
Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace - lnguyen
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-06/why-github-finally-abandoned-its-bossless-workplace
======
hodgesrm
My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of
flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves.

One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting
technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For
software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on
features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

(Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs.
I'm an engineer currently.)

~~~
Raphmedia
> For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering
> on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

That's exactly the kinds of things I wish that I could do. In my experience
it's mostly managers that want you to push features without any documentation
and filled with bugs.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I am a junior developer, but my experience so far has been exactly this;
arbitrary deadlines, poorly defined or no technical specification and worst of
all, no room for testing or documentation, yet still somehow expecting it to
happen in the end.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
Well look at it this way....if all of those things were to be provided to you,
they could probably find someone to do your job for 30% less. There are _some_
upsides to software being a total shitshow.

~~~
deathanatos
I would, as an engineer, be okay with that. As you imply, that makes me
considerably more valuable. The problem is that I'm never given _time_ for any
of it. As soon as "MVP" status is reached, the feature is launched, declared a
victory, and then we move on to the next thing, while the users note the half-
assedness of the delivered product, and never looked on again. Meaningful work
(aside from the occiasional bugfix) never occurs, as it can't ever get
prioritized higher than the current MVP of the day.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
You shouldn't worry about software being late. Work at a good clip with the
time you have. This is just the norm for this industry and the only managers
who presume otherwise are themselves novices.

~~~
jaggederest
Or are cynically using it to crack the whip and aggrandize power with zero
regard for whether the deadlines are meaningful.

~~~
Ntrails
" _Noted Good Developer_ A thinks it will take at least 3 weeks for _you_ to
complete this feature request, but we're being pushed to get it out in 2. I
think you could manage that, but what about you? Can you do it or not?"

------
morley
I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid
of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find:

> Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-
> founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning
> managers in the spring.

It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they
picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias
controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat
organizations.

Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure
works?

~~~
caminante
My guess?

The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a)
raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern
about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on
opportunities.

~~~
caseysoftware
This.

Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!"
PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe
how they are now addressed.

We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.

~~~
wonkaWonka
So, translation is actually:

    
    
      blorp blorp! 
    
      money money! 
    
      blorp blorp! 
    
      feed me, seymour!
    

Yay! I feel reassured that everything is going smoothly, just as planned, and
10% growth as usual.

One could quickly argue that PR articles that skip the details, and make
designs to produce the sensation of graphs that "go up and to the right," are
a clear indicator that pleasing investors produces a bland gruel of
profiteering corporations as ineffective at doing anything useful besides
"making money," as is flatlander management, at providing direction to
employees (read: millennials) who can't adjust to the sensation of not being
subordinate to micro-managing overlords.

------
makecheck
The key is that every task must have EXACTLY ONE BOSS whose say is _final_
when a decision is necessary.

A hierarchy works fine if it really _is_ a hierarchy. It won’t work if the
hierarchy has been poisoned with “dotted lines” or lots of unnecessarily-
senior-sounding job titles that let senior people share control over project
direction. I’ve worked in groups in the past where there were like 5 senior
people trying to pull things in completely _different_ directions, no one
would tell us whose opinion really mattered, and we kept having to decide for
ourselves.

~~~
xapata
Eh. At every large company I've worked in or with, even if there's officially
one boss, the reality is it's a committee. Worse, when in the middle of a big
organization, you're never really sure who has authority. Someone lower on the
org chart might call their friend who is an SVP from some other branch of the
company, they fly in to have their say... it's all politics, no matter what
the org chart says.

------
rubicon33
I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a
hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which
lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience.
This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers,
despite those junior engineers often being very wrong.

The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior
engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt
the brunt of that resentment.

Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have
clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to
have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision
that sticks, when the time calls for it.

~~~
8ytecoder
The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a
relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't
be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be
wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues -
a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and
creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the
bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but
leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should
be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong
decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173)

~~~
rubicon33
Totally agree.

While I believe clear power lines, and titles, are important for business
function, they should not come at the cost of respect, or a democratic
environment which promotes conversation and compromise. You can definitely
have both; Not all rigid org structures are authoritarian.

"Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all
about."

The problem I've seen is that unless an engineer sees his peer as having more
experience (visa vi the title), then they often won't even give them the time
of day. Even if their peer is 100% right, the junior engineer often believes
themself right and is unwilling to budge. While the reverse can definitely
happen, its generally less common.

~~~
xapata
> unwilling to budge

I respect explanations, not assertions, nor titles. Maybe that's why I have
trouble with large companies.

~~~
sanderjd
Explicit hierarchy is useful to break ties. Not all questions have a
universally compelling answer. There are often two or more competing
"explanations" that are all sensible. Having nobody with the authority to make
the final call often leads to uncertainty and endless bikeshedding.

~~~
xapata
In which case I expect the other person to agree that both options are equally
valid and it's appropriate to choose randomly.

I think randomness is often underappreciated in business decisions. It helps
create a baseline for performance measurement.

~~~
sanderjd
And I expect to have an experienced person in authority make the decision
based on their "intuition", which just means the part of their accumulated
experience that is difficult to formulate into an externally compelling
argument.

This is actually a pretty good example of the phenomenon - if you and I were
on a team and trying to figure out how to make decisions for our team, we
would have this strong disagreement about whether it's better to break ties
through intuition of randomness. My intuition is that intuition is better, and
your intuition is that randomness is better. It's unlikely I can convince you
that I'm right, or vice versa, so how should we break that tie?

------
nate_martin
"flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get
to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than
the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are
only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees,
no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their
time.

~~~
gchadwick
> Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like
> Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots
> of specialists who know how to best allocate their time

Are they that effective at Valve though? Seems it's not bad enough to cause
the company serious damage but are they doing much nowadays? Yes there's the
Vive but that's in partnership with HTC who may be providing a lot of the top-
level direction.

I get the feeling Valve is coasting along on the Steam cash cow and could be
doing a lot more with the people and resources they have available.

~~~
nitrogen
An example of a flat structure failure is the complete lack of a new episode
of Half Life.

~~~
effie
I think not doing HL3 was the right move from the business standpoint. The
expectations of the HL fans got so high that anything short of another
milestone of PC gaming history would damage them. It is hard to beat yourself,
when the last success was so big. Much smarter to put the effort into several
other directions.

~~~
serge2k
Doing half life 2, then switching to episodic content so you can get things
moving faster, then taking forever to release 2 episodes, then sitting around
for a decade with an unresolved cliffhanger is ridiculous.

I don't buy your reasoning either. Right business move because DotA 2 and
their Hats! are a cash cow business, sure.

~~~
ftlio
They're waiting for VR. Half-Life 2 already spans everything cool you could
conceivably do with a 'post-quake 2' shooter. Team Fotress 2, Counter-Strike:
Global Offensive, and Dota 2 cover all the neat online matchmaking, micro-
transaction, user-created content stuff.

They don't want to make Half-Life 3, the expansion to Half-Life 2. They want
to make something new. They created something new with Portal, which required
them to hone their ability to introduce players to an entirely new game
mechanic, but now they have to wait for VR to put it all together.

~~~
nitrogen
As a fan of the HL series, I don't need a revolution, I just want to finish
the darn story.

------
wutf
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

~~~
kaosjester
I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your
boss? _Vote them out_! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because
they're basically in charge anyway? _Vote them in_! If anonymous voting
happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away
in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them
leave altogether).

That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of
cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power
by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them
breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to
dissuade that.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and
that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are
unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You
described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You
probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one.

Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders
code, and let everyone else decide what they code.

~~~
mason240
Exactly, it's "leaderless" in the same sense that a class of high schoolers is
"leaderless."

------
linuxhansl
Interesting. I just talked to a friend of mine who is actually a lawyer. He
told that in his firm of 300 everybody is a partner and nobody has a boss.

Instead they periodically elect a body of 20 (or so) partner to deal with
compensation, bad partners, sets policies, etc, etc.

My buddy says that all the partner are fairly self-driven grown ups, and
usually do the right thing. Rarely is there any action needs to be taken by
that elected body.

They do have a "CEO" in name to represent the firm to the outside, but with no
other powers otherwise. And obviously you need some HR department.

Immediately I wondered whether one could run a software company like that.

Seems that GitHub drove it a little too far on the no-structure route. I
wonder if they could have done what this firm does.

~~~
blahi
Law firms are very different in how they generate revenue and operate than
every other company. There is no basis for comparison.

~~~
jaggederest
The more I talk to lawyers the more I like the way they operate. Is there
really no way to steal a lot of that structure for our field?

~~~
blahi
Sure if you are an application developer (like an integrator, BI, ERP, etc).
Make cooperatives. But they won't be flat. You still have a boss - your
partner. Every partner is like a mini company and they share resources and
partners vote on future direction. It's not that rare actually. The ad agency
conglomerates operate similarly. So do management consulting firms which are
increasingly getting into tech consulting. Don't know how Accenture operates,
but I would think it would be very similar. Ditto for Capgemini, Infosys,
Cognizant, the list goes on.

------
unabst
I've experienced first hand why businesses need bureaucracy, because I
resisted building one. Turns out it's the same reason cars have 4 wheels. It
just works.

Some workers require oversight to be productive, and for some it just helps.
This means you get the most out of your work force, and can also hire workers
who can't manage themselves. But managers also abstract trust and
responsibility from multiple staff to one staff, help organize workflow, and
ensure proper communication across teams. It's a simple matter of fact that
some work is more fun, some people communicate better, and people don't
organize themselves. Add to this the coaching and mentoring factor of a good
manager, and it's a no-brainer.

Granted, what most employees fail to understand is if you have a manager, the
company has already deemed you need one, and you're practically paying for
your own overhead. Good managers are hard to come by, and are expensive. But
businesses desperately need good managers because they solve most staffing
issues. In other words, if you stop being complacent and just behave like a
manager, chances are you will become one.

Here is how it's done: You start by managing yourself and removing your own
overhead. Then you start taking care of other responsibilities because you
can't help it. Know what needs to get done, understand the big picture, and
just help accomplish it from the side. And when you provide relevant insight
about how to improve something, put out a fire, or organize a project, you're
already manager material. Your goal is to replace your manager without
actually replacing him, without being the boss, without pissing anyone off,
and without higher pay. You just made your bosses job easier, increased the
value of everyone else, and ensured work got done. If your company doesn't
give you a raise, you're at the wrong company.

Here is how it isn't done: You keep relying on your manager to keep you in
check. You only accomplish your minimum requirements. You blame training for
not being able to do anything else. You feel entitled for a raise just by
being there for a long time.

Both of the above are exaggerated to emphasize two opposites, but most people
are somewhere in between. Of course, if you're not manager material and you
suck at your job, the likelihood is you will get fired, so it's perfectly okay
to be complacent and just do good work. But the point is, you have your
manager to thank for your straight forward and fairly comfortable job, and at
the end of the day, his/her salary is practically coming out of yours.

~~~
dasmoth
What if you're looking for autonomy without becoming a manager?

~~~
unabst
You're a great worker. If you're autonomous, you're already good at managing
yourself and your own work, so you're half way there. You're the person that
would be high on the list of potential recruits for managerial positions if
there was a shortage in your company. And you'd have to turn them down to
maintain your non-managerial status and lower payroll.

If you have a group of people that can manage themselves, you have a group of
potential managers. In other words, they're worth more than people who can't
manage themselves, and the likelihood of them doing simpler tasks that can be
done with someone more cost effective is greater. Meaning, unless you're
allergic to non-autonomous people, it becomes a good business decision to just
start managing some helpers instead of forcing everyone to help themselves.
The quintessential helper is "the intern" (and they may be grooming you for a
managerial role if they put you in charge of one).

Also, if you're an entrepreneur you're a manager. If you can't manage people,
you have no business trying to build a business.

It's also worth noting public education systems do not produce managers. The
teacher-student dynamic is similar to the manager-worker dynamic. They don't
teach you in school that you could learn whatever you want on your own and
that the teacher is mostly there just to make sure you get your work done.
It's pretty much the same with managers.

~~~
dasmoth
Thanks for the response -- interesting stuff.

But any thoughts on what to do in the "allergic to non-autonomous people"
situation?

~~~
mwfunk
If you're just describing people who can't or won't think for themselves (or
have very poor judgement when they do), your options are (a) work alone or
with a small group of people you respect, (b) work for a company with high
standards for hiring (no place is perfect, but some are better than others),
(c) learn how to constructively work with people you consider lesser mortals
while hiding your contempt, or (d) don't put people into made-up buckets and
learn how to make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. (d) is
by far the most challenging, and by far the most rewarding, because what
you're capable of won't forever be circumscribed by preconceived notions about
people, who can be quite surprising in unexpectedly positive and negative
ways.

~~~
unabst
Just to add, regarding (d), buckets will make themselves based on work, and
people will make buckets for themselves based on who they are. So you want
these buckets to match. Except, as a manager or an employer, you really have
little control over either. If marketing needs to get done, that's a
predetermined bucket. If someone loves marketing, that's their predestined
bucket. But 1 to 1 matches are rare. If your business is growing, work buckets
constantly change. And if you're a person, you constantly change. And then
there are offices that are still trying to figure out the proper buckets, as
well as the people who are still trying to figure out their passion. So it's a
clusterfuck and there is always collateral damage. But you want to be working
for someone who's at least trying to get it right, and usually if you can talk
to that person, they'll appreciate your feedback. The key is for both sides to
be flexible enough to get all the work done without making anyone too unhappy.
Of course, businesses can't sacrifice work, so people end up sacrificing
happiness, but for the most part, a business that fails to keep their
employees happy is either a failing business or a bad business (and as an
employee you should look elsewhere).

------
yuja_wang
I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing
arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories
for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone?

Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on
that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Can you elaborate?

~~~
brobinson
I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was
banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos
containing "problematic" language which were ignored.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Not just that repo -- see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250)

~~~
brobinson
I'm honestly so jaded by the injection of language policing into everything
that all I can do is sigh nowadays.

------
booleandilemma
I once worked for a company with a very flat organizational structure. It was
just the CEO and thirty people underneath him.

Every day I had 10 people coming to me with issues they all thought were
critically important. I was being pulled in every direction and I couldn't
focus on anything. It was a complete mess.

Now I work at a company where I have one boss, and he acts as a funnel for all
the work that comes into our department.

I'm never going back to a flat company again, if I can help it.

~~~
forgottenpass
Not to say it's an unimportant difference, but the only difference is that
your boss knows how to say "no" to immediate requests for you time and you
don't.

------
ChuckMcM
Most of the people I've talked to who "reject management", they really reject
"bad management".

~~~
metaphorm
to be fair, that is _most_ management. good management is quite rare,
unfortunately.

~~~
kabdib
And much of the "good" management I've encountered is actually about
protecting your people from the bad management around and above you in the
organization.

Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and
with project management, and they are different things.

~~~
flukus
> Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and
> with project management, and they are different things.

The problem is that if you get a professional PM, they typically have
seniority on the org chart and call the shots, even when they don't have the
technical capacity to do so.

I'd like to experience an in team flat structure, one where management/PM is
working for the team, not in charge of them.

~~~
kabdib
All the really excellent PMs at Microsoft that I worked with seemed "flat" to
me -- they did coordination, technical documentation and basically "glued
together" disparate groups. They were technically deep and would have made
fine engineers, except they were better at communication and negotiation than
your average engineer. They didn't seem to give a damn what the management
structure was like, except to steer around it.

The poorer PMs were the ones stuck in hierarchy, who managed schedules,
tracked bug counts and (aside from bug triage _maybe_ ) did work that could
have been largely automated. These folks tended to circulate through and were
generally fungible, even at the nosebleed levels of their management tree.

I would happily have traded 20 or 30 of the "bug counter" PMs for a couple of
technical PMs who could write specs that meant something. (I saw many "bug
counter" PMs quit, or get fired).

------
nathanaldensr
Can GitHub--a company with 600 people-- _really_ be called a "startup" anymore
(as termed by the article)?

~~~
civilian
There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why
successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming
that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being
inflated, I think there's "startup inflation".

In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we
ended up with something like: _> A startup is a company that is new company,
less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky
and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for
extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment._

So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and
paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency?
Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not
novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also
hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get
commoditized.

Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push
this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high-
growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional
business startups".

~~~
fsloth
I think the brief description is a company in search of a new scalable
business model.

If the business model is not new then the business can be categorized as X
(grocery chain, real estate dealer, machine shop, etc).

------
danso
It'd be cool to see an internal study, at least within the engineering group,
of how commit activity/issue resolution changed before and after the new
structure. On an aggregate basis, at least.

~~~
sidlls
Could you elaborate on why you think that would be useful?

~~~
danso
Ostensibly the decision to change structure is to improve productivity. Does
it? And if so, how does it affect/improve it? Commit activity is as
granular/quantifiable a data source as we have to analyze it.

Obviously, the analysis shouldn't be limited to the mere quantity of commits.
I'm more interested in if the activity becomes more "regular" than sporadic.
Or if long-neglected (i.e. boring) issues get more attention than they did
before.

~~~
sitkack
It would be interesting, but not immediately scientific when it comes to
measuring productivity. A larger structure is going to be less efficient than
a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The
individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to
arrive at.

What _I_ would find interesting is a what is the slope of the line in terms of
worker productivity as it varies with org size as the number of workers are
added.

Having a bossless architecture is fine when there is lots of interesting
engineering work to do. Coordination and direction is just overhead when the
organism should just spread in every direction. But after some point it needs
to move and find food.

~~~
fsloth
" A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under
most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more
specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at."

This is the best brief simplification of organizational dynamics on scaling
I've had the pleasure to read.

------
ricardobeat
> GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two-
> day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that’s expected to
> attract 1,500 attendees.

This can't be serious...

~~~
jdale27
What do you mean?

------
Animats
It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who
really, really want to make computer games. (This is also why game developers
tend to be exploited. See the EA litigation.)

It's surprising that it works for Zappos, which is just an online shoe store.
Yes, there are people who are fanatical about shoes, but the business of
selling and shipping them is not that exciting.

~~~
aChrisSmith
Does it really? Valve is extremely profitable because of their particular role
in the video games industry. But outside of Steam, is the company really a
role model for success?

Is Valve's latest "new" IP DOTA2 successful when compared to the other set of
MOBAs that have come out over the past few years?

Have Valve's forays into VR and hardware been successful compared to other
companies in the space? e.g. the Vive, Oculus?

Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch?
Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor
auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search,
discoverability, etc.

I am not an expert, and may have my details wrong about Valve. But I don't
think the company has been especially successful outside of being the only
game in town for buying AAA video games online.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Would Steam have happened if they had a different management structure?

~~~
mwfunk
Perhaps not, but if it didn't it would be because the rest of the org that
didn't want to do Steam would have been more empowered to stand up to Gabe,
whereas with Valve's flat org, Gabe is God and everyone has to do what he
says.

It's probably best for Valve that Steam did happen, but if it's due to Valve's
flatness, I would attribute that to the org's inability to resist Gabe rather
than any sort of bonus wisdom that arose from that flatness.

------
matt_wulfeck
One of the ways I see manager's having a very positive impact on a product is
by managing the (sometimes) competing interest of users versus engineers.

As engineers, we can sometimes become obsessed with
updates/refactors/optimizations that have zero meaningful impact on the user
experience. A user doesn't care about your cobwebs and dirty laundry, but as
an engineer it's so hard not to obsess over these optimizations. It's so easy
to forget that users don't care about the same things as you.

At the same time it's maddening when you feel like you're working with a house
of cards and your manager asks for a third story.

I see a lot of conflict here, and this imho is what separates good technical
managers from bad ones. They understand the competing interests and are able
to prioritize work in a way that works best for everyone.

~~~
collyw
> that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience.

The reason I want to refactor is to make the code easier to read and maintain
and more likely to be bug free. It doesn't have any meaningful impact on the
user experience, but it is making the software a lot better and keeps running
costs lower and allows new features to be added more easily.

------
lifeisstillgood
We desperately need to find new organisational forms - it's crazy in modern
western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control
dictatorships

However the transition is hard. Democracy is nice but companies are too close
to the daily life of people to allow a vote every four years and let others
decide policy

GitHub could have experimented with new ways of deciding policy (voting) - and
I would argue that it's likely they would have got things like "write good
docs" voted in anyway.

And it would be interesting to see how one handles voting on issues like
"gender bias"

But we will all have to have companies like this one day - otherwise where do
the big value wins come from. We can't keep inventing technology of the 21 C
and hope they overcome the management hierarchies of the Stone Age

~~~
kitd
There are other forms of structural organisation than strict hierarchies.

One interesting one proposed by cyberneticist Stafford Beer was dubbed
Syntegrity [1].

It involved relationships between workers structured like a bucky ball, where
each person had direct influence over a number of topics, and oversight of a
number of others.

The result was (in theory) an arrangement where everyone had some
responsiblity, but there was no overall "leadership". _In theory_

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntegrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntegrity)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you - but I think that the perhaps less complicated goal of achieving
corporate democracy will be hard enough :-)

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GrumpyNl
Its just agile/scrum for management. How is that working out for you guys? Do
you get things finished?

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YeGoblynQueenne
Flat management structure is not the problem, is it? Someone always has more
of a say in what gets done for whatever reason- seniority, skill, charisma,
anything.

What should really be flat is the pay scheme: pay every worker 1/n of the
company's assets at the end of each financial period.

That means anyone who wants more money must work to make the company prosper
as a whole. Employees should also have the chance to decide who gets hired
(because they have a motivation to hire only the people they think can
increase their own pay).

Btw, I'm totally willing to try this in my own company one day. And if it
doesn't work- who the hell cares. Most companies fail for much more common
reasons than their management or pay structure anyway.

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darkmarmot
Are they still using the Code of Conduct that explicitly allows "reverse-
racism, reverse-sexism" etc. for members of marginalized groups?

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samscully
Depending on the business, there is usually a requirement for a coordination
role. Whoever that coordinator is needs to have the authority to make a final
decision in order to be effective.

If companies want to avoid tyranny in the workplace then perhaps it would be
better to have bosses but allow a majority vote of direct reports to fire
them. Give 360 reviews some actual teeth.

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ilaksh
Gitlab is cool but with things like webrtc, ethereum/swarm/ndn, gittorrent
etc. out there eventually we will be able to get away from servers and
definitely having one company in charge of storing all of the code is not the
most ideal final solution.

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mathattack
The link to Medium's experiment is interesting too.

[https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-
mediu...](https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-
medium-2228cc9d93e9#.3xupsu3mh)

------
bluenose69
The genius of github is git. Did a manager help Mr Torvalds construct that?

~~~
pluma
If GitHub was only git, we'd be talking about Gitorious (or Gitweb, or...)
having hundreds of employees, not GitHub.

I've heard people describe GitHub as the "Facebook of Open Source" and that's
not as absurd a statement as it may seem at face value.

GitHub is basically the SourceForge of Web 2.0. It's where you go for open
source projects and it makes it easy to participate.

I would hope to see GitLab succeed GitHub by virtue of being open source at
heart (rather than just at the surface level) but as much as I love GitLab I'm
not holding my breath.

Either way, git is ultimately an implementation detail to GitHub's success.
Git's success may have given GitHub the edge over BitBucket (back when
BitBucket was hg-only and GitHub was git-only) but it feels like the inverse
is also true.

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hoodoof
Seems kinda childish to me to not want management.

~~~
collyw
Try working a couple of months in my previous workplace and i am sure you will
change your tune.

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spajus
Next step: TPS reports.

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exstudent2
And yet during the flat org structure time period Github was an innovation
BEAST. It was one of the most creative technology companies I've ever seen and
changed the way we do development. Since more structure has been put in place,
innovation seems to have come to a screeching halt. The product feels old, new
features are hard to come by, bloat and cruft are everywhere. Maybe they hired
too many people for the job at hand?

~~~
technomancy
I think you'll find the slowed pace happened a good deal before the managers
came in if you look at the history more closely.

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h4nkoslo
Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant
politically-vetted governance.

"the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn’t be
solved by the masses. While the old times created a strong sense of
camaraderie, employees didn’t know who to direct questions to, either about
uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance"

