former Zappos engineering manager here. still with the company, just not a manager any more.
this latest round of news stories all stem from the offer that was given in may being extended to a select group who were deemed critical to finishing the "supercloud" migration. that extension ended in january, so another "exodus" occurred as a new round of people took the offer. since the project was a tech project, this new round was almost 100% from tech.
the ones who accepted this latest round were heavily tilted toward managers. mostly product or project managers with a healthy smattering of engineering managers. out of all the engineering managers (~15), there are only 2-3 of us left. we are the ones who took on active roles in writing software and making an impact by doing rather than commanding (https://medium.com/zappos-engineering/elastic-beanstalk-vs-a...).
fwiw, from my perspective, the story is far from over. i feel like it is only now that we can really progress the hard work of self-organization. the extended offer was holding us back. it's tough to move forward with distributed authority when you know that a good portion of your peers are not interested in that distributed authority.
i guess the message i'm trying to get across now is that for those of us here and moving forward, it's far from a "finished" project. it's certainly not a "failed" experiment yet. it feels like it's just starting.
and we are starting to see some of the benefits of people self-organizing. one example is that for the last couple of years we've tried to contribute to open source. i'm not entirely sure why we weren't able to do so except to point at bureaucracy and traditional management putting up roadblocks. if your manager doesn't see how you working on open source is going to help them out, then you have much less incentive to contribute to open source.
in a self-organized system, with the directive being "figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company," when an individual senses that contributing to open source benefits the company, then they can do it. since the tearing down of the traditional management hierarchy, we've had an open source project released and are deep into releasing a second.
it's hard to say this never would have been possible under the traditional hierarchy, but it is accurate to say that it didn't happen after two years of trying and then happened within months with self-organization.
this latest round of news stories all stem from the offer that was given in may being extended to a select group who were deemed critical to finishing the "supercloud" migration. that extension ended in january, so another "exodus" occurred as a new round of people took the offer. since the project was a tech project, this new round was almost 100% from tech.
the ones who accepted this latest round were heavily tilted toward managers. mostly product or project managers with a healthy smattering of engineering managers. out of all the engineering managers (~15), there are only 2-3 of us left. we are the ones who took on active roles in writing software and making an impact by doing rather than commanding (https://medium.com/zappos-engineering/elastic-beanstalk-vs-a...).
fwiw, from my perspective, the story is far from over. i feel like it is only now that we can really progress the hard work of self-organization. the extended offer was holding us back. it's tough to move forward with distributed authority when you know that a good portion of your peers are not interested in that distributed authority.
i guess the message i'm trying to get across now is that for those of us here and moving forward, it's far from a "finished" project. it's certainly not a "failed" experiment yet. it feels like it's just starting.
and we are starting to see some of the benefits of people self-organizing. one example is that for the last couple of years we've tried to contribute to open source. i'm not entirely sure why we weren't able to do so except to point at bureaucracy and traditional management putting up roadblocks. if your manager doesn't see how you working on open source is going to help them out, then you have much less incentive to contribute to open source.
in a self-organized system, with the directive being "figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company," when an individual senses that contributing to open source benefits the company, then they can do it. since the tearing down of the traditional management hierarchy, we've had an open source project released and are deep into releasing a second.
it's hard to say this never would have been possible under the traditional hierarchy, but it is accurate to say that it didn't happen after two years of trying and then happened within months with self-organization.