GitHub says it scrapped its bossless corporate structure because as the company grew, it was hindering the company's ability to get things done
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. Tweets: @roybahat , @tfadell and @carnage4life Tweets: Roy Bahat / @roybahat : We will stop with experimenting on management when every working person feels fulfilled and productive. http://twitter.com/... Tony Fadell / @tfadell : When can we stop w/ these useless experiments?! Why GitHub finally abandoned its bossless workplace http://www.bloomberg.com/... @technology Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : GitHub concludes you can't run a 600 person company without managers. Flat management continues to fail at scaling http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
GitHub built its brand on the same flat, bossless model as Valve and Zappos, but by early 2016 the structure was already cracking: reporting at the time showed that prioritizing enterprise clients had sown open conflict between employees and management, with nine executives gone in recent months (nine executives had already left amid the enterprise pivot). This Bloomberg report is the formal admission that the experiment failed at scale.
The reversal matters because GitHub was the reference case other startups cited for going manager-free — and because the company that emerges from this decision is the one Microsoft later buys and folds into CoreAI after Dohmke's departure (Dohmke's exit to become a founder again), a trajectory a Wired retrospective framed as presaging a decade of tech backlash (the closing of its San Francisco HQ).
First-order effects
- GitHub employees move under explicit management layers, trading autonomy for direction as the company scales past what peer coordination could handle.
- Valve and Zappos lose their most prominent corporate convert, weakening the proof-of-concept case for bossless structures across the startup ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise customers — the segment whose demands triggered the internal conflict — get a conventional accountability chain, making GitHub easier to buy from against competitors selling managed developer tools.
- Other flat-structure startups face investor and board pressure to justify their own experiments, since the best-known practitioner has publicly reversed course.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'no bosses' shifts from a scaling strategy to a small-team phase that companies are expected to outgrow, with management hierarchy re-emerging as the default once headcount and paying customers grow.
- The episode feeds the broader reassessment of 2010s tech-culture perks — the same arc that later made GitHub's own workplace conflicts a symbol of the industry's backlash period.
The trend: High-profile flat-management experiments are being abandoned as their adopters scale into enterprise businesses, restoring hierarchical structures as the default for growth-stage tech companies.