
“Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee - danso
http://kotaku.com/weird-paranoia-at-valve-says-former-employee-700121951
======
LandoCalrissian
I find it pretty astounding that she is bitter considering they let her take
all her research and hardware developments when she left with no stings
attached. You would never get that a most companies.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2013/07/08/hardware-hacker-spills-
on-...](http://www.joystiq.com/2013/07/08/hardware-hacker-spills-on-cast-ar-
projected-reality-glasses-v/)

From that link too it sounds like she gave Gabe Newell an ultimatum, but here
she's claims she was fired because she was a trouble maker.

EDIT: The ultimatum appears to be after she was already fired, thanks for the
clarification.

~~~
srdev
She told Gabe after she was fired that he should either fund the project she
was working on personally or give it to her. Its not much of an ultimatum
because she was already fired and had no bargaining power. Its pretty awesome
thing for Valve to do, all things considered.

~~~
EvanAnderson
There's some discussion here and a link to a podcast episode where Jeri talks
about the firing and being given the IP for her project:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5786200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5786200)

------
crazygringo
This is exactly the kind of thing I've been curious about, regarding such
"flat" companies like Valve and GitHub.

I've never quite believed that things could go so smoothly as they say. I'm
not saying this article is necessarily true, but that I wish there were real
research into the negatives of these kinds of management structures (or lack-
of-management structures).

~~~
_delirium
I know there is some study of it in left-wing political groups, both writing
by people within such groups, and some sociological study of them by
outsiders. One of the manifestations of dissatisfaction with both
Leninism/Stalinism's ultra hierarchical style on the one hand, and the
emergence of "union bosses" in the trade-union movement on the other, was a
strong ideological attachment to radically non-hierarchical organization among
groups like anarchists, council communists, etc. And one of the immediate
problems that comes up is non-transparent, _de facto_ cliques and networks of
behind-the-scenes leaders. There's been a bunch of ink spilled on trying to
come up with consensus-based organizational methods and best practices that
aim to avoid that and produce "actual" non-hierarchy rather than just the
superficial look of non-hierarchy. In some brief searching I haven't come up
with any particularly good summary to point to, though, and I don't know if
there's any consensus (ha ha) on whether any methods are more successful than
others.

In a different vein, there's a _lot_ of academic stuff written on Scandinavian
workplace management, which is not precisely flat, but has flattish
hierarchies based more on rotating and interlocking committees, rather than
boss-and-subordinates tree structures. The goal there seems to be to make the
sub-groups that are making decisions overt, so informal cliques don't make the
decisions. So there are a lot of committees, with rotating membership to make
sure they don't develop into hierarchies. E.g. 5 people are chosen to be
responsible for something like working conditions, or strategic direction, or
integration of foreign workers, for a term of a year or two, and then a
different 5 people will hold that power next year. A big controversy there is
how much Scandinavian workplace management is tied to Scandinavian culture,
i.e. would it work anywhere else?

~~~
EthanHeilman
ParEcon is an attempt at what you mention:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics)

This is a more problem than networks vs hierarchies since both face this
problem. All companies that succeed by definition start with a successful
social structure, but as a companies increases the number of employees the
social structure has trouble scaling. Clausewitz discusses a simple example of
this with an army, as the army grows the number of links in the chain from a
commander to a unit increases. He proposes a number of solutions (increase the
unit size, increase the branching degree, split the army, etc) but in typical
Clausewitzian fashion admits there is an inherent trade off between size and
effectiveness.

Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective
structure. This is a counter-intuitive strategy in the world of bigger is
better, but I'm interested in seeing how it plays out.

~~~
epsylon
> Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective
> structure.

I wouldn't call 300 people a small number for the size of a company.

In fact, Jeri Ellsworth addresses this point (I'm quoting the transcript by
develop-online [0]):

"Their structure probably works really well with about 20 people, but breaks
down terribly when you get to a company of 300 people. Communication was a
problem. That's where management… Well if I had anything to do differently,
would be to make sure a layer of management could do communication correctly."

So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure.

[0] [https://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-
hir...](https://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-hiring-
hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-High-School)

~~~
EthanHeilman
>So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure.

Such scaling problems are not binary. They are probably less effective than
they were at 20 people but they would be even less effective at 30,000. One
way we might look at this is to assume (incorrectly) that a flat hierarchy is
a complete graph which is the way most small informal groups are run.

A complete graph of 30 people has 435 edges. A complete graph of 300 people
has 44,850 edges. A complete graph of 3000 people has 4,498,500 edges.

------
grannyg00se
What's with this trend of adding some kind of menu overlay on the top of your
page that allows text to scroll underneath?

You read a page, then scroll forward a page, and 4 lines of text at the top
are obscured. You then have to scroll back up individual lines and try to
figure out where you were.

Am I the only one hating on this design trend?

~~~
adventureloop
I despise this UI trend, if I really want to read a page I will jump into
Chome's Inspector and fix the CSS. Otherwise I navigate away.

------
srdev
There's a lot of discussion around this interview, and unfortunately much of
it tries to paint her as a trouble-making whiner. A lot of her complaints
match what I would expect from an attempt of a non-hierarchal organization:
cliques, lack of ability to get man-power for essential but non-popular work,
and inability to consider points of views that don't match with the larger
group. The potential downsides of open allocation systems are swept under the
rug as bitterness, and nothing of value is gained.

What I wonder is, are the issues she encountered fixable? She recommends a
small layer of management, but that seems like it would erode away at the
system they are trying to harbor. Since the issue seemed to be specific to the
challenges of the hardware division, maybe they could have just split and
applied the fixes only to the hardware portion.

~~~
ownagefool
I have no idea what goes on internally in valve but the lady wasn't working on
essential but non-popular work, she was working on an idea, based around her
desire to engineer hardware, retroactively attempting to add gameplay to it
after what sounds like numerous attempts were made to nudge her onto course
and remind her she was working at a gaming company.

She pretty much says all that in the video interview, it's just a shame that
people have bought into valve having a problem, rather than valve just being
the wrong place for her to work and follow her desire to produce new and
interesting hardware, which doesn't sound like it entirly fits the pc gaming
landscape.

~~~
talmand
Do you work at Valve? Because you are laying claim to a great deal of
information that you say you don't know.

You say you have no idea what goes on internally at Valve but you then make a
judgement call on someone's work at Valve? You seem to believe the parts of
her story that are negative towards her but choose to ignore the parts of her
story that are negative towards Valve? What's wrong with thinking there might
be a problem at Valve? Hardware doesn't fit the PC gaming landscape?

Why don't we go with the idea that we don't have enough information to know
anything of what's going on inside of Valve other than the people inside
Valve?

~~~
ownagefool
Did you watch the video, because you've seemed to misunderstood my comment
that I'm drawing conclusions based on what she said and what she summarized
the platform was at this current moment.

That doesn't have a lot of do with valve, just the fact I'm saying as a PC
gamer it doesn't sound like anything I'd be interested in and while she
bitterly suggested there were ulterior motives, it is possible that people
just weren't actually interested.

This doesn't mean that there aren't problems at valve, but I suspect the
problems are fairly typical as nothing is perfect for everyone.

~~~
talmand
No, I didn't watch the video but read an article where she was interviewed.
From what I gather she was consistent between the two.

I didn't misunderstand your comment in that you made specific claims despite
saying you know little of the internals of Valve. I just didn't understand how
you could do that.

I found it interesting that you were willing to believe her story during the
parts with her describing her own shortcomings, which she has been honest
about, but apparently completely disagree with her negative opinions on Valve.
Even though she would be a source of information of the internals of Valve
since she worked there. If someone else steps forward to disagree with her
then that would be one thing, but no one has (that I know of) so her story is
all we have. Not that I automatically believe her but I give her story some
consideration because what she describes is not that unreasonable for the type
of company culture that Valve has publicly admitted that they have. Maybe it's
possible that her problem lay within the structure of how Valve works and not
her personally nor her project, which you only seem willing to focus on?

~~~
ownagefool
You haven't quite understood me. Of course her problem was with the structure
of how valve worked, it was different from what she desired. My point was that
that doesn't make valves flat structure terrible, but also doesn't make her
terrible either, it just means they were ill-matched. However, her desire to
bend the company to her will doesn't seem like the most likely outcome in my
opinion.

Also please keep in mind, she was slating valve, as far as I know they haven't
criticised her. If they did, I'd no doubt look for reasons to find their
opinion invalid. :p

------
DanBC
For people who don't know, Jeri Ellsworth does interesting hardware stuff.

The C64 in a joystick case (in 2004); the homemade transistors, etc.

([http://www.youtube.com/user/jeriellsworth/videos](http://www.youtube.com/user/jeriellsworth/videos))

~~~
9999
Yes, it's well worth watching the entire interview where she talks in detail
about CastAR, the project she was working on at Valve, and what she's doing
with it now.

([http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434](http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434))

------
moomin
Worth bearing in mind that she's not an isolated case. A lot of talented
people have unexpectedly left Valve recently. There's a possibility that
Valve's culture is failing.

~~~
Ygg2
Maybe they are approaching limits of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number).

~~~
epsylon
At 300 people, they are well above that limit. See my other comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018134)

~~~
Ygg2
Yeah, I heard they are 400 person strong a bit later. And was thinking of
updating that comment, but too late. Maybe split into two flat structures with
two benevolent dictators.

I think what they should keep is their focus on making developers feel like at
home, which Gabe so far did masterfully (he keeps moral high, he gives people
what they want even in face of fire, etc.).

------
MartinCron
_" I was fired for being abrasive," she said. "And I probably was"_

As someone who has been there, I'm impressed by her brutally honest
introspection.

------
mindstab
I'm not really surprised by reports of an ~ unofficial semi secret cabal
forming and consolidating power. It's human nature to collect power and if the
rules say "flat" then the only way to get power is to band together. Power
generally wants to consolidate and it seems to take concerted constant effort
to diffuse it.

~~~
talmand
You only have to watch the first season of Survivor to see that very thing in
action.

------
dnautics
it sounds like the 100% democratic across the board structure may have failed
- if Valve wanted to try this again, i would suggest they self-appoint a
"small committee" of people interested in spearheading the project, keep the
same "internal corporate rules" but keep decision-making between the two sides
of the company firewalled for a fixed period of time while the new venture
gains traction.

------
shadowmint
Just thought I'd point out that everything I've read about Valve says that
people who are a cultural fit are _the most important thing_.

Can't hire a machinist?

Well, what exactly would they _do_ there? What if they decide to go and write
games instead? Do they have to hire _another_ machinist then?

There's lots of talk of social cliques, and maybe they didn't handle the
dismissal process right, but if she was trying to create a hierarchical
hardware department (where say, a machinist is required to stay in that role),
that's the end for her, or Valve stops being Valve.

------
ownagefool
Personally I think it's a case of her jimmies being rustled.

She's complaining about the flat structure because she cannot cocere coders to
get interested and join her project. Maybe that's because they're all chasing
the big bucks and prestige or maybe it's because they're paranoid, but maybe
it's just because she's not a gamer, working on an unproven prototype that
doesn't seem to have any gameplay, in a gaming company filled with people who
care about actual games.

Of course it couldn't be that she actually doesn't get valve and doesn't fit
in, the problem NEEDS to be with the organisation, not the person who admitted
to constantly complaining they couldn't hire someone cheap to do their grunt
work.

No disrespect, I'm sure she's extremely talented but it really does sound like
she fit the culture and I think valve were pretty cool to let her export the
project and continue working on it.

P.S. I have a bias point of view. I was a pretty hardcore gamer and I really
don't believe her project is at all interesting. Sometime in the future,
maybe. But more likely in a venue like laser tag, probably not for a pc gamer.
Thus I don't think it was fair of her to complain until she actually proved
her concept.

~~~
rst
She's complaining about the flat structure because it was unwilling to
accommodate hardware specialists (e.g., a machinist) which her project needed,
but which the software-centric crowd just wouldn't hire. The specific
complaint about folks like this was that they were poor fits for the culture
as a whole, which is almost certainly true as far as it goes: a machinist
can't toddle off with their wheeled desk and join a purely software game
project, because they don't have software skills. In other words, they _can
't_ function the way a member of that culture is expected to. But at the same
time, skills in machining, board design, and the like are necessary if you're
going to have a hardware project go to completion.

The bottom line is that her project was just doing something different from
the rest of the organization, and needed some degree of autonomy ---
particularly in terms of really big areas like hiring --- to do it
effectively. The flat structure was simply unable to provide that, because
that requires that there be a corner of the organization where, say, software
devs have nowhere near the sort of influence that they're used to having on,
say, hiring as a matter of course.

~~~
ownagefool
I don't think being an expert in a field prohibits you from getting hired by
valve. Her project comes across to me as R&D where a small team of experts are
working with something trying to find an application, while she seems to come
across as wanted to scale up and produce something functional now.

From my POV it almost certianly sounded like she actually needed software
folks, as opposed to additional hardware, because the nudges from valve were
that her project had to actually display some interesting game play before
anyone would be interested.

------
jokoon
Well the bigger the boat, the more vulnerable it is.

New cool things don't come out of big companies, it either comes out of
small/medium companies who did not prove their worth, or either of particular
smart people or indie devs.

I don't even know how successful google is at this 20% "free time" thing. I
don't think it works, because any hiring process is always biased in order to
have those people work on things they want. Not only people working at google
could turn this free time and environment into a success.

You don't sit talented people in a room and get success. You need to sit aware
people who just have the motivation to do cool things, and let them work.

"Talent" is overrated. You can't tell a person is talented because this person
had or is having success. You don't plan success, you just see it where it is,
and make it happen, talent or not.

Getting hired because of talent, and you end up in your comfort zone. Then bye
bye "talent".

------
patcon
Isn't this just the results of this philosophy?
[http://yfsentrepreneur.com/2013/05/06/toxic-
employees-3-type...](http://yfsentrepreneur.com/2013/05/06/toxic-
employees-3-types-of-employees-to-fire-sooner-than-later/)

I'm not even passing judgement. If some group is sowing discontent in what is
otherwise known as a happy, fluid environment, you get rid of them. I pass no
judgement on whether that environment is "right" or "wrong", but my sense was
that you deal with it quickly before it spreads.

~~~
makomk
Well, that's interesting. That article's scrupulously gender-neutral in
describing two of the three types of employees, but consistently genders "The
Complaint Artist" as female.

------
cdegroot
Personally, I think this is more an indicator that, whatever you do, growth
sucks. Semco is most likely still doing well because they have an enormous
amount of small subsidiaries.

Something similar happened to Toyota - once the poster child of lean
companies, then they wanted to become the largest car producer in the world,
the rest is history.

I wonder - maybe it is time to pick up these clues and start being satisfied
with working at companies that are fun and stable and stay small?

------
spikels
Why does this article call Jeri Ellsworth a "longtime" Valve employee? She was
hired in in early 2012 and fired in early 2013.

------
mwfunk
I always felt like flat organizations, once they grew beyond a certain point
(25 employees? 50 employees?) would just end up replacing a formal, explicit
structure with an informal, implicit structure that is much more confusing and
frustrating for everyone involved.

------
sillysaurus
It's important to take this article with a grain of salt. It appears that it
was written based solely on her (obviously one-sided) testimony.

~~~
kevingadd
It's one-sided because Valve refuses to comment on the (very visible) firing
of (what appears to be) their entire hardware team. What else is there?

~~~
talmand
It wasn't just the hardware team, there were quite a few surprises that day.

~~~
heuan
Information on the other surprises?

~~~
talmand
Jason Holtman: one of the main guys responsible for Steam

Tom Forsyth: already mentioned, VR for TF2

Moby Francke: art lead for TF2

Realm Lovejoy: one of the Narbacular Drop people which turned into Portal

Plus a few others that have been there since the beginning, what you would
call the core of the company.

Without knowing details it's impossible to know if they were justified or not,
but they are surprising because their resumes suggest these aren't slackers.

------
fractallyte
Perfectly described by George Orwell: "All animals are equal, but some animals
are more equal than others." (Animal Farm, 1945)

------
amerika
Gosh, a lack of hierarchy means that everyone is unstable because they might
get climbed over by others. Who would've guessed.

