former Zappos engineering manager here. still with the company, just not a manager any more.<p>this latest round of news stories all stem from the offer that was given in may being extended to a select group who were deemed critical to finishing the &quot;supercloud&quot; migration. that extension ended in january, so another &quot;exodus&quot; occurred as a new round of people took the offer. since the project was a tech project, this new round was almost 100% from tech.<p>the ones who accepted this latest round were heavily tilted toward managers. mostly product or project managers with a healthy smattering of engineering managers. out of all the engineering managers (~15), there are only 2-3 of us left. we are the ones who took on active roles in writing software and making an impact by doing rather than commanding (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;zappos-engineering&#x2F;elastic-beanstalk-vs-apig-part-1-in-an-aws-showdown-92afc6273491" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;zappos-engineering&#x2F;elastic-beanstalk-vs-a...</a>).<p>fwiw, from my perspective, the story is far from over. i feel like it is only now that we can really progress the hard work of self-organization. the extended offer was holding us back. it&#x27;s tough to move forward with distributed authority when you know that a good portion of your peers are not interested in that distributed authority.<p>i guess the message i&#x27;m trying to get across now is that for those of us here and moving forward, it&#x27;s far from a &quot;finished&quot; project. it&#x27;s certainly not a &quot;failed&quot; experiment yet. it feels like it&#x27;s just starting.<p>and we are starting to see some of the benefits of people self-organizing. one example is that for the last couple of years we&#x27;ve tried to contribute to open source. i&#x27;m not entirely sure why we weren&#x27;t able to do so except to point at bureaucracy and traditional management putting up roadblocks. if your manager doesn&#x27;t see how you working on open source is going to help them out, then you have much less incentive to contribute to open source.<p>in a self-organized system, with the directive being &quot;figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company,&quot; when an individual senses that contributing to open source benefits the company, then they can do it. since the tearing down of the traditional management hierarchy, we&#x27;ve had an open source project released and are deep into releasing a second.<p>it&#x27;s hard to say this never would have been possible under the traditional hierarchy, but it is accurate to say that it didn&#x27;t happen after two years of trying and then happened within months with self-organization.