[jjtheblunt]

> Fortunately for us, the realities of flat organizations are pushing them out of favor and lively conversations about engineering leadership as a craft are taking over. Flat organizations are a nice idea, but they just don’t reflect how people behave.

this makes me wonder who "us" means.

i make the educated guess it's "managers", which were dead weight in the Apple engineering scheme I joined, which functioned super efficiently without them, as it was emphasized how flat was a feature, not a bug, for getting things done.

[wayoutthere]

Flat organizations over a certain size just develop their own hierarchies usually based on seniority. If you can’t see them, you’re just on the bottom.

Flat organizations also end up building the same thing 4 or 5 times because nobody talks to eachother. As a consultant, I love flat orgs — it means we’ll be there for a while because nobody can really tell us to leave.

[jjtheblunt]

I think the critical Apple enabler of flat orgs was size limits by division, preventing what you saw. (And I was a couple jumps from the top, nowhere near a bottom, which as size was limited wasn't so much a thing it seemed.)