Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.



Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.

*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.


If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.


I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: