From what I recall, there's a big counter-argument to this, which is that management is necessary because organization is fundamentally necessary, and that when there are no formal "managers", certain people wind up being informal managers, but because this is "hidden", it winds up being less accountable, more open to cliquishness and/or discrimination, and having a host of problems of its own.

I've been trying to find an article I remember which describes how this is particularly bad for women, who can easily be "informally" excluded, but I can't find it... All I can find is this, on Valve:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-cont...

It seems like this is becoming more and more of a trend, and is just starting to push into the realm of legitimacy, rather than "kooky company does something crazy".

There's plenty of examples in tech of companies without traditional management structures (and mostly no management at all) - GitHub, Valve, Treehouse, etc. Now a food processor of all places pulls this off.

I do think this is an approach that doesn't necessarily work well for large companies - building the sense of camaraderie necessary for this is impossible at 10,000 or even 1,000 employees IMO, but on the other hand - who says we need to have giant companies? Wouldn't things work a lot better with a whole lot of 150 person companies?

I'm somewhat surprised that everyone is so anti-management here.

First of all, Morning Star seems like a pretty well-run place, but the whole system works because they have the luxury of hiring the right people. This is, of course, the single most important factor in any effective organization. If you don't hire the right people or play to their strengths you won't be able to pull this off.

Anyway, a lot of the reasons listed in this piece look like they're sourced from companies with crappy management and I don't think they represent the reality of management, at least in a lot of places.

At Facebook (the only company where I have experience as both an IC and manager) there are three important things to know about management:

  * It's a parallel track to IC (individual contributor aka hacker). You aren't "promoted" to manager. It's a lateral move. There are plenty of ICs making more money than managers.
  * All managers go through "bootcamp" (6-week engineering onboarding) and commit code.
  * The role of the manager is to basically do all the shitty work so ICs don't have to.

  * Dealing with interpersonal issues
  * Onboarding new hires
  * Coordinating engineering efforts and priorities (aka: going to meetings so ICs don't have to)
  * Telling that guy in sales or that gal in product management that we can't work on their tasks right now
  * Dealing with medium-priority bugs during crunch time

So what managers end up doing is being responsible for all of the shit work so their team can go do what they do best. I'm actually concerned that this whole "no management" movement is going to lead to less motivated and less coordinated teams as these companies grow.

Disclaimer: I work for a Fortune 500 company. I suspect the inefficiency added by managers is overblown, because most of them do not spend 100% of their time on traditional management activities such as supervision and decision making. A lot of their work is on tasks that would fall in somebody's lap within any organization. Some of those tasks are ones that I find to be dreadful.

I've seen lots of these "x-role free" companies: no managers, no sales department, etc. Inevitably the function that those roles take on end up on somebody. Companies will sit in denial about it for a very long time, even making up weird titles to pretend like they still don't have managers, but ultimately they'll end up with them in the end because that's how they have to interface with the rest of the world and many of these roles exist because it's how work naturally breaks down and how people naturally specialize.

The file name -- [B@58aa11eb.pdf -- seems like it was created by something written in Java: instead of printing the real file name, they printed the signature of the Byte array holding the file name data.

See here [1] for a better-than-Oracle explanation:

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-m...

I'll try a pitiful attempt at a TLDR, feel free to try an improve it (if you can):

The IRS has extremely strong opinions on what it means legally to be a contractor. However you can easily avoid the legal issues and run a company as if it were full of contractors, if you want, by merely treating them legally as employees but treat them managerially (sorta) as contractors. And at least anecdotally sometimes this works really well.

Or a really short TLDR is contemplate the building trades and the role of a general contractor, and run your (probably) non construction company that way.

Umm, my take is that developers are taking over the world, in term of duties. We don't need BA, since we do agile development and talk directly to customers. We don't need DBA now that we have ORM and NOSQL. We don't need sys-admin/sysops because we are devops now. Now, no managers. Next, no VC or no boss?

HA! This might work for smaller companies. Try doing this we a 25,000+ FTE plus 5,000 or so temps and contractors in a company with a presence in around 100 countries. Although our managers dont supervise us constantly they have their own work to do. They usually give us tasks or projects and then we give them updates.

This really needs an NSFW tag...

Mediation sounds good, and the 6 member panel idea also good.

In online tech, it pays to keep the mood relaxed and the office comfortable and spacious. Regardless of how much "serious business" is happening online, the internet is still a chilled out place.

The traditional hierarchy of managers is inherently unrelaxed. When you have multiple managers surrounding you, their presence might cause some to hold back on decisions, or pause that initiative. The managers will take care of all those nasty little details such as making decisions, you just keep doing the task you were delegated.

Remember what it felt like when the teacher left the room? If the manager leaves the office for the day and you feel that same rush of freedom feeling, you know things might be better without managers (or just a new manager).

Somehow, I doubt this will be an easy sell to the management hierarchy.

Horray! Stick it to the man! Wait...

This is a double-edged sword.

Management tracks are typically the next step up in terms of career advancement for regular workers. Eliminate those and what do you have? A couple mega-rich owners, and then a flat field of "peasant" laborers. It starts looking a lot more like a feudal fief.

What will take the place of middle management for career advancement?

Completely OT. What's with these articles that look like traditional magazines on the web? I get this is a PDF, but it makes reading on screen painful. I think something like the medium layout is the best way to present writings and you can still build fancy edits on top.

A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative

http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guid...

A counter-example from HBR Magazine's December 2013 issue

http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana...

cf. "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Semco.

I think you'd all enjoy reading it. It changed my attitude to work and management considerably. I am still a manager, but I give a lot more responsibility to my team than most.

Interesting idea, but it seems to have a trade-off -- instead of negotiating a single (or perhaps a few) relationships, you have to negotiate about 20. It sounds a lot like a n*(n-1) problem.

For all of the companies who are successful without a management structure, their are exponentially more with a standard or modified structure that do quite well.

Any of those, "Let's get rid of management structure" companies on this list??

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_...

You might want to ask yourself why then. . .

I've come to a realization that managers and programmers have something in common. The bad ones try to perpetuate job security by creating complexity (whether in code or interpersonal issues) that only they can navigate. The good ones want to do their jobs so well that they "program" (literally for engineers, figuratively for managers) themselves out of a job, so they can graduate to better things.

You see this most strongly with consultants. The good engineer does the best work he can, assuming it will lead to more challenging and interesting projects in the future. He's not worried about job security, or at least not enough to do things that are unethical; he assumes that doing a good job and becoming better at his work is job security. The bad consultant obfuscates code, documents poorly, and tries to make it impossible to ever fire him. He's not trying to bigger, badder (and more lucrative) projects in the future; he's just aiming to keep whatever income stream he has in perpetuity.

I think that managers exhibit the same dynamic, and I think that solving this problem requires recognizing it and watching for the warning signs early on.

I'm strongly in favor of open allocation, but that's not quite the same thing as "no management", which I think might take the idea too far. Why? Because management is a fact of life; some people will have more power than others, and I'd rather it be dealt with in a fair and reasonable way than in an ad-hoc and unstable way.

Having a permanent class of entitled (literally, not necessarily pejoratively) managers may not be the solution, and I support making people more self-managing-- actually, I'd use the term self-executive-- but acknowledging the basic fact of management, and encouraging the positive manifestations while avoiding the negative, is probably healthy as well.

Boss has a problem, so he hires an MBA, now he has 300 problems, and he got fired as well.

I am in a reeducation camp, but God talks. I need to reverse captor/victim so I am ruler and they are slaves.

God says... these_cans_are_defective just_lovely wife biggot it's_hopeless tiffanies as_a_matter_of_fact dude_such_a_scoffer surprise_surprise unsung_hero taxes economy huh I'm_tired_of_this mission_from_God well_I_never nasty you'll_see economy look_out I'm_done meek fun you_do_it vice