Building Great Products Through Anarchy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But it wasn't exactly anarchy, was it?
If you leave 18 baseball players to their own devices for a whole Saturday, on a baseball field, with a stack of baseballs, gloves, and bats, you will probably come back to discover that they played at least one game of baseball.
It's only half the story if we don't know how the Guardian assembled its development team.
A clickbait title in my HN? gasp
The article describes placing a ball at the top of a hill, and conveys a sort of perplexed astonishment that it reaches the bottom without needing any additional pushing.
The non-authoritative equivalent would be offering a bounty for the desired work, or granting a patronage gift to members of a development team, in the hopes that they produce something pleasing to the patron, and gift it in return.
Such arrangements are practically nonexistent, because most businesses prefer to be authoritative.
The modal corporate structure is a command hierarchy, wherein the board of directors selects a chief executive, who commands the other C-level executives, who command their middle managers, who command their floor managers, who command the workers. This is so common that I don't even know what sort of business structure is next when ordered by frequency. Per-unit payments to qualified independent contractors? Employee-owned co-op? Municipal utility managed by elected citizens' board? I have no idea. Practically every company I do business with is a corporation with a command hierarchy, where every command potentially comes with an expected value calculation including the cost to issue it and the expected revenue if it is obeyed.
I uncertain as to what confusion of ideas led you to believe that an employer-employee relationship is non-authoritative, but I think that you may be presuming that having choices is the same as having freedom. It is not.
Employee-owned co-ops often follow the same corporate structure, except that the board is elected by the coop members (generally, non-probationary employees).
Is it because hierarchical command is actually more efficient, or because no one ever got fired (or failed to get funded) for choosing it?
I know that when I am free to do whatever I wish, I try to create software I can be proud of. When involved in an organizations process, I am usually just trying to fix something so it's not broken, and there's not even an opportunity to propose building a better alternative, even if it would have significant business benefits. The software engineering industry seems to be obsessed with the idea that everyone except software engineers knows best how and what should be built.
This wasn't anarchy at all. It's even a bit insulting that they decided to call it that. It's almost as if management folks resent the ability of development teams to finish things without their guidance/interference, and wish to poison the well with loaded prejudicial terms.