Steve Smith On Optimizing For Happiness

This is probably the greatest endorsement for working at a company I've ever seen. Working @ Github must be great.

I do like the idea of a "flat" team/company - but I'm finding it hard to see how it would work with a company that does work for other clients. Clients expect deadlines, and progress reports and so on. How do you handle that without a project manager to keep things on track?

I'm a student at Notre Dame (in South Bend) and Steve actually came and spoke to our computer club a little while back. I ended up talking to him for a good long time afterwards about everything from business to software to Github to working remotely. Pretty cool then to see an interview with him on the front page of HN.<p>One thing that was kinda cool was that Github's interview process isn't necessarily so technical, because they usually find out if someone is a good programmer by just looking at their Github, and having popular repos sometimes catches their attention. Also, all new employees push to the master Github branch on their first day IIRC.

Does anybody know of other flat companies? I've heard Valve is somewhat like this. What about outside of the software industry?