communication, and fed back into the underlying dissatisfaction.

I haven't read The Tyranny of Structurelessness cited in many other comments, but from the title alone I am assuming that it's an accurate depiction.

That said, there is one thing that I feel like holacracy helped with significantly: the emphasis on well-defined decision-making. When teams stopped saying "We will get this done" and started routing tasks to specific individuals (who had an obligation to perform those tasks according to the roles they held), it was clear that the reduced ambiguity had a positive impact. The use of "we" has its place in an organization, of course, but "we" is just a code word for "not sure who" when it comes to planning specific, concrete work that needs to get done. If you're not careful, things can get a bit political when it comes to defining authority (at Moveline, this often related to holacratic "domains"), but I'd still consider the technique of specific task attribution as something I'd want to bring to future workplaces.

I'm happy to answer any other questions about my views on holacracy that HNers might have.

> The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk of change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and roles needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy. There were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems, and to getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up phase ended and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

My "Management Consulting Claptrap" red-flag just went up...

> A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a not-insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't really be fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months. Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just have to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first setup step effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate structure, and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where you can critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

...And this makes it sound like a cult - the same tactics as convincing people about The One True Path(tm)

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