[rainsford]

I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.

No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.

I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.

[perilunar]

> it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example.

Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.

[fernie]

> if you want to do BigCorp scale things

I think they were specifically talking about those large aeroplanes