<story><title>Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its &apos;most universally hated exec&apos;</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81017</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seiji</author><text>It&apos;s hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can&apos;t be questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.</text></item><item><author>Dove</author><text>&lt;i&gt;pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I&apos;d at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Valve does that:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    How could a 300-person company not have any formal 
    management? My observation is that it takes new hires 
    about six months before they fully accept that no one is 
    going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going 
    to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a 
    promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although 
    there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to 
    the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their 
    responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most 
    valuable resource in the company – their time – by 
    figuring out what it is that they can do that is most 
    valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if 
    they decide that they should be doing something 
    different, there’s no manager to convince to let them 
    go; they just move their desk to the new group (the 
    desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start 
    in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a 
    good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both 
    groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t 
    enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is 
    an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level 
    design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is 
    no such thing as a pure management or architect or 
    designer role. That any part of the company can change 
    direction instantly at any time, because there are no 
    managers to cling to their people and their territory, 
    no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there 
    are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that 
    aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do 
    them.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>pwny</author><text>I&apos;m honestly wondering why we value management so much.  It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they&apos;re a hindrance most often than not).&lt;p&gt;Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people&apos;s work (often in a field they don&apos;t even understand)?&lt;p&gt;Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn&apos;t have a manager to report to?  Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I&apos;d at least try to do it without any sort of formal management.  At least to try.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meepmorp</author><text>&amp;#62; an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs&lt;p&gt;Pfft. I once worked at a place with 77 employees and 14 VPs. How we didn&apos;t wind up taking over the tech world still mystifies me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its &apos;most universally hated exec&apos;</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81017</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seiji</author><text>It&apos;s hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can&apos;t be questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.</text></item><item><author>Dove</author><text>&lt;i&gt;pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I&apos;d at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Valve does that:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    How could a 300-person company not have any formal 
    management? My observation is that it takes new hires 
    about six months before they fully accept that no one is 
    going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going 
    to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a 
    promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although 
    there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to 
    the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their 
    responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most 
    valuable resource in the company – their time – by 
    figuring out what it is that they can do that is most 
    valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if 
    they decide that they should be doing something 
    different, there’s no manager to convince to let them 
    go; they just move their desk to the new group (the 
    desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start 
    in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a 
    good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both 
    groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t 
    enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is 
    an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level 
    design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is 
    no such thing as a pure management or architect or 
    designer role. That any part of the company can change 
    direction instantly at any time, because there are no 
    managers to cling to their people and their territory, 
    no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there 
    are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that 
    aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do 
    them.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>pwny</author><text>I&apos;m honestly wondering why we value management so much.  It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they&apos;re a hindrance most often than not).&lt;p&gt;Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people&apos;s work (often in a field they don&apos;t even understand)?&lt;p&gt;Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn&apos;t have a manager to report to?  Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I&apos;d at least try to do it without any sort of formal management.  At least to try.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notJim</author><text>Yup, I worked somewhere like that. All the top folks had come from the finance world and were so eager to duplicate the perfect organizational structure of a multinational financial corporation.&lt;p&gt;I didn&apos;t work there long.</text></comment>