Working for a bossless company, i.e. a company where instead of managers telling employees which projects they should work on, employees themselves initiate new or join the existing projects, can sound like a dream to most of us. Too often, though, it has become a nightmare for employees of bossless companies that, after an initial bout of success, have been forced to lay off workers (as in the case of Valve, a videogame publisher and distributor) or to reverse to a traditional, hierarchical structure (as at GitHub, a provider of Internet hosting for software development).