There was no HR, no management class, no purchasing agents or head of IT, maybe one hour of meetings a month and everything worked ridiculously, buttery smoothly.
We built the products that needed building, everyone pitched in and morale was generally high.
I could name one person who I'd consider had a "bullshit job", and another who's job was semi-bullshit. This is out of maybe 100 people I met across multiple departments.
I agree that a lot of businesses can cut down on bullshit process and bullshit jobs and keep running fine, but there's a lot of "cost centre" style jobs that are non-negotiable, especially when it comes to compliance and government reporting. Compliance and reporting is a business requirement that the software industry very rarely has but I'm expecting to see that change over the next decade. Accounting kind of falls in that category actually.
An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. I avoid big companies specifically to avoid the bullshit process and people, so that sounds like a dream.
There was an accounting team, of course, as well as support and the most competent IT department on planet Earth (consisting of two guys for the whole company), but they were nimble and didn't overreach in terms of their authority.
Legal was outsourced, AFAIK.
>An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at.
It really was. The culture was amazing.
In a company with no HR, whose role is it to deal with employment contracts, ensure the company's compliance with labour laws and deal with personnel issues (which, at 500+ employees, probably arise more frequently than either of us would think)?
Interviews were handled by the team that the new hire would be joining, and most personnel issues were handled locally too. Very rarely they'd be kicked up the chain to the department head, but honestly these issues were very rare.
Seriously, without an "HR police" to complain to, most people would just deal with interpersonal issues like adults and move on.
Who handles health insurance and 401k match?
The Federal Government.
>Who handles the sexual harassment complaints and the illegal hiring discrimination?
Team leads, or lawyers if it gets far enough. You don't need a team of people on full-time for an event that happens twice a year.
I think at this point it's unfair if we were to say the specific people are the issue. A big business has a lot of required components in order to keep running, and some of them are not directly revenue generating, but you still need most of them. That's a value of small companies, being so lean you can be hyper-focused and efficient. Bigger companies can perform at scales smaller ones can't, but that comes at the cost of inefficiencies of orchestrating the bigger operation. Just getting all the people aligned to do the things the business needs them to do is a huge and messy cost that smaller companies don't have, but it's required else your conglomerate would fall apart.