
The Nightmare of Valve’s self-organizing “utopia” (2018) - kiyanwang
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb
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yummypaint
The article briefly touches on the fact that this system worked when the
company was small. I also frequently see people talk about the growing pains
startups face when they exceed around 3 dozen people. When groups are smaller
i think people do have an inherant preference toward more "egalitarian"
strategies because its still possible for an individual to grok the social
dynamic of the full group. Being in a small flat organization brings the same
potential anxieties, but its possible to relieve them because its still
possible to have a real relationship with other stakeholders.

One of the purposes of heirarchical structures seem to be to just divide
people up into smaller working groups for this same purpose. I wonder if its
possible to subdivide a company to get this benefit while keeping it flat. For
example, maybe the company consists of 30 fixed groups of people, and those
groups coordinate with each other via some type of structured interface
without heirarchy... Or maybe having a heirarchy is ok at that level of
abstraction.

~~~
chongli
If you divide the company into 30 fixed groups of people and then each group
appoints a representative to the other groups, you've just created a
hierarchy. If you want to avoid hierarchy at all costs, that means not
allowing any one member in the group to be the leader or the representative to
the other groups. I don't see how that's even possible, given that in almost
every group of human beings you're going to have someone who wants to take
charge.

~~~
danharaj
You can rotate the leadership positions regularly. The chair of a university
department is more of a custodian than a lord.

~~~
geephroh
An apt analogy in that much of the chair's time is spent cleaning up sh*t...

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techslave
> Indeed, in July 2018, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban
> studied two Fortune 500 companies making the switch to open office plans.
> The results were damning: face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent
> across the participating employees, productivity had declined, employees
> found it harder to concentrate and were overall less satisfied with their
> job.

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gumby
I think the worst condemnation came from an ex-Valve friend of mine: "After
almost two years I finally learned who my boss was when she fired me."

If there's no overt structure there is politics (ex Valve person told me
that).

~~~
taneq
If there's a person who can fire you, but you can't fire them, then they're
your boss.

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PeterStuer
Still sounds like every other big organization out there (the politicking, the
backstabbing, the fiefdoms, the barons, the bullies, the serfs, the hidden
true powers, the untouchables, the 'safe' hiring, ...) just lacking the
'formal' hierarchy on the side.

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chevas
Values are dependent upon hierarchy because values have to and enforced. The
attempted removal of hierarchy minimizes and/or obscures the company's values
and prevents them from being lauded. In its nature, the flat model is not
forthright to its workers. This is why its employees function with suspicion
in the dark.

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pasabagi
There's an echo of something I remember Marx saying here, about the futility
of trying to abolish capitalism, in private, behind its back. Ultimately, the
two stress points ruining the whole project are that the workers have to be
productive, and non-productive workers must be fired. That drives both the
crunch, and the lurking threat of being fired. These both have the same source
- whatever organizational structure Valve chooses, it is a for-profit company
with a limited hiring budget.

If nobody was being paid, nobody had to be fired, and nobody was worried about
money, their system probably wouldn't give rise to any cliques, barons, and so
on - simply because there would be no need for this sort of defensive
politics.

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brain5ide
So... not that much about Valve, but quite a lot of parallels with other
structureless entities. Seems like a clickbaity worthless read. Used to not
have those on HN.

~~~
dojomouse
There were numerous direct references to Valve, explanations of issues in the
context of Valve, _and_ commentary from Valve employees.

As someone who really liked the ideals and concepts of the Valve handbook but
struggled to see how to extend them to my own (hierarchical) workplace, I
found it quite enlightening.

