> 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.
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.
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.
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.
My first reaction is that you are very much correct. In fact, it's clear that the article's advice applies moreso to smaller companies than larger. I don't think that anyone would question that it doesn't scale.
> 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?
Divisional consistency is a concern for a large company. However, it is simultaneously possible to maintain a "skunkworks". It comes down to (unsurprisingly) the overall culture / mandate.
