In defense of the dudeperson, 7 years and 200 people is precisely when toe-dipping into a maturing/stratified/annoyingly process centric IT org probably should begin. It is really annoying to ICs, but the stuff exists for a reason, in every substantial company, for the last 50+ years.
If you're looking for a revolutionary approach, this article does not describe it. It is very very very unlikely any article titled "I am VP of XXX" will describe anything highly divergent from the general managerial consensus on how to run things.
A hierarchy and "salaried emmployees" (which a 7 year / 200 person company will now start to have because there is no tangible ownership % available) are going to involve the usual monetary-extraction / exploitation model of companies: employees take salary and some (actually:none) security and forgo any real economic incentive/reward if they deliver truly valuable/transformative work.
If an employee makes a company a billion dollars, he gets a plaque. If an executive does it, they demand stock options and other "rewards".
Thus, employees cease to care about the company. The next step is the creation of middle management, which ALSO have no aligned incentives except the more abstract "one day will be an exeuctive" but have no real production / creation to point to.
But, orgs and execs know that this hierarchy can be somewhat controlled with "bureaucracy and ceremony" and with sufficient scale, rent seeking, and regulatory capture, will produce an effective profit extraction system.
Sure toe dipping. At 200 people you’ve hit a Dunbar number and you need some process.
Some kind of lightweight performance cycle for instance. If it takes more then a day offsite you are probably overkilling it
Similarity for quarterly planning. You better be doing it at 200 people but the people that need to be there for that will fit in a room and you should get it done in a day
This doesn’t sound like toe dipping it reads more like a full on swan dive. Like someone said “hey shit is getting crazy we need some processes” and just whole hog adopted “what google does” or some such. The processes that are evolved for a 20,000 person org are overkill for a 200 person one
> for a company that appears to only have 200 employees
I was wondering how big the company was. 200 employees isn’t a small company any more, but the bureaucracy and alignment challenges described in the post made it feel more like a 2000 person company.
Oh I know it happens, but that doesn't make it good.
The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient.
For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still only have 4 layers of management (4 + 16 + 64 + 256).
You could even get the 4 C-level executives and their 16 top-level reports into a single room every week if you had to.
The company in this blog post has almost half as many people (according to parent comment) yet the bureaucracy described within sounds like they have layer upon layer of removal to the point that it's a full-time job for many people just to move information around.
The only times I've seen this happen have been when executives get too focused on 1:1 communication and like to fill their calendars up with recurring meetings with fixed sets of participants. The 1:1 communication turns into a slow game of telephone and the recurring meetings consume all of their time with talk that feels like "work" but could have been replaced with a lot of as-needed e-mails and targeted meetings organized on demand.
Generally in a healthy org it’s more like 8-10 direct reports per line manager.
At 200 people you should probably be still at around 3 levels deep. The VP Eng with 8 line managers could easily run a 70 person engineering team
Maybe throw in a single director to help share the load and for succession planning
But I agree likely what is happening is too many managers with smallish numbers of directs creating a lot of unnecessary layers and then all the extra management work that comes with that
I've seen such bureaucracy at a previous employer. Company is a little over 25 people (including a few that are contractors.) There are 3 people in the C suite, at least one VP, at least 4 directors. There were endless meetings, like you describe. The whole management structure needed to be torn down. People would rather go to meetings and update internal status spreadsheets instead of doing any real meaningful work.
It feels like they have adopted processes that are really only needed for much larger orgs