[bsaul]

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.

Total chaos.

[cyber_kinetist]

I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.

For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.

[lispisok]

My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn opinionated people end up making all the decisions because they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad calls. Better to have a designated lead.

[fer]

>Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[IshKebab]

Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.

[mohn]

Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.

[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

[thaneross]

This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.

[throw0101a]

> The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy.

See perhaps Le Guin's novel:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

[kev507]

FWIW there's equal pay but it's not a flat structure

[UltraSane]

It is hard to define exactly what good management is but incredibly easy to tell when it isn't happening.