

The negative side of no-manager companies - Nimi
http://ryancarson.com/post/73639971628/the-negative-side-of-nomanager-companies

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Nimi
Curiously, I found some of these negative to be true for "managed" companies
as well, certainly when the company is large enough:

1.Lots of chaos - yep. "It’s not entirely clear what’s happening, but there is
a lot of activity and eventually large structures/tunnels get built. I know
for a fact that we have Projects that were started and eventually abandoned
because another Project was conflicting or duplicating their work". All this
seems to hold true for the last company I worked for (MegaCorp, you'd easily
recognize the name).

2\. Coordination is very hard - yep. "it’s up to individuals to take time to
communicate what’s happening on their Project and how it affects others" \-
absolutely.

3\. Starting Projects can be slow - well, I hear a lot of MegaCorps have
entirely abandoned the notion of starting projects, and simply rely on
acquisitions, either consciously or in practice.

4\. I can’t make people do things - boy oh boy, please ask your friends
working at MegaCorps about people who are "the only ones who know how this
works". Delightfully funny stories, really.

5\. It takes longer to understand what’s going on - I simply got the
impression no one really understood what's going on. When high-level managers
spoke to me about the status of my project/component, they were routinely
misinformed, although it was clear they cared and have spent time trying to
get informed.

6\. Harder to hire people - OK, maybe this is true :-)

BTW, apparently there are citation-like watermarks when copy-pasting from the
blog post - this isn't a big deal, but I don't see any particular benefit to
anyone from this... Ryan, if you're reading, may I humbly suggest you
reconsider this?

~~~
ryancarson
I hadn't thought about how these cons might also apply to large traditionally
managed companies. Thx.

> BTW, apparently there are citation-like watermarks when copy-pasting from
> the blog post - this isn't a big deal, but I don't see any particular
> benefit to anyone from this... Ryan, if you're reading, may I humbly suggest
> you reconsider this?

Nimi, I think Tumblr does that. Sorry.

