[einhverfr]

But on top of that, I wonder how much management could be eliminated. Management is, in most businesses, fundamentally a communication infrastructure. How much of it can be replaced through implementing IT through was that work for FOSS projects?

My thinking is to have a relatively small group of high level managers, a group of project managers, and an HR department, and eliminate all middle management. I think teams should have rotating leadership but coordination should take place in ways which include both the upper management and folks on the floor directly using things like email lists.

Maybe this is a pipe dream. But maybe it can be made to work.....

[Drbble]

Rotating/randomize leadership is called "sortition" and it has been known since Roman Empire times as a solution to the corruption and inefficiency problems of hierarchy and representative democracy. It also solves the problem of bizarre distortion when you need to choose a winner among 100 qualified candidates -- better to pick one well rounded winner at random than to choose purely based on metrics that promote "teaching to the test".

[nostrademons]

At least at Google, middle management doesn't exist to run projects. They exist to provide career guidance, ensure people are happy, and keep them from leaving for Facebook.

This is a task that doesn't scale, because it requires knowing your reports well enough, as a person, that you understand their career goals, their likes & dislikes, their strengths & weaknesses, etc. so you can steer them into the right role. It's the tech lead's job to manage the (engineering half of) the project, and the tech lead frequently doesn't manage any of the people involved. I've found that managers can rarely manage more than 20 people effectively, and usually drop off sharply in effectiveness after 8-10 people.

Open source projects don't face this limitation, because your way of ensuring that everyone's happy is to assume that everyone who's not happy has quit. I suppose some big companies do this too - Yahoo seems to be trying out this strategy right now - but it really doesn't go over well with the public at large, and it wastes a lot of effort spent investing in new employees.