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.
I work at a product company that works in a very flat way. We accomplish our goals by having a product owner who doesn't actually have any direct authority over the technical team. The technical team is managed by a member embedded within who handles HR-style questions and otherwise works like a peer.
Technical decisions are made by majority vote.
The team handles uninteresting work like documentation, bug fixing, broken builds, and training with full-time promiscuous pair-programming.
This means that attitude and maturity are our most important attributes, as technical skill quickly will be taught while doing regular work. Several times in my career we've had to say to someone, "perhaps this isn't a good fit for you, why don't you start looking..." because they hate the exposure and boring work required to build a massive Enterprise system.
We almost always fix bugs and broken builds immediately, followed by product work. We spend 25% of our time fixing technical debt (this is typically the least fun work!).
Through all this we are able to ship release after release on time, adding in new features and regulatory standards with ease. It's given me hope it _can_ be done, but also that the circumstances to maintain it are almost impossible to force. It requires all the right people in all the right places to change a typical hierarchy into something like this.
That's very interesting way of running a company. Is everyone in the company a partner, including the secretary, researchers, interns etc? How are these folks "managed"?
By the way, I am not asking from cynical perspective. I run a project team, and I am working through on how much autonomy to give the team members.
Isn't every one of those partner lawyers a boss to one or more paralegals? And usually there are a bunch of new grad lawyers around trying to make partner, I'm sure they don't consider themselves equal.
I previously worked for a company that does purely outsourcing work; they nowadays have a bossless hierarchy (apart from project leads, who are named anew for every project, and basically anyone willing can volunteer). It seems to work well for them, and I don't see why not.
Now I'm in a "product company", and the needs are completely different. Like has been stated elsewhere in this thread, when making products, there just has to be someone making the final decisions, i.e. being the product owner.
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.
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.