Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace
The software maker, which once prided itself on a flat corporate environment similar to Valve and Zappos, finds that workers can benefit from a little direction.
Two years ago, Chris Wanstrath gathered the employees of his software startup GitHub into a meeting to notify them of a major change: They were all getting bosses.
When Wanstrath and his co-founders started GitHub in 2008, they were adamant that they use a flat corporate structure without managers or titles. GitHub quickly became an essential tool for software developers to share their code and collaborate on projects, and its creators gave part of the credit for that success to their nontraditional work culture. Although the founders took “fluidly” defined roles of president and chief executive officer, they said the otherwise lack of structure allowed workers to pursue their own ideas and congregate around whichever ones interested them most.
But a boss-free setting had blind spots. Shortly after Wanstrath slid into the CEO chair at the beginning of 2014, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at the startup, said she faced gender bias and was pressured into leaving by the previous CEO, Tom Preston-Werner, and his wife. After an internal investigation found that he’d acted inappropriately, Preston-Werner resigned as president. Wanstrath penned a blog post acknowledging “challenges” facing efforts to create an inclusive work environment and promised to institute new HR policies.
The mess highlighted that GitHub’s six-year experiment in self-government had come up short. Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co-founder’s departure, and the software engineering department began assigning managers in the spring. The company hasn’t publicly discussed the change in detail until now. “We’re building a tool for software developers, but we’re also hacking on the future of work,” says Kakul Srivastava, GitHub’s vice president of product management. “That hacking has taken us down some pretty interesting paths, and we’re a better company because we went down those paths. But not all of those paths were the right paths.”
As GitHub has grown to about 600 employees, it says a flat organization compromised its ability to get things done. GitHub says coordination by the heads of the engineering, legal, marketing, sales, and other departments has been crucial to recent achievements, including the ability to open-source more projects than before, increase the frequency of some product updates to quarterly, and secure a major partnership this year with IBM.
Coders at Ford Motor Co., General Electric Co., John Deere, and Target Corp. are among the more than 16 million users that now rely on the startup’s services. GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two-day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that’s expected to attract 1,500 attendees. The company, valued at $2 billion by venture capitalists last year, declined to disclose revenue or other financials.
Despite GitHub’s transition to a more conventional power structure, the company says it’s still trying out different modes of work. About half its staff is remote, and some are nomads, moving from city to city every couple months. One person is currently road-tripping across the U.S. in an RV. He checks in with his boss daily.
GitHub is an invaluable member of the cryptocurrency community. Thank you for the well-written article.
Good info. Thanks.