I think that jives with people's expectations when they go to work for other mega-companies though. It seems people going to Google too often assume that the rules really will be drastically different there.

There were a couple posts a while ago about the Semco management style which felt like a much better solution than the traditional vertical hierarchy. I would have thought Google would be a lot flatter as an organization.

Google is very flat by reputation, but that is not an unequivocal good. If your manager is also managing 50 other people, to the extent that you would benefit from management you are probably not getting those benefits.

All of the big silicon valley companies claim to be "flat." When I started at Yahoo!, all I heard about was how flat the organization was. Doesn't mean it's true.

Indeed.

The number of times a product idea was sent from an SVP to the divison VP who forwarded it to the group head of product who forwarded this with the note added "SVP wants this done by the end of the day" was more than I'd even like to think about.