Baldur Bjarnason

“First, Let’s Fire All the Managers”

Pro-flat org hot takes are always interesting but what they always miss is that orgs aren’t badly run because they are hierarchical, they are mismanaged because individual units are either too big or too dependent on the hierarchy.

The problem isn’t hierarchies. The problem is how you distribute authority and decision-making through a hierarchy.

This can be solved in a number of different ways, but the most common solutions do not do away with hierarchies entirely. Completely flat organisations are a specialised tool that you shouldn’t encounter that often.

The standard solution is to push power to the edges and increase the autonomy of individual units. It’s what they do in US military organisations. You can’t have soldiers or marines phone home in the middle of a mission just to ask if they can apply a new tactic in response to a heretofore unknown problem.

Amazon solves the problem in a slightly different way: parts of their organisation is built up of smaller groups who expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

An API-driven organisation, if you will.

(Amazon does a lot of smart things when it comes to managment. Some of their solutions are unique to their needs. Some of them aren’t. All of them are worth paying attention to.)

A phenomenon from programming offers us a relevant lesson:

Old code is more complicated than new code. This happens because old code is less familiar, because it becomes more interconnected with other code over time, or because other code has grown around it. As a result, if you write code that pushes against the boundaries of what you understand, code that is just simple enough for you to pull off the first time around, then odds are that you won’t understand big parts of that code when it comes to maintaining it as old code.

A similar phenomenon in management has to do with the complexity of change. Most day-to-day management is about reducing variation—attaining stability in an unstable environment. Changing the fundamental structure of an organisation is a much much harder task.

Which means that if your managerial team is doing a crap job as it is, they are unlikely to be able to change the organisation they (and you) are mismanaging.

This leads to the counter-intuitive observation that if you are one of those rare organisations that genuinely would be better off ‘flat’, you still need to fix your hierarchical structure first before you throw it out because odds are that otherwise the management team won’t be able to pull it off.

I worry about the effects the US cultural dominance of tech has on web developer discourse. I worry about how deafness to cultural variation stifles understanding and dialogue in tech.

An honest description of a developer’s career journey of going from server-rendered HTML to SPAs and back will be dismissed as cynical and combative if the tone doesn’t match the narrow definitions of the west coast tech scene.

Attempts to critique and bring historical context into a discussion will be seen as argumentative—seen as attempts to start a flamewar—if your rhetoric doesn’t match the cloying upbeatness of your average San Francisco software startup.

We may all be writing in English, debating in English, and working in English, but the web dev scene is thoroughly multicultural even though online discourse doesn’t seem capable of taking that into account.

In many Nordic cultures combative and confrontational rhetoric is normal. We often speak in absolutes and rely on the listener to adjust the meaning based on their assessment of context.

Translated over to anglophone social media, we get seen as hostile, angry—verging on abusive.

In our native languages, we rely on metaphor and cultural references to set context and guide readers to the nuance we intended, but that’s hard to translate to the North American anglophone culture that is studiously context free.

Take that problem and multiply it by the number of non-English languages on the web. An infinite variety of misunderstandings, all with the same root cause.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a figure as controversial in tech as DHH just happens to be Danish. Nor does it surprise me that non-Anglophone voices continue to be rare among the ‘influencers’ of tech discourse, both in books and online, while at the same time they are well-represented among those who write ‘influential’ code.

The easiest way to remedy this is to simply retreat, have our own tech discourse in our own languages, but that’s also a good way to have no influence at all, globally. Or, we could just let our code speak, but that’s also a good way to lose all influence because code tends to become influential through discourse. Or through funding, which in turn you get through discourse and connections.

Web dev culture is an anglophone culture.

We can’t change that.

But maybe we should, at the very least, try and make it less American.