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The Future of Internet Organizations: Dissecting the Source of GitHub Employees' Willfulness

Category Programming Technology

If there is such a capricious company, there is no so-called "manager" level, people are doing what they like, and creating value, and other things, let it happen naturally. How much bureaucracy can be saved from this waste? How fast can such a company run? How many unnecessary conflicts can be resolved? What an astonishing innovation culture can be formed?

GitHub is a company trying to approach this idealism wirelessly! Programmers (girls) should know GitHub, GitHub is a collaboration platform for developers, as of 2014 statistics, there are more than 3.4 million users, and it is rapidly commercializing.

GitHub is a privately owned and profitable company built on open source software, but throughout the operation, they are practicing the spirit of open source collaboration - the whole company advocates volunteer work. Still don't understand how to play? Let me explain it to you.

Open Work Assignment

Most companies arrange work like this: the company's top management comes up with a project, so after the establishment, financial budget, and personnel allocation, the project is assigned from top to bottom to various teams and business units. At GitHub, they don't do this, their people adopt an "open work assignment" method - people solve their own project assignment problems, they assign themselves to the projects they want to do, without any formal application or intervention from the management.

You must be complaining, how many people does GitHub have? Only 175 employees, of course, it can be done this way. But you look at Valve Software, they have 400 employees, and the company's gross income reaches 10 billion US dollars, Valve's organizational form is very close to GitHub. This can always illustrate something.

Why talk about the structure of the company?

In ancient times, people who farmed with knives and fire were thinking, what can they do with their surplus production capacity in the second and third industries? For example, in addition to hunting, they grow some crops, sew some clothes, etc., and sell them at the market. Some people have studied, the most likely to have an impact among the surplus production capacity is the surplus creativity in people's minds!

So Google's famous 20% of time can do some amateur projects. There is a person named Clay Shirky, who wrote a book called "Cognitive Surplus - Creation and Prosperity in the Network Age", he has a view that leisure time gives people the opportunity to create valuable things.

Intuitively, this is simply nonsense. Just put people there, let them do what they want from beginning to end, and then they naturally create value? You are probably wondering in your heart, if you put that person here, she will probably be browsing Taobao 24/7.

However, the facts have proven that such working conditions are indeed tempting for those who are creative. For example, there is a UX researcher named Chrissie Brodigan, who has a set of testing methods called Deprivation Test, which was previously used for Firefox's user experience evaluation, and decided to join GitHub.

GitHub's employees said that they were attracted by the open work assignment method, mainly because there are no boundaries - these people like to freely choose to work with people who are in the same atmosphere to do some cool things. They can even design their own programmable office together.

The Four Major Difficulties of Innovation

Some people have to say, this is really troublesome, why make such a mess, I don't care about those, the company tells me what to do, I will do it well for him, isn't it okay?

We have to say, this argument is of course feasible in some industries, such as a few years ago, in Guangdong, Zhejiang and other places, there are many garment factories, for a person with a senior garment industry background, if you have a clear goal, such as the target group, the style of the clothes, which area to sell, these can be determined, he can tell you how much money you need to invest, build a production line of what scale, recruit what kind of technicians, and even what each link of the technician should do.

Unfortunately, today, if a company wants to survive for a long time, it needs to face unknown innovation: how to innovate? How to make such innovation happen repeatedly? Traditional companies will establish a separate "Innovation Department", where people are responsible for innovation, and other people are more like working in a garment factory. GitHub is different, they set up the whole company in a work mode centered on innovation. This is done considering the four major difficulties of enabling a group of people to continuously innovate successfully:

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Manage Attention: The design of general organizations is mainly based on existing successes, on the one hand, enjoying the success, on the other

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