

DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees - marilyn
http://www.nfib.com/mybusiness-magazine/operational-insight

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systemtrigger
To the commenters here who notice there may be an upper limit on the number of
employees David's approach is valid for, keep in mind that the subtitle of the
article identifies "small business" as the scope. Thus the counterexample of
Google seems unfair. That said, the legal definition of "small" in the U.S.
for most nonmanufacturing businesses is that the business must have less than
$7 million in annual receipts
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_business#Size_definitions>). It would be
interesting to know if David feels there exists an upper limit on the number
of employees in order for a flat structure to work, and if so, what that
number might be. Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are
just a latticework of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no
upper limit.

Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make
people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent. This creates an
unhealthy work environment compared to the ideal in which all employees are
truly on equal footing as regards power. One of the tragedies of working for a
manager is that nervous feeling you get when you ponder how much control this
one person wields over your career. A superior organizational design is one
that takes care to hire people who are great at managing themselves and
entrusts them with the power to do so.

~~~
j_baker
Sure I agree. But on the other hand, the Joel Spolsky article I posted noted
that he started having problems once he got to _17_ people, which is smaller
than 37signals. I was simply using Google as an extreme to illustrate my
point.

> Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are just a latticework
> of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no upper limit.

How do you make a smaller organization though? By giving someone authority
over it who can really take control of it.

> Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make
> people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent.

Tough. That's just the way it is. You're always going to have a boss. Whether
it's a manager, a C-suite executive, a board of directors, or the customer.
You're never going to be completely free from someone having authority over
you. It's just a matter of how they use that authority over you.

Now, I _will_ agree that bad bosses (which are unfortunately too common) make
you feel slavish. If you have a good boss (and let's give DHH credit, he
sounds like he is a good boss), then they make you feel powerful. A boss's
primary job is to enable you to do things either with encouragement or by
taking care of the administrative details for you. Someone once said that a
boss is a "secretary who can fire you."

~~~
nostrademons
FWIW, I've heard that Google once had no managers. The person I heard it from
started around 2002, when Google was already an order of magnitude bigger than
37signals. So while it obviously doesn't work for all size companies, it seems
that you can get fairly big and still do okay without managers.

------
hitonagashi
My only issue with that approach is that of holiday days.

I can see so many ways that that can go wrong. To me, the reason it works
seems more like peer pressure than enjoyment of work.

I love what I do, I love coding, and I also know that I love taking a week out
to not care about everything I do at work. If I was in a system like that, I'd
feel kinda pressured to keep up with my colleagues and not let the team down.
Not by my friends and officemates, but by the knowledge that if I take a week
off, that's a week they've got to handle the work I'd do. There's rarely a
'good' time to take holidays, especially in smaller teams.

It could work, it is certainly possible, but it seems an unnecessary area
where pressure can occur when a team is under stress. To be honest, I think it
could work better with the caveat that everyone has to take a certain minimum
level of holiday.

Sick days however make perfect sense.

~~~
Andys
But remember, they are already working a 4 day week, so the chance of being
burnt out and forcing themselves to work is lower than normal.

~~~
patio11
IIRC, they don't do that anymore. Something about the weather in Chicago. No,
really.

~~~
jasonfried
We do four day work weeks from May - October. Five day work weeks the rest of
the year. We've found that's the right balance.

~~~
Andys
Sounds good to me. I would like a workplace where it is accepted culture to
work 4 days, or equivalent on average, since I'd probably rather work a few of
weeks and take a long weekend.

------
j_baker
As much as I like the idea of not having middle managers, I think it's
impossible at a certain point. I mean, Google would love nothing better than
to do away with middle managers altogether, and they have them. I think the
best counter-point comes from Joel Spolsky:
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-
ho...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-how-i-
learned-to-love-middle-managers.html)

~~~
shadowsun7
Thank you for sharing that article, Jason. :) Paraphrasing Joel Spolsky in
response to DHH:

 _A final thought: You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the
latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a founder
about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the
light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set
up and operate._

I sometimes wonder why DHH and Spolsky are so different. DHH speaks as if what
he says is law, will work for everyone, Spolsky seems to constantly pad his
advice with warnings about context.

~~~
RickHull
In this case, DHH seems to have provided the appropriate hedge:

> _You might be thinking, "This is crazy -- it would never work at my
> company." And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it
> would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or
> division._

~~~
jessedhillon
I wouldn't consider that a hedge, I would consider it lip-service to the idea
of "I might be wrong here." It seems almost completely disconnected from
reality.

What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000
employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each
teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees
through the management roles?

I work at a company of over 300 employees, where we implement many of these
kinds of ideas: we don't count sick or vacation days, our management hierarchy
is extremely flat, and we have no policy about what time people come in to
work. Despite that, I think this method of management-via-non-management is
not something that every company can try on. It has to be built into the
culture from day one. DHH is really only describing the trappings of a fun
company culture, not the core of it.

You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company
which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.

~~~
j_baker
What's ironic is that you're doing the same thing. You pay lip service (using
phrases like "I wouldn't consider" and "It seems") to the fact that you might
be wrong about DHH paying lip service to the fact that he might be wrong. And
then when you actually change over to the main topic, you do the same thing.
The majority of this comment explains how DHH is undeniably and completely
missing the point.

If you want to criticize DHH, be my guest. I might agree with what you're
saying. Just don't criticize him and then turn around and do the exact same
thing as you accuse him of doing.

~~~
jessedhillon
Not really. The implied point is that DHH has an obligation to explain not
only why a company should consider his radical changes. But _also_ , because
of the magnitude of the changes he proposes, he has an obligation to explain
seriously why a company shouldn't. Otherwise, it's just cheerleading.

I was calling out that he failed to do the latter, and my obligation is to
explain why a company might not want to, or be able to, implement those
changes.

The fact is that I'm _not_ wrong about him glancing over an important part of
his proposal. If you write an article advocating companies undergo radical
shifts in their organizational structures, then as someone who is regarded as
an informed commenter, you have an obligation to tell people the pitfalls of
such a large change. Again, when you don't do that, it's called cheerleading.

He didn't include any discussion of the downsides, or the upsides of
hierarchical organization, so I'm not wrong. I should have used a more tactful
phrase than "lip-service," however: it's more loaded -- perhaps even
derogatory -- than I intended.

~~~
j_baker
I wasn't trying to say that you were being disrespectful. I was just saying
that the way I interpreted it was logically inconsistent. It came off that you
were saying "DHH isn't admitting that there might be a downside to his plan.
He needs to provide a balanced argument. Oh, and by the way he's completely
wrong about everything too."

Whereas after reading this post (and rereading the last one), it sounds like
you might have meant to say "DHH isn't admitting that there might be a
downside to his plan. He needs to provide a balanced argument. For example,
here's one potential hole that I see" which is a reasonable thing to say.
Remember, we humans are dumb animals who are prone to completely
misinterpreting your argument. Sometimes you have to beat a dead horse to make
your point. :-)

~~~
jessedhillon
It's all good; I'm glad we came to an understanding. Thanks for the feedback
and perspective.

------
brudgers
At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically
however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting
30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid
territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number>

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way
of managing people.

~~~
seanfchan
If the company does start to become bigger, and groups in charge of certain
aspects of the products start to form, is it possible to still apply this
model on the smaller formed groups? Then the weekly leader of each group meet
and therefore encourages employees to maintain the "bigger picture" of the
product.

Is this doomed to fail? what do you guys think?

~~~
d2viant
Yes, that's what the "Scrum of Scrums" idea is meant to solve, in exactly that
way:

[http://www.xqa.com.ar/visualmanagement/2009/08/scrum-of-
scru...](http://www.xqa.com.ar/visualmanagement/2009/08/scrum-of-scrums-
making-it-visual/)

------
jtbigwoo
There are tons of bad managers, but there are also a few excellent managers. I
think it mostly depends on their focus.

Most middle managers (and most people in general) are focused on what they
need to get done--the reports that need to be filed or the next status meeting
to be scheduled. What good managers realize is that their work contributes
absolutely nothing to the company (directly.) They are overhead in the purest
sense of the word. All those i's to dot and t's to cross don't add a single
cent to revenue. The only way they can make any contribution to the company is
by making their people more effective. A great manager should be a hacker
focused on her people's time rather than on code. She should be anticipating
problems and annoyances and dealing with them before they blow up. If there's
a fire hose of distractions, she should be the valve that slows the flow down
to a trickle and routes the real issues to the appropriate people. Her goal
should always be, "How can I make my people 1% more efficient?"

Too bad that most managers appear to be little more than a secretary with a
checklist. (Actually, most secretaries I know are more useful than most
managers.)

~~~
hashbrown7
I agree, good managers are supposed to manage people, not tasks.

------
sp4rki
It is possible to keep this model working at a scale with a lot more
employees. That being said it requires not only the right culture within the
company, but the right people. Keep only the creme of the crop employees; stop
'fiscalizing' sick days, time sheets, and clocking hours; get the developers
to get together at the start of an iteration (say every two weeks for example)
and together come to a definition of priorities and tasks; measure results,
not time in front of a computer. You as a business owner have - of course -
the last word on any issue or priority; however empowering your employees,
while keeping a friendly, social, and liberal company culture, will most
probably have a positive effect on your workforce's drive and productivity.
Hell everyone wants to the see the company grow when you really feel a part of
it, as opposed to just another employee.

As a counterpoint though, I feel this approach only works with IT, Development
and Design Departments. Lot's of other departments (Sales, Marketing, Customer
Service, Implementation) require a certain structure and hierarchy to function
correctly. In my experience, the more specialized the skill set, the more are
liberty and culture important to further the drive of the team/teams.

------
alsomike
Here's what I got out of this: employees are extremely obedient when you don't
tell them the rules. Because they have to guess what's expected of them, they
come up even more restrictive rules just to be on the safe side. Example: if
you don't count vacation days, people take less time off. That's your
employees putting money in your pocket!

Bonus: you can tell them you're giving them "autonomy", and also fire some
managers.

