This is fucking stupid, given we have almost literally no information about what has happened at Github, nor the extent to which any events were due to an absence of hierarchy.
I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.
Bad actors and unstable people are found in EVERY organization, no matter what the hierarchy or lack thereof.
A falling out at GitHub proves nothing! This is a datum, not a statistical study. How many traditionally run organizations have completely imploded and gone bankrupt, or been involved in HR lawsuits?
I find it completely asinine that people will use GitHub's problems to push their pet theories.
Regardless of the details, that things escalated to the extent they did can almost entirely be attributed to it being nobody's job to resolve this earlier. Engineers get paid for shipping code. Executives ensure that the company is moving in the right direction, and often the concerns of one engineer are rounding error. People need to be able to say: "If things happen, I will go to this person, whose long-term success at this company is entirely determined by the success of this particular half-dozen of us."
> I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.
Like you did here, and I quote: "The proper target for anger in this case is the NSA and the government which allowed this to happen"? But mention sexism and everybody's a fucking lawyer waiting for all sides to be heard. Double standard?
I don't understand why everyone is so excited about this.
Any company with more than about 10 employees is going to have some BS drama like this going on.
Did people think github was different because it has a cat/octopus thing for a logo?
Actually, we have a pretty good amount of information. We have one point of view from the employee who left, a message from Github that mostly confirms her story, as well as knowledge about how Github works internally. We have good reason to believe that was is on the table is mostly true, therefore it's not inappropriate to theorize about how things could have been done better, especially since similar stories may play (or have played out) out at other companies.
These aren't pet theories but an excellent starting point for a discussion.
I would have expected a community of smart individuals to sincerely examine these accusations, even if they are not the whole story behind this current scandal, because we could only benefit from such a discussion.
That this article has been flagged by several people only demonstrates a great level of immaturity and that we, as an industry, more than deserve scorn. We can certainly not claim to be open minded and thoughtful after this.
When you're a woman in tech and you're hurt by the community reaction, here on HN as elsewhere, indignation certainly has its place. Catherine Bracy, the author of this post, is an expert on issues of sexism in Silicon Valley, and what she says should carry weight here. The article I posted yesterday was written in the early 70s, and discussed problems in different (though perhaps strangely similar) settings. The words of a modern day expert well versed in Silicon Valley culture should certainly find their place here. I think it reflects badly on this community that HN was allowed to be indignant in the Aaron Swartz and Ed Snowden cases but not in this. This high standard of not adding new information to the discussion was not applied in those cases, as I distinctly remember the front page flooded with at least 5 similar stories on Snowden/Swartz (articles were flagged back then only after a dozen or so stories, and we're not there yet). In fact, HN should be reeling with indignation against all those who suddenly become cool observers and expert rhetoricians calling to suspend judgment.
Whatever the particulars of the GitHub scandal turn out to be don't matter (for the purpose of this discussion). What better opportunity is there to discuss the very real problem of underrepresentation of women in SV than this? And what you call "bait" others might call raising awareness. This isn't the NRA talking after a school shootout, but someone discussing what is possibly the biggest problem in SV culture today as a response to a painful, though far from tragic event.
I also find it problematic that a post by a prominent woman is found to be "indignant and lacking in information", while far worse stupidities by race-car driving programmers are featured prominently. At the very least, I think some affirmative action wouldn't hurt us. In fact, this could be our finest moment, and we're squandering it.
ADD: it is perhaps ironic that Bracy implies that this revulsion from politics in SV is simply a form of a very destructive kind of politics, and flagging this story is precisely a case in point. It is a strong political statement that only nurtures what I think is very bad politics.
I urge you to unflag the story unless you strongly believe that its appearance on the front page is somehow bad for HN.
> I would have expected a community of smart individuals to sincerely examine these accusations
From my experience, smartness, sincerity and a sufficiently malleable ego (that enables one to look at accusations constructively) don't always go hand-in-hand. They seem like orthogonal qualities.
People who weren't there arguing about how something they know nothing about actually happened and what can be done to prevent it.
I think to prevent something like this happening again we need to ensure employees can't disable their transponders, either that or make sure we have more power structures in the cockpit.
To me, Github's structure is largely an overreaction to the culture flaws elsewhere. Belief that managers are more valuable than doers, and thus paid more. Belief that engineers are infinitely replaceable. Belief that one should be paid proportionate to the number of people below them in the org chart.
Management has a purpose - but companies poor treatment of engineers over the years has blinded many engineers to this. A great manager ensures their people are pointed in the right direction, makes sure that they're not running into roadblocks, and frees up their people from dealing with bullshit so they can be the best they can be. This really doesn't have anything to do with "oppression", or whatnot.
Managing is orthogonal to engineering - and saying either is worth more than the other is simply wrong. If we can decouple the ideas of "managing" and "building" with systematically being valued / paid more or less than others, we'll have progress. Right now, most are erring on one side or the other.
Managers' higher pay isn't some kind of conspiracy squatting in the industry. It's the result of market forces. Those outside pressures will not evaporate simply because we do not like them.
Pay grades are telling us things we do not wish to hear:
- engineers are more replaceable than their managers
- management staff are consistently difficult to find
Is the market saying that? There were higher starting salaries coming out of my CS undergrad than my management masters. That was 5 years ago, and I don't think things have shifted away from engineers since.
Look at the acquihire prices engineers are getting these days...
Would that be the same market that thought they could accurately predict the risk of securitized mortgage instruments?
The same market that produces for more failing companies that successful ones?
The Market, is not some omnipotent, omniscient force. Much like the forces of natural selection, you actually don't have to be "the best" to survive, just "good enough", and most of the time organizations and organizations survive despite themselves rather than because of themselves.
Or said most succinctly, I think you may have bit too much faith in both the accuracy of market forces and our ability to correctly qualify and quantify such forces.
Securitized mortgages were priced "accurately" to the extent that there was strong, almost inexhaustible, demand for assets with the right rating from paid ratings agencies. This had unpleasant consequences for many of us.
Markets will never magically produce the socially beneficial outcome. They efficiently allocate resources along lines imposed by incentives on market actors, and the resulting supply and demand. If the demand is insane, so are the market-allocated outcomes.
I didn't make the argument that our current structure is "the best" or that the status quo is perfect. Only that sufficient supply/demand for managers exists vis a vis engineering staff to drive management wages up.
In short: it's clear that managers are more highly-valued.
You're assuming that it's an efficient market. But irrational ideas can make a market inefficient. This presumably gets sorted out in the long run, but that takes time.
In software, one source of irrational ideas has been the management models that were developed for industrial and manufacturing organizations. Since building software is a design process, not a manufacturing one, these models don't apply. The industry is slowly figuring that out, but that has left plenty of room for an inefficient market in the meantime—middle managers being perceived as more valuable than programmers and all the rest.
I think your second point is the key one, I don't think the first point is necessarily valid.
It could well be that good managers are much more common than good engineers, but that the essential problem is that it's hard to find good managers and the consequences of hiring a bad manager are much worse than that of hiring a bad engineer.
After Jeri Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she had said that the "flat organization" of Valve masked an informal but very real hierarchy that was made up of elites and their cliques. I realize that flat organization is not the same thing as holarchy, but it could be that they both are trading formal hierarchies for informal ones rather than dispensing with them.
Found it[1]. She says, "The one thing I found out the hard way is that there's actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company, and it felt a lot like high school... There's popular kids that have acquired power within the company, then there's the trouble makers and everyone in between."
> When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power
I've never really given this issue much thought, but it sounds reasonable. Illusions can be dangerous, including the illusion of equality.
I was instantly reminded of the famous commandment in Animal Farm : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". It now seems almost naive to pretend that there wouldn't be people in the organization with vastly more power than others.
All that said, until very recently I was someone who admired GitHub's flat hierarchy from afar. If they were being naive, then so was I.
It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure.
That is the major failing with a lot of the companies doing this. The belief that everyone shares the same ideals and it will work itself out without requiring very strict constraints and process.
All that happens is that the inequalities are layered behind façades, becoming a lot harder to address and resolve than if a traditional power structure was used.
> It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure.
To wit, this is the actual democratic experiment that people keep thinking they refer to when talking about America.
"Holacracies" aren't impossible. It's just that they're hard. Brady's point is more that many people refuse to admit this and, accordingly, run into the worst problems posed rather than having ways to deal with them as they arise.
Holacracies still have a vested management power structure.. Basically you still have owners / top-tier management who's goals may not align with workers.
Want to be a really progressive start up.. become a COOP.
Eh. I worked at a reasonably holacratic/flat organization (a high-profile agile consultancy, actually), and when I say it was flat, I didn't know who my boss was, or who to give notice to when I quit. It was honestly very flat, and in no sense did this mean "secretly rich white guys ran the show." It did lead to a bit more cliqueyness than might otherwise have been desired.
I think that a holacracy, like most things dealing with human beings and their behavior, is dependent on the specific human beings in question with regard to whether or not it will succeed.
On a slightly meta level, it is interesting why the startup/development culture seems to flock to articles like this, saying "such-and-such thing can never work as a solution to people problems because it didn't work here" - we see this crop up on HN constantly, pro- and anti-, with things like working from home, pair programming, etc. Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?
I think I work at the "high-profile agile consultancy" you're talking about.
I've been there two months and I still have no idea who I talk to about X, where X is a variety of things. Before getting staffed on a project I spent time working on whatever I wanted to learn. At several points I wondered if there was someone I should check in with. It felt so weird to just do what I wanted without having to get permission or justify it to someone.
That said, I don't think I could ever go back to reporting to a manager, especially a non-technical manager.
>Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?
I couldn't agree more. I think the flat model works at my company because harassment wouldn't be tolerated by anyone. I turned down positions at startups because their culture was too fratty. Even if they had a management system I wouldn't have felt comfortable bringing up issues.
> That said, I don't think I could ever go back to reporting to a manager, especially a non-technical manager.
After working in a flat organization (I'm 99% sure we're talking about the same place here) like we do/did, I agree. It's amazing how much more productive you can be (provided you're a generally high-aptitude, motivated person to begin with) when you are left alone to do what needs to get done. I'd prefer only to work in similar organizational structures from now on. In my experience, even the little cliqueyness you get is hardly an argument against the alternatives (rigid organizational structure, difficult to move vertically, documentation, all the waterfall stuff, and/or the domineering personality of a god-complex startup founder)
> Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?
Weak opinions make for weak conversation, especially between strangers. All the participants need the ability to appreciate nuanced positions in order to gain value from weak opinions.
This isn't unrelated, either; it's one of the reasons that cliques form in the first place. The extreme position is inevitably simpler than moderate ones, and thus acts as a more solid common ground for group formation. And it's also why we have institutional structures: things like accredited universities and portfolios and interview loops: they help filter for people who can appreciate the relevant nuance so that milder and deeper conversations are easier to come by.
> The extreme position is inevitably simpler than moderate ones, and thus acts as a more solid common ground for group formation.
While I certainly agree with you that this is true, and while I am certainly not surprised finding this sort of thing on HN, it would be nice if discussions could start from less extreme positions. In my weak opinion, anyway ;)
Discussions could start from less extreme positions if we had two things: (1) minds in the habit of being constructively critical and (2) ways to capture many, many opinions with minimal cost.
For #2, I think that a technological solution can be started on, though I admittedly have no idea what I want (or I would have started on it myself). The weakness of democracy, and the Internet, is that our tools for discussion are really, really weak. They do this thing where they're kinda-sorta paying lip service to real-time conversation... except that they're very much not. And they pay lip service to long-form discussion, except that no one really has the time, energy, or reason to properly parse an essay-length exploration of a subject.
This needs to change. Despite what Jeff Atwood seems to think, a better forum isn't really an answer: all that does is capture all the drawbacks of human conversation, notably the difficulty of acknowledging the many nuances in thousands of other opinions. Dozens, our human brains can manage on a good day and with some talent. Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions goes from silly to impossible. But we need to find a way to do it anyways.
I guess flat organization means that you build the company bottom up but unfortunately companies don't work efficiently this way. Why? My most recent experience with flat organization revealed the fact that people judged by the perception of their merit not the real value or expertise. Since everybody is biased towards certain things, based on your gender, race or background, this makes flat organizations vulnerable of people forming cliques and jinxing other people's work outside their group. Politics get even stronger in such an workplace, now you need to make these groups happy instead of just going to the right manager or exec to get something sorted. These groups can promote broken ideas, screw other other groups and have subpar performance and blame it on other groups. Without management and data collected (how long does it take to deliver a feature, how many support hours the company need to spend on a product they wrote etc.) it can get nasty very quick.
Summarizing: I don't think that flat organizations are any better than hierarchical structures, I have experience with both and I believe that flat workplaces suck more especially above a certain size (200-300+ people).
My father, who I consider to have been one of the "real" hippies, told me that he couldn't deal with hippie communes. He claimed that when the group becomes large enough and everyone should be considered equal, a jerk comes in to take advantage of the situation, starts managing, and fucks everything up.
The dynamics of the counterculture communes has been studied, and it is of interest as counterculture was certainly a forefather to modern day Silicon Valley.
If you say "we don't have office politics at our company" the reality is that you do have office politics and it's completely unrestrained due to the blind eye turned on it by "management".
If you notice that the cars you build tend to rust, and that water causes rust, you might say, "well, we're going to build cars that don't encounter water," and you'd be rightly laughed out of town. Office politics doesn't happen (or not) because the founders wrote it into their business plan. Office politics happens because offices are occupied by humans.
Not to change the subject: Having just come out of a totally flat org that was pushing hard for 100% Holacracy I have to say if I didn't leave for other reasons it would have been that. It can be incredibly incredibly difficult to get things done in this environment and sadly made me feel like every day I had to wake up and battle my coworkers because everything was by committee. I'm all for collaboration, but I also believe at the end of the day someone has to be accountable and responsible for actions taken or not taken.
But that's not what Holacracy pushes for. The organization is supposed to have people with power to decide certain stuff and be accountable for it. It's just not supposed to have a single hierarchy that ends in the CEO and which concentrates all power, but a bunch of "circles" that have role-specific powers.
It seems that everyone is blaming the process without following it. Not that I claim that following it would have good results - I have no idea if it's a good system or not.
You got it right. I work with Holacracy and I can confirm... everything you read Holacracy being blamed for, as in Catherine Bracy's article, is actually not against Holacracy.
They think it's against Holacracy, because they mistakenly believe that Holacracy simply means "flat org". Then they build an entire argument around this error...
Since the Zappos story, people talk about "holacracy" here and there. In reality, there are few organizations actually using Holacracy® — the system defined in the constitution you link to. Github isn't part of them, Valve either. Zappos and Medium are.
>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works
I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people?
Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?
EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."
Managers aren't powerful people. Their job is to see powerful people's will is done, in a way that will minimally piss off the workers. So a good manager is one that can pull the wool over your eyes enough that you do the things those in power want.
Your argument is fallacious. You've cherry picked a single line from her argument and misrepresented it.
Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.
I think your read on this is a little strong. The point is that a power structure is going to emerge in an organization eventually, and a formal, out-in-the open power structure is less likely to be abused than the sort of off-the-record de facto power structure that will inevitably emerge in a "no management" type company.
Just because people have power doesn't mean they are "progressive dictators" or "oppressing people".
I think the point is more that bureaucracy exists, in the best case, to distribute power throughout an organization. Delegation of authority necessarily means a reduction in power at the top.
As an ideal, picture a "separation of powers" system - you no longer have a co-founder managing HR disputes in which they are the defendant, for example.
> Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?
No, it's quite close to the idea that progressive power structures are good, as opposed to anarchy followed by "obviously everything will end up being progressive now that I've torn down the structure of power".
But isn't that why the people behind the Holacracy concept have a whole structure (with pretty pictures!) that is supposed to replace the managerial layer?
I have no idea if holacracy is bullshit or not (it does feel like a concept invented to sell training classes), but claiming it replaces managers with nothing is plainly false.
If I'm understanding the linked article correctly, she wasn't claiming holacracy guts management, she was claiming that it introduces a power vacuum. And from what I can tell in that pretty picture you provide, she's probably actually right.
E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Who decides which spouses get to work on company property without pay, and which employees are allowed to date other employees?
The way those things get resolved will show you who's really in charge.
> E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company?
The circle whose focus is strategic direction.
> Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day?
Unending governance meetings and "decide who the managers will be that day" both seem like signs of a circle with a poor governance process (probably, one that is trying to force things into a non-holarchic structure.)
The idea that having focus on long-range, broad-scope problems is intimately tied to authority is a typical assumption of traditional heirarchies, but there's no reason it has to be true in holacracies.
It has nothing to do with whether you call the direction "strategic", "next quarter" or "tactical". If you have the authority to set the direction at all you're the one (or few) in charge.
We prefer these types of direction to be long-term if only to avoid having a business do its own random walk through the markets, but don't confuse scope with authority.
Also, can you expand on what you are digging at with your "kinda ad hominem-y" line? The technology arm of Obama's campaign was generally viewed in a very positive light, as far as I remember. And not the same thing as the brains behind the Obamacare debacle. So I'm not sure what the dig is. Is it because she is a recruiter rather than an engineer? Still not sure how that would disqualify her opinion in this case.
I read it as someone close to the maximum representative of hierarchy (the President of the whole US) having an incentive to discredit less hierarchical systems.
A second facet of that is that Catherine seems to be arguing[0] that organizations with no hierarchy give the false impression of power for employees and society at large. Doesn't a similar situation happen with democracy: people can vote Obama, Romney or Absolutely Not Viable Other Candidate and get the false impression of being represented[1]. In the same vein, wouldn't democracy be bullshit?
[0]: Both in this reply and the previous one, I'm speculating entirely — the post seems like an intro to a future more detailed explanation of why holacracy does the things this intro mentions it does.
[1]: Many times people will get most of what they want (as happens in a company, holocratic or not). Both my argument and the author's argument concern the exceptions to the rule: the times when people don't get what they want, or are completely run over.
evil rich white men article though an evil rich woman was the power vacuum filler.
github can keep their managerless system, they just need to adopt a shop steward system like unions have. This is somebody who can advocate for employees during disciplinary meetings with management, arbitrate petty disputes that don't need heavy handed management involvement with threats of termination, and anonymously bring problems to management if the grieving employee doesn't want to be identified. This person is elected and wields zero power.
It's the only thing I remember liking from being in a union once and would work for github. This girl could have gone to the steward, then the steward could complain about the founder's wife harassing employees to HR without identifying the employee to management for silent discipline, when they try to get rid of you for complaining or whatever personal vendetta (it can happen).
I was expecting the article to educate me on why holacracy is less effective than hierarchy. However the argument that "holacracy does not work because rich white men fill power vacuums" is fluff.
"When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill
it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally
held power (rich white men)."
Why? If there is a power vacuum, exactly what forces support rich white men filling those roles? Why can't woman or person of a different race fill the role?
Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?
How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?
You don't. You leave that discussion and have it elsewhere. I don't know about you, but the most feminist response to the alleged Github debacle would be for a woman to go out and start her own company with the culture she wants to see in the world.
There are a lack of women engineers out there, but if the issues we're discussing here are so widespread and destructive, why do we not see more female engineers leaving these misogynistic cultures in droves to start companies together?
Early on in my career I worked at one of the largest banks in the world and sought to promote changes for the better within the bank. After 6 months, I succeeded in getting that behemoth of an organization to move maybe a hundredth of a degree. For all intents and purposes, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The amount of effort for so little payoff led me to the conclusion that if you want to see the changes you want, then you need to leave that system and head elsewhere, where you can actually have an impact.
Once you've built an organization where you are at the top, you then have the experience to determine how much of what you experienced in prior organizations was actually discrimination and how much was the result of a manager/subordinate relationships. I would genuinely love to hear the opinions of women who have already gone down this route since their voice is conspicuously absent in this discussion.
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers.
Which you have an incentive to keep, as you do not want to immobilize your good engineers, as per the Dilbert principle.
The problem is not holacracy itself. Plenty of companies are doing just fine using decentralized and autonomous organizational methods, including Valve and Flying Wild Hog.
The problem lies in having a culture of apathy and immaturity. Not having managers doesn't mean one should not be able to forward complaints to an appropriate person and have the situation handled.
Also, ironically, in the GitHub debacle, it was a woman who rose up and disrupted the power balance.
Hierarchy may be superior but I think it might be a bit early to declare holacracy a failure. Presumably there are a multitude of successful holacracies that we aren't hearing about because they are actually working.
Though, I'm guessing Gabe Newell has a ton of defacto power, and you hear plenty of complaints from people that minor bugs and issues go unhandled because they aren't sexy to work on.
Jeri Ellsworth's accounts of working within Valve and the issues with the structure there were pretty widely published after her firing. She mentions a fair few more problems then just unsexy bugs being ignored it's worth a listen.
As far as I can tell, it's reasonably sustainable for company size of n < (something). At some point (low-mid 2 digits?), you end up with too many lines of communication.
Agreed. I won't hold them up as a paragon, having only heard anecdotes, but Valve seems to be an example contrary to Github. Could be completely wrong - would love to here from some Valve guys about how traditional HR issues are dealt with there (the answer may just be, "through HR" :) )
I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.
And probably as long as a company is small enough, people who work there can just accept a hidden structure just as well as they can accept an articulated one as long as it doesn't cause too many problems for them.
I've always found these attempts for "holacracy" as efforts to square the circle. There is actually a solution to this problem - it's called democracy. Every person gets the same amount of power - one vote, and they can decide things (or decide they don't care). This is compatible with hierarchies, both formal and informal, but the authority is challenged all the time (which is a good thing). Some companies work like that, they are called worker cooperatives, but they are rare. Any eventual power cliques have hard time to be stable in such environment, because the power is equally distributed by default and according to a fixed, well-known rule. This actually allows participants to focus on production rather than politics.
But this is seldom what the owners of the company (who invested capital) want. They don't want people to run things, they want people to run things on their behalf (and get rich from the process). And even if they were sympathetic to this idea, it's very hard to grow such a company at all stages (in small group it's very prone to hostile takeovers and later there is no incentive to grow, since the power of individuals is always the same compared to number of people).
I don't see transition to democratic workplace happening unless lots of people give up any hope to have more power than other people. Interestingly, in political system, this largely happened, although it's still not enough and there is resentment from some.
I added an edit here, pointing out that GitHub wasn't actually employing holacracy. That was my (pre-breakfast) sloppiness. My main point still stands, though. And Tom Preston-Werner describes his "management" structure here in pretty great detail so we do have some insight into what was actually going on inside GitHub: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555
It's mistake to associate Holacracy to flat organizations — Holacracy is actually FARTHER AWAY from a flat organization than it is from a conventional hierarchy. It pushes very strongly about the looseness and lack of clarity around accountabilities in a structure-less org. It even pushes against the lack of clarity in conventional hierarchies as well. Overall, Holacracy instills more structure in an organization, not less.
Ev Williams, who uses it at Medium, puts it this way:
"Holacracy is the opposite of the cliché way to run a startup. People think "freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it's totally flat, and that's cool because we're all down with those rules". But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I'm gonna do a land grab for power... People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it's fairly rare that people in startups say "this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along". So in Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it's very flexible at the same time." (source: https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 )
So... I'm afraid your assessment of Holacracy is really backward. I'm not saying Holacracy is perfect, but it's certainly not flawed in the ways you describe.
The problem at Github isn't a good example of the supposed deficiency of holacratic enterprises.
In the first place, the problem became as serious as it did because it involved Github's management, such as it was. Secondly, the founder involved in the incident was put on leave, and an apology was promptly and unreservedly issued. It is easy to imagine a more hierarchical organization circling the wagons, instead. In the end, Github may be an example of serious problem with a founder that was handled as well as possible.
There are a lot of ways software development does not fit within traditional management structures. For example, if you take traditional project management tools and try to predict a non-trivial software development schedule with them you are going to have a bad time. So we invent new, usually less-structured tools.
You can't do entirely without those structures, but minimization of hierarchy is the logical way to adapt management to the challenge of keeping software development orderly and making a business out of it, if that's your aim. If there is a deeper problem at Github it is likely that they didn't follow some of the other rules of thumb for software development organizations, like "don't hire jerks."
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers.
So, on the one hand, we have what we might call the Lord of the Flies narrative - that Github's pseudo-anarchic non-management just enables people's worst traits to come to the surface; it doesn't remove power imbalances, it just hides them and makes it harder to challenge illegitimate use of that power because it's harder to identify.
On the flip side, we have what we might call the Milgram Experiment narrative - that authority positions are naturally corrupting, making belief in good management seem utopian; sure, we'd all like to be managed by someone that we respect, admire and trust, but we're just as likely to be managed by someone that we fear, pity or loathe, and the explicit hierarchy turns out to be just as hard to challenge as the implicit one and often even more so.
Lots of people seem to have decided that one of the above is the greater evil, and are willing to risk the other. Github is in the minority of companies that (hitherto) has seen the latter as the greater evil, or at least that is how the company has presented itself (I don't work there and don't personally know anyone who does, so I really can't comment on anything other than the rhetoric).
What we need is, boring though this may seem, some kind of balance between the two. In an anarchic company, people are going to over-step the boundaries (e.g. by reverting a co-workers commits due to a personal dispute). Some authority needs to police this. However, that authority only really needs to be reactive - it should punish wrongdoers rather than order people around on a daily basis. Most of the time, people do the right thing and can be left to get on with it, and hassling them while they do it is harmful.
To get overly philosophical, I think we can have the best of both worlds by borrowing the concept of 'complex equality'[1], which comes from the book Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer[2]. In a nutshell, he suggests that we can avoid power imbalances by ensuring that natural and legitimate imbalances within different 'spheres' do not spill over into other ones. In the context of tech companies, we might have, say, a 'discipline' sphere where managers are in charge, a 'technical' sphere where engineers are in charge, a 'design' sphere with designers in charge, and so on. Being the top engineer doesn't give you the right to overrule a designer on a design question, and being a top manager doesn't give you the right to overrule an engineer on a technical question. If we're dealing with a personal conflict, this falls under the jurisdiction of management, and they should have full authority to resolve it. If we're dealing with a technical debate, that should be resolved by engineers. Resource allocation should be handled as democratically as possible.
Once you think in this way, it becomes obvious why some companies and projects fail: managers demanding authority over technical matters (e.g. estimates, software development workflow), engineers demanding authority over design (I'm sure we can all think of examples), or anyone demanding authority over management practices. These are all likely to lead to abuse and mismanagement; in any case they are unlikely to be optimal. What companies need is formal structure, but structure that constrains authority rather than simply entrusting it to managers and thereafter hoping that they turn out to be, against the odds, good ones.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality
[2] I am dimly aware that Walzer is controversial in some circles. I know nothing about him apart from the book, so please do not take anything I say as an endorsement or condemnation of any of his other views, which are beside the point here.
> In a nutshell, he suggests that we can avoid power imbalances by ensuring that natural and legitimate imbalances within different 'spheres' do not spill over into other ones. In the context of tech companies, we might have, say, a 'discipline' sphere where managers are in charge, a 'technical' sphere where engineers are in charge, a 'design' sphere with designers in charge, and so on. Being the top engineer doesn't give you the right to overrule a designer on a design question, and being a top manager doesn't give you the right to overrule an engineer on a technical question. If we're dealing with a personal conflict, this falls under the jurisdiction of management, and they should have full authority to resolve it. If we're dealing with a technical debate, that should be resolved by engineers
I don't disagree with the theory, but in practice power would come down to who gets to decide which sphere applies.
That's a false dichotomy. The only difference between the Milgram experiment and the Lord of the Flies scenario is that in the former the deck was stacked beforehand by putting people with no prior experience in a position of absolute power.
Other than that they are the same, and not opposites.
The opposite would be clear structure and responsibilities, with just enough power assigned to carefully selected individuals.
A good balance is what most organizations already have, no need to reinvent the wheel. Other than maybe improve the criteria for selecting and monitoring managers.
> we have what we might call the Milgram Experiment narrative - that authority positions are naturally corrupting, making belief in good management seem utopian
Wait, what the hell? Milgram's experiments, whether or not you find them valid (they're quite problematic on close inspection) had a narrative about proving that normal people were obedient. It has nothing to do with the corruptive influence of power.
I fear that having several specialized and limited hierarchies built around the same group of people would create "I have eight different bosses right now." type situations, where a middle of the road employee might have a boss for 'discipline', a boss for 'design', a boss for 'engineering', etc.
Well, it does kind of lead to that situation. But as long as the hierarchies are clearly defined and orthogonal it need not be that bad.
In the military you often find people having to play different roles at different times (we call it "wearing different hats"), and there are various types of hierarchies that might exist simultaneously, and you could be involved in some of those with different roles in each. It can be taken to an extreme (and I want to say there was a Union General in the American Civil War who got famous for that), but it can also help very large organizations function properly in situations where a person has to fill multiple roles.
I don't know how Github runs, but it sounds nothing like Holacracy. The author is confused (as are many people on this thread).
Six months ago, I switched my company (over 50 full time employees in 3 cities) to Holacracy.
I'm here to tell you that I'm 100% convinced that it's a huge step forward in terms of any organizational system I've come across.
There's nothing 'flat' or 'manager-less' about it. It's a complex and intricate system that leads to greater clarity, less politics, and better distributed decision making.
Accountabilities are clearer, meetings are more efficient, and more voices are heard. Holacracy explicitly avoids design/decide by committee.
If you're running a company with more than 10 employees, I highly recommend you take a serious look at Holacracy. It's the best decision I've made by far, and I'm never going to work for, or start another company without running it this way.
If you're earnestly curious, drop me a note and I'll be happy to talk about it more with you.
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers
I agree with this. However, in my experience, bad managers are really good at politics, and their aptitude with politics biases many organizations towards bad management. Holocracy isn't so much a knee-jerk reaction to bad managers, it is a knee-jerk reaction to bad politics. I would posit that if bad managers were never promoted, people wouldn't have the same holocratic ideals. They would just switch teams or switch companies, and be done with it. They can't do that, because sooner or later, Bad Manager Bob comes back as Bad Director Bob.
But I think the point the article is trying to make is that people who are good at politics will end up with power whether you officially have a flat structure or not. So then management needs to be used as a way to keep the whole thing in check. I'm not sure how best to do it, but I think it's a good point.
Actually, if you look at the situation, it was the very nature of having a Founder involved. If there were no Founders or other powerful people, then that wife's all edged bullshit never would have taken off.
I don't think so; operational/management structure and ownership structure don't have to interact the way they did here. OTOH, without formal rules and control mechanism to assure that those rules are respected, the ownership structure is naturally going to impact the operational/management structure, which will make holarchy unlikely with any ownership structure (other than ownership through an identical fractal network of teams as the intended operational structure.)
I think that a "no managers" system can work either with a very small number of employees (<15) or in a company of very, very talented people, but if you need to hire fast, you're going to sacrifice hiring quality, and wind up with people who may not be the best.
The "GitHub Debacle" seems to be more an issue of a lack of professionalism and an unwillingness to confront serious problems (a bully non-employee spouse in the office creating trouble for what sounds like a good employee) before they came to a head.
But what does that mean? People who are very, very good at building software aren't necessarily good at interacting with others or following basic social rules. Same goes for any field (replace "building software" with "practicing law", for instance).
Tricky to hire only people who are very, very good at everything necessary for a healthy culture.
But if you aren't in the kind of bind that a company like GitHub is in, or any company that needs to grow quite fast, you can hire and fire at your leisure, creating the team that you need.
They definitely need to work on things, but I don't think that this debacle means GitHub's decentralized model is invalid. They experienced rapid growth and there are bound to be some aspects that slip through the cracks, doesn't mean they should give up trying to retain a flatter hierarchy as they expand. I hope they don't anyways, it's a core reason GitHub is one of my favorite tech companies.
This public spat is good for the investors (a16z) at GitHub. Investors want structure and accountability, and holacracies don't have that. They may get better results (I'm on the fence) so GitHub is probably on a long leash, but this will be a topic when Ben Horowitz and the executives at GitHub sit down for their quarterlies. Wait, holacracies don't have executives...
I wonder if the frat house culture, the opulent office, the drink up debauchery and the "holacracy" may create a delusional sense of grandiosity that permeates from the company level to the employee? Just a thought.
Waaaaay too soon to be writing off holacracy. Fad or not, it's at the crawl stage (crawl-walk-run). And to compare it to business-as-usual running-- when it's as broken as it is-- is premature.
I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.