Whenever someone wistfully posts about how great it would be if their &gt; 100 (heck, even &gt; 10) employee company had a flat structure like Valve, I can&#x27;t help but cringe a little. If you don&#x27;t have an explicit organizational structure, how is it not inevitable (if not present from the outset) that you end up with an implicit organizational structure, one that&#x27;s even more based on socializing, old boy networks, etc.<p>IMO whenever someone speaks longingly for such a thing, they imagine a meritocracy in which they are somehow more valued&#x2F;important&#x2F;influential than they are at their current job. I don&#x27;t think anyone would advocate a structure in which they themselves would be less valued than they are currently, that&#x27;s for sure.<p>It&#x27;s hard not to see calls for flat orgs as being much more than an unconscious expression of professional narcissism- &quot;I know better than my stupid manager, if only I could do things exactly how I wanted to, on my own schedule, everyone would be better off!&quot;. I&#x27;ve got to think that that statement might be true in some cases, but for every valid case there are 100 or 1000 people who are thinking the exact same thing simply because they overvalue the things that they care about, undervalue the things that other people care about, and in general don&#x27;t know what they don&#x27;t know. Even dumber would be  those who assume that they would end up at or near the top of the magical, Utopian meritocracy that would emerge from such an arrangement.