it works fine as long as everyone is extremely reasonable, and everyone's primary motivation is the success of the project.

unfortunately, this is very unlikely to be true. and increasingly less so as the team size increases.

one confounding factor here is the heavy use of religion to guide technical decisions. the decisions we make now about the direction of the product and the attributes of the codebase are largely subjective. there are arguments on all sides of a position.

a good team, properly enculturated, understands the process. when the issue is important enough to justify digging in and when its just a personal bias. a good team helps all of its members stay on the path and not end up in giant ratholes. a good team uses its experience to inform future decisions rather than create artificial strictures. a good team has enough time and maturity to interact constructively with the rest of the business and the customers.

I shouldn't say 'good' team, I should say 'perfect'

good management greases all of these points of potential friction. but I think at the end of the day management is there to address the last point. its natural and expected for engineers to keep a narrow focus on the technical aspects of the project itself. someone's got to make sure its evolving in a direction that's meaningful in an external context.

Yes, teams don't need managers unless they have people that need managing. Also, teams don't need developers if they don't have any code that needs writing. Ignorant dismissal of the value of other kinds of work besides their own, combined with a lashing out against suggestion that they might not be perfect, is one of (a vocal portion of? HN's nasty vices.

I’m in one right now. We manage each other I guess. It works well. We recently decided to add a lightweight annual career goal type check in. We have a sort of informal lead that is recognized politically as the person you’d go to if you needed to resolve a dispute or air a grievance. I came from a gig where I was managed being managed very directly and I don’t miss it at all. If people want more structure we can accommodate them, but I think most of us feel like it’s just process we don’t need because our culture highly values trust in one another.

It tends to work for small early teams, but it tends to not survive growth and turnover. The reason is that in order to make it work you have to rely extremely heavily on behavioral norms and a “social contract” that every team member exercises restraint, and in practice that’s very hard to enforce without a hierarchy.

I don’t honk that’s possible as someone will always have to do the bureaucratic bits of people management - in my experience most engineers don’t want to do this bit at all and only focus on the tech

I've always dreamed of that, and while I haven't yet experienced a completely "manager-less" team I've come close. It didn't work out quite like I hoped it would.

The short version is that it worked amazingly well for a little while, with a small team of people that worked well together. However as the team scaled certain personality traits emerged in everybody. What basically happened is certain people became "the manager" in practice because everyone just deferred to this person for decisions and such. Various reasons for that, good and bad:

1. This person was technically very capable.

2. This person had a strong personality that was disagreeable, and people didn't want to cross him.

3. If you were wrong in any way, this person would publicly broadcast your failure, which made people afraid to ever challenge him.

4. Many people aren't really comfortable not having a boss. They will naturally look to someone to lead things, and usually the person they select is not the best one for the job (or even close), it's just the person with the strongest personality. I don't mean to get political here, but I can't help but notice how similar this is to President Trump.

So basically my conclusion is: we can't have nice things because human nature. More specifically, manager-less teams would great for small groups that work well together. It doesn't scale, and doesn't work well for everybody. Some people need management.