So a star is a person who is good at their job..<p>&gt; Going from individual contributor<p>What did you do?<p>&gt; This is one of the reasons why you can&#x27;t have a totally flat org - you need managers.<p>Look a Valve, a flat company, who are pretty successful. That proves your point factually incorrect.<p>&gt; There&#x27;s lots of managerial advice out there. It&#x27;s hard to find any truly useful information out there, I&#x27;ll say it all comes down to stars. They are making it happen.<p>So if it all down to stars, then what is the purpose of the manager?<p>&gt; Seems the younger&#x2F;sv area crowd are more into &quot;culture fit&quot;. That seems a little too college fraternity to me. People say &quot;one asshole can ruin the team&quot;. I suspect that&#x27;s bullshit.<p>Culture leads to teamwork which leads to project flow. Nothing is better than a project flowing well.