I suppose I've just had good managers when I've had them, which is of course going to make things work out well for me.
I suppose I've just had good managers when I've had them, which is of course going to make things work out well for me.
[1] http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi...
In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics than any organizational system I've ever seen. It's not a good thing.
Were her comments before or after she was fired? I'm not sure that if it was after, we can necessarily count on it being objective. I've heard plenty of people make comments that aren't exactly the most accurate after they've been fired.
Even if it were before, would you "necessarily count on it being objective"? It seems like an impossibly high standard, given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired.
That's certainly fair. I'm not making a comment one way or the other - I don't know her, I don't know the story, and I have no knowledge that leads me to believe one way or the other.
I just naturally am a bit more skeptical of comments made about companies from employees who were fired. People at a company can certainly make untrue comments, and people who were fired can certainly make true ones.
It's just that, in my experience, there's a higher chance of negative bias in someone who was let go from a company.
For anyone who finds this plausible, it might be enlightening to contemplate (1) the first "hacker koan" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan and (2) this classic XKCD cartoonhttps://xkcd.com/592/ .
Honestly, my experience has been that structure is one of the key things that makes teams effective (not structure as in "rigid meetings/etc", but structure in the sense of "understanding what their role is and where they fit in")
This doesn't strictly require managers, of course, but self-organization rarely works out that well either as the org gets larger (you have the same problems, they are just hidden and nobody is accountable) :)
People don't work without structure, ad hoc structures develop. The conjecture is that this is a good thing, that these ad hoc structures are more natural, and you will have natural leaders take lead where appropriate and this will be more effective.
But the issue is structure deals with quirks in human behavior. It deals with the emotional side of it, it deals with the cliquish, tribal nature of our default social behavior. You can put a highly productive, less social person into a position, give him a set of tasks to do, evaluate him fairly and see him produce. In doing this, you need an objective manager, you need a fair structure, and it works.
Without those things, the less social, highly productive person is easily sidelined. The person who takes leadership isn't given that position, they don't lead because they have been shown that they can motivate people to do great things, because nobody gives them that position. The people who get into leadership positions are those people who can convince other people to work with them on a personal level instead of on an organizational level. The really smart, less social person doesn't even get brought in to participate, and little power struggles happen between factions of people who want to be the person who directs the project, despite the fact that none of the people looking to do it might even be very good at doing it at all.
The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. Where the people building the systems aren't very good at it, and where they invite their buddies to be management because management pays the best, and they want to help their buddies out. It's because you have poor systems, and because you have the wrong people managing.
The issue with this is that rather than potentially falling short and missing the mark, they start with the worst of it.
This is exactly right. The traditional organization already falls prey to politics and games due to lack of good structure, not due to the idea of structure itself.
You will get a system regardless of whether you intentionally create one or not. It's far better to get the one you intend and can develop, than an uncontrollable chaos.
Well, that's your experience, and you're entitled to it. I'm finding the opposite. Though describing holacracy as a "lack of structure" seems like a pretty serious mis-statement. Holacracy is extremely structured - way more, and way more explicitly, than most organisations.
It's kind of like the classic traditional observation that "agile is basically no processes". Yeah, if you use agile as an excuse to throw out process, you might equate the two. But actually agile (at least at its beginnings) involved a lot more process and rigour than traditional waterfall development. Agile is not an absence of process. Holacracy is not an absence of structure.
I guess humans will be humans - which means they will misinterpret, distort, exaggerate, etc, especially when exposed to newness.
I have little comment about what holacracy is like to work in, because I haven't worked in one. But I started a business that now operates by principles fairly closely related to those underlying holacracy (though the implementation is fairly different). We have less structure than holacracy, however... and yet what I'm seeing is that quite the opposite of your statement, it is bringing out the best in people.
Then again, I've not implemented a fake holacracy for all the wrong reasons. We're still in the relatively early days of this sort of culture. There are many more ways to get this wrong than right. Unless the people making this happen are truly committed to creating an open culture, and are doing it for the right reasons (i.e. this is the way they want the business to operate because it's good - not "well, this seems like a good tool to get people to be motivated without paying them nyeh nyeh nyeh dr evil laughter"... unless it's done right, it will probably be a horrible distortion of what it's meant to be. Kind of like what you describe.
I think you should consider the possibility that the allegedly holacratic organisation you worked in just got it really badly wrong.
I agree that the organization I worked in got it really badly wrong, but I also saw how the structure that was being followed (and there is a structure) sort of enabled that. It was a small organization and there were many other things going on that I think caused issues—so perhaps it's not 100% attributable to holocracy, and wasn't perhaps the best situation for it to be effective because of that.
I'll admit it was anecdotal. But I don't trust a process that, when followed fairly closely, had what appeared to be many holes in its organizational model that were suboptimal.
I don't think they are against people assuming responsibility or managing work, they just want to be more dynamic about it.
It sounds way more like Valve wanted to do something that was a radical departure from anything they'd ever done before (hardware), the intrinsic structure of Valve meant that it was difficult if not impossible to set hardware up to succeed (peer-evaluated hiring, bonus tied to value of work), and then Valve realized it wasn't working and decided to make a clean break instead of drag it out. So then Valve immediately says "OK guys we couldn't make this work within Valve but we will back you up 100% if you want to go make this work external to Valve."
(From an earlier discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527)
is a lie. It all depends on who you know and are friends with. Read on how Valve handled Jeri Ellsworth and her hardware team, they were all fired with no notice by Gabe himself.