> Tight nonhierarchical integration of the team. This isn’t a Hubris feature, but it’s hard to separate Hubris from the team that built it. Oxide’s engineering team has essentially no internal silos. Our culture rewards openness, curiosity, and communication, and discourages defensiveness, empire-building, and gatekeeping. We’ve worked hard to create and defend this culture, and I think it shows in the way we organized horizontally, across the borders of what other organizations would call teams, to solve this mystery.
This caught my attention. I'd love to hear more about the motivations for crafting such a culture as well as some particular implementation details. I'm curious if there are drawbacks to fostering "openness, curiosity, and communication" within an organization? Obviously, some go for more rigid hierarchical systems, and it occurs to me that an org chart can (and probably should) be strategically decided upon, but I am somewhat clueless as to the tradeoffs. HN have any insight here?
Hmmmm, the specific values stated here is hard to evaluate, but in general one disadvantage of having an organisation without a strongly defined structure is that generally there still is a power structure of sorts. But when it's not explicitly defined it's less open, and generally less deliberately chosen, and harder to understand (especially for those who are good at social interaction), so it can allow sometimes even more pathological behaviours because of the shadowy nature of it, but also even if it doesn't get particularly bad it can make co-ordination much harder.
I've experienced this in some companies I've worked for (one was a very large company where there was an explicit power structure of sorts, but it was not particularly stuck to in practice. It was a consultancy which worked on a variety of different projects, and the way you got onto projects was basically by making friends with the people selling and managing them, not so much through any particular official channel. This worked great if you were good at forming the social network needed to do this, it didn't work so well if you weren't). For other examples, there's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" which is a talk from a feminist who noticed the same kind of thing happen in the organisations she was in, which generally rejected hierarchy as patriarchal, and you can see similar discussions around how this does/doesn't work in Valve, which also doesn't have a particularly well-defined internal structure. Open-source projects can suffer from the same thing (I would characterise some of the rust drama as stemming from a similar problem).
That said, an explicit power structure doesn't need to be hierarchical, even though that's the 'traditional' business organisation. It's possible Oxide's structure is explicit but non-hierarchical. Also, in general such an approach tends to work better at smaller scales than larger ones. Said consultancy is probably the largest company I'm aware of which still mostly operates in a freeform way there, and they do have a kind of scaffolding which keeps it kinda held in place. And of course, this is more of a spectrum than a dichotomy: even the most rigid of power structures on paper still has some implicit, more complex implicit structure underneath: it's the nature of groups of people.
Don't take this as me believing explicit > implicit in general. This is just me talking about some of the observed disadvantages of less explicit organisation. More explicit power structures have their own problems as well (and there's the related 'seeing like a state'/'legibility' issues there).
So, when hearing about Oxide's culture, these kind of objections come up a lot (namely, concerns about shadow structures). There are three important things to know about Oxide: first, while we think autonomy is important, we do have a CEO -- and the CEO is (and has to be) the final single authority in the company. Now, we also don't disagree much as a company, and that leads to the second important thing to know: our hiring process[0][1] is very, very deliberate -- and we are carefully looking for people who will thrive in our environment. And that it's careful and deliberate is not unrelated to the third thing to know about Oxide: our compensation is uniform.[2] (As it turns out, people are very careful when evaluating someone who is a peer rather than a subordinate!)
With respect to other environments that encourage autonomy, that last element -- that compensation is uniform -- tends to set Oxide apart: if an environment encourages both autonomy and stack-based ranking and compensation, it absolutely will create shadow structure. By removing the organizational tumor of variable compensation, Oxide removes the shadow structure that it creates.
> With respect to other environments that encourage autonomy, that last element -- that compensation is uniform -- tends to set Oxide apart: if an environment encourages both autonomy and stack-based ranking and compensation, it absolutely will create shadow structure. By removing the organizational tumor of variable compensation, Oxide removes the shadow structure that it creates.
This sounds like a really profound point. Rather than just saying "it's human nature to form shadow hierarchies", ask why they do it, to what end. If increasing their compensation is removed as a potential motivation, that must change the way people behave.
This caught my attention. I'd love to hear more about the motivations for crafting such a culture as well as some particular implementation details. I'm curious if there are drawbacks to fostering "openness, curiosity, and communication" within an organization? Obviously, some go for more rigid hierarchical systems, and it occurs to me that an org chart can (and probably should) be strategically decided upon, but I am somewhat clueless as to the tradeoffs. HN have any insight here?