
Valve's flat management structure 'like high school' - ot
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-management-jeri-ellsworth
======
Zarkonnen
Ah, the tyranny of structurelessness:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

Seriously - in the absence of formal power structures, informal ones will
always form, and they are often less accountable and fair than formal ones.

~~~
qznc
Our german Pirate Party is struggling with this as well. They desire to be a
democratic party, where the officials just do as voted. Technology [0] is used
to make this feasible. Nevertheless it hardly works out in practice and leads
to lot of discussions and a high churn rate.

[0] [https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/](https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/)
note the meaning of the name
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy)

~~~
walshemj
As Burke says "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his
judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your
opinion."

~~~
obviouslygreen
Even if you do subscribe to that point of view, modern politicians neither pay
attention to their constituents' opinions nor exercise judgment for the good
of the same. The reality-relevant betrayal is the application of the
representative's judgment for the good of himself or his sponsors; that people
are attempting to replace this but going about it in a way that might not be
ideal might be an overreaction, but I'd argue at least it's a mistake they can
learn from rather than a total abandonment of principle.

~~~
walshemj
Oh I agree most politicians do not follow Burke - but when I have been in the
potion of being a democratic representative I took it very seriously.

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

"TSA body imaging at home"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyo_OQFdAc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyo_OQFdAc))

"Home made EL wire"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RKBGxJJmwg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RKBGxJJmwg))

"Recording Audio onto floppy discs"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr7B-7BFP4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr7B-7BFP4))

"Home made transistor"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qph8BNrnLY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qph8BNrnLY))

"Homebrew NMOS transistor"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_znRopGtbE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_znRopGtbE))

~~~
wavefunction
I stay in my parent's basement so I don't have to be subjected to TSA body
imaging, why would I want to do it at home?

j/k it's more of a tin-foil covered shed, but there may be some evidence that
tHz radiation causes "resonance effects" resulting in DNA depolymerization:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz-
wa...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz-waves-tear-
apart-dna/)

[http://www.biomedproofreading.com/Hintzsche.pdf](http://www.biomedproofreading.com/Hintzsche.pdf)

So get the pat down folks, your genes will thank you!

~~~
widdershins
She did that as a protest against airport scanners, I believe.

~~~
at-fates-hands
You are correct. It was to demonstrate they were wasting absurd amounts of
money paying for these when they can be built fairly easily for quite a bit
less.

~~~
wavefunction
I guess my point, from the links provided, is that we shouldn't be bombarding
ourselves with the radiation these devices produce.

~~~
chc
It's about the same as what you get from eating a banana AFAIK. At any rate,
people routinely subject themselves to much higher doses of radiation.

~~~
ubercore
It's actually higher than a Banana Equivalent Dose, and you can't always
directly compare radiation exposure like that based on dosage.

~~~
vwinsyee
I honestly thought that you and chc were joking about the Banana Equivalent
Dose. But it turns out that it's a real concept!

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose)
2\.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15288975](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15288975)

------
uchi
It's very disingenuous to say that Valve backstabbed you when they willingly
handed over all the legal rights to your project when you left.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical-
illusion...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical-illusions-
valve-augmented-reality-glasses-jeri-ellsworth-rick-johnson)

Granted, a firing is never a graceful affair, but Valve could've done much
worse if they wanted to.

It seems to me that Valve was cutting some losses and her project wasn't
showing much promise compared to other things they had going on, so they let
her go.

------
ChrisNorstrom
It's all starting to make a bit more sense.

Democracy tends to weed out bad ideas but moves at a snails pace. Tyranny is
the opposite. It moves at blazing speed but the mistakes are massive. This
explains so much about Valve. It's products are high quality but it's a slow
company. They're release games very slowly for a company with their money,
their source engine is inferior to modern ones, and (not that it matters to me
but for some it does) their graphics aren't exact top notch. I think that's
why Half Life Episode 3 is delayed for so long, they're working on a new
engine to compete with EA's Frostbite 3.

Before EA came out with Origin and Valve starting hauling ass to add features
to Steam, Valve didn't look like it was really pushing any new steam features.
There was the redesign and that was all. Then as Steam had more competition
they starting added Screenshots manager, greenlight, software, source
filmmaker, community hub, walkthroughs, big picture mode, linux support,
etc...

It feels like the company is trying to stay small and stay the same despite
desperately needing to be restructured in order to keep up with competition.

Maybe "staying a startup forever" doesn't work as good as we thought.

~~~
nemof
Valve is really not a slow company. I've heard this expressed before and never
really seen it. Please see this list of IP developed by valve:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Games)

That's not an insubstantial amount of games for one company.

This doesn't even take into consideration that they currently run the biggest
online games store in the world which is a huge undertaking, and all the
moonshot developments they have running that might not even see the light of
day.

Valve are not a slow company. They're a savvy company. It's hardly surprising
that they don't really have a flat power-structure, but they do seem to have
some kind of structure that allows them to continue to innovate in a variety
of areas.

~~~
mariusmg
The only significant game they did since 2007 is Portal 2. (1 game in 6
years). Left for Dead was acquired and the sequel was done basically by the
same team.

Valve has Steam and, with it, a very nice income stream (they're basically
rich). While they do try stuff with F2P (dota, tf) personally i doubt Valve is
a top tier game maker anymore. It seems to me they don't have the ambition
anymore and live the good life while Steam provides.

~~~
Negitivefrags
Dota 2 is the #5 PC game being played right now according to Xfire and is only
growing. It's pretty unreasonable to call it insignificant.

~~~
bane
IIR, DOTA was a mod for Warcraft III, and Valve hired the mod team on to build
the sequel based on Source.

from WP "According to Valve's founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, the
company's investment in Dota was sparked from the collective interest of
several veteran employees, including Team Fortress designer Robin Walker,
programmer Adrian Finol and project manager Erik Johnson, all of whom had
attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level."

So it might be a _popular_ game, but it's not a major development for Valve in
the sense that Team Fortress, Portal 2 or HF2 was...and also demonstrates some
of the internal culture issues Valve has.

~~~
mccr8
Team Fortress was a mod for Quake, and Valve hired the mod team to build the
sequel based on Source. That doesn't make it less of a major development.

~~~
wasd
Wasn't it a mod for half life 1 (team fortress classic)?

~~~
jholman
Heh. What do you think "classic" means when it's part of the title of a
product? It means that it's a derivative of something else, and wants to
capture some reflected glory. Don't go thinking that "Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein", the 1994 movie, is the original.

Team Fortress was a mod for Quake before HL1 was a twinkle in Gaben's eye. TFC
was someone saying "that sure was a fun gameplay mode, but I can't get anyone
to load Q1 any more... maybe I'll recreate the same thing over again"

------
spikels
Why is Jeri still whining that her job at Valve didn't work out? As best I can
tell she was treated fairly but she was just not a good fit in this rather
unique company. Maybe this was news in February when she was fired but now it
is either a childish grudge or a cynical PR move or both.

Listen to the Grey Area podcast if you think this is wrong.

~~~
kyrra
Exactly. There were a number of comments on Slashdot[1] that pointed out that
Valve may not be the problem here, but that Jeri did not fit into Valve's
culture. If you read here Wikipedia[2] page, you'll see she dropped out of
both highschool and later college (college due to "cultural mismatch").
Reading her wikipedia page reads like someone that may not play well as part
of a team (I haven't fully listened to the Grey Area podcast yet, so I could
be totally wrong here).

Jeri couldn't get buy-in for her projects at Valve so they failed. For a
project at Valve to succeed you need to convince a number of other people at
the company that your project is a good idea and that they should help you
work on it. It sounds like she wasn't able to convince others at the company
to come help her on her ideas (maybe because she didn't put forth the effort,
she wasn't good at selling it, or no one thought her ideas were worth it).

Valve has a very specific culture and you have to really have a certain
personality to fit in. Sounds like maybe she wasn't a good fit.

[1]
[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-v...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-
valve-hardware-designer-recounts-management-difficulties)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth)

~~~
nutmeg
"A very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to
fit in."

Sounds a lot like high school to me :-)

~~~
d23
But still, you have to take it as a "no hard feelings" thing and move on. The
company I work at has an extremely casual attitude and some similarly
extremely casual personalities. We've had a few employees that could do the
work requested, but clearly didn't fit the culture. Nothing against them; it
just didn't work out.

------
mikeash
This person must have gone to a much different high school than I did if the
biggest problem was hires being vetoed by old-timers and trouble reaching
consensus. "Like high school" to me implies that the place is full of idiots
who hassle you because you're actually productive, and you can't really leave.

This seems like a nitpick, but it makes it hard for me to take the rest of the
article seriously....

~~~
stephencanon
Agreed (at least assuming there aren’t regular fistfights in the hallways at
Valve).

------
kamaal
The problem isn't the structure. The problem is the size of the company. And
one should not live in the delusion that office politics is the result of a
structure. Rather its a result of size.

In any case a structure, though not official always exists. Somebody on the
top is always going to ask his trusted lieutenant when it comes to doing
reviews, 1-1, appraisals, deciding hikes and promotions etc.

Your best bet is to keep yourself to a small company. Nothing you are likely
to do to a large company can bring about genuine change.

~~~
brazzy
> Nothing you are likely to do to a large company can bring about genuine
> change.

Unless, of course, you're near enough to the top of its structure, formal or
informal...

~~~
kamaal
Even that will not help much.

To bring about change in any large company, you need some partner in the high-
mid level management who can assist you in bringing about that change. Now
this is the problem, if the system is rotten to the core, simply firing the
low level solves no problems. You really need to clean the mid level
management, and you will never get a true picture of what is going on. All you
will see is numbers that will those guys look fabulous.

One of the reasons why Jack Welch got tremendous success with stack ranking
was because the managers were subjected to same kind of measurements some one
at the bottom was. There fore he was able to clean up a good deal of crap in
the management layers.

Unfortunately this is not possible to implement in most companies as either
they lack a 'real' leader or the ones implementing, make the process such that
they exempted to be judged as a part of it.

~~~
brazzy
I think your definition of "genuine change" is much wider-reaching than what I
thought was meant.

------
k__
She said it herself:

"...There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company ... I was
struggling in the company to make a difference"

There IS a always a hierarchy and she failed climbing it.

~~~
Angostura
The article effectively uses 'popular' as a pejorative but doesn't really
explore is the extent to which the 'popular kids' have achieved power through
merit. If someone is popular because they are a good manager, with good ideas,
able to listen and adopt better ideas from talented team members, then I have
no problem with this form of hierarchy - it's a meritocracy.

~~~
k__
I think the same way about this. But life is not fair. You see systems and you
exploit them. If you gain fame by merit when interacting with one of those
systems, that's nice. But not all systems work like that.

------
pjc50
It's also worth observing that "culture" tends to mean "people similar to
myself", unless more explicitly defined. So it's no suprise that the people
who declared not to "fit" are a woman and a skilled manual worker (machinist).

The totally uniform power distribution idea only works if you have totally
uniform employees. As soon as you have signifigantly different skillsets and
workflows - which you need to do different kinds of work - then employees
become uncomparable and shortly afterwards unequal.

The size of Valve is also over Dunbar's number, so they're beyond the range of
what can be organised with informal social operations anyway.

~~~
tfgg
It seems a bit unfair to claim that it's because she's a woman -- how many
women work for Valve?

Also, Valve, being a game company, has always had a diverse set of skills with
artists and software engineers being the most obviously different. Their
success has been a lot to do with efficiently integrating these together.

~~~
pjc50
I don't know, how many women work for Valve? It's not public or easily
googlable information.

~~~
papsosouid
You should definitely assume it is none then and blame sexism for her project
being rejected. That makes perfect sense.

------
egor83
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015182)

------
Ygg2
I wonder if it would be possible to create temporary hierarchy, like you have
on video sets. You have cast/directors/animation, etc. They form only for
purpose of making the film after which they are dissolved. Or is this how
Valve already works?

~~~
Spooky23
Video sets are really projects, with a different set of lingo that a "PMI-
style" project.

So they have to have something like that, otherwise nothing would ever get
done. People don't just magically do things.

------
antninja
Dudes, the word for "non hierarchical" or "structureless" is "anarchist".
Either a social organization is a hierarchy or it's an anarchy (or a mix of
both).

A corporate culture is certainly defined by its political structure: some
companies are monarchies if not tyrannies, some are democracies and some like
Valve are closer to anarchies. This is decided by the founder's preferences.

------
mathattack
It sounds like the informal style of a small company didn't scale.

I've heard various #s between 50 and 160 batted around as optimal sizes of
organizations, after which you need more structure. The challenge is that
interpersonal relationships grow n^2 with organization size. This is in part
why the Mythical Man Month tells us to not add bodies.

A high level summary of some the research is here ->
[http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.htm...](http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.html)

Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. At some point you have to say, "You do
your part, and I'll own mine, here's the deal we're setting up to get each of
our parts done, but we each have some autonomy in how to do it."

------
kabdib
Any time you have more than a handful of primates in a room, you're going to
have politics and hierarchy.

Valve does appear to try very hard to avoid enshrining hierarchy. No org
charts. What people work on can be very fluid.

Doesn't mean it's nirvana.

------
cpeterso
GitHub also claims to be a flat "no bosses" organization. Can anyone here who
works at GitHub, or knows people who do, describe how this actually works? Can
this scale to a large multi site combating?

------
ssw1n
It is fully expected, and Gabe probably did not intended this to happen.

It is only human nature: to strive for authority, to build little exclusive
clubs around it, and to suck up to such authoritative group of people for a
sense of security if one not part of such a group. Decades and decades
(centuries and centuries?) of human society has trained people in this
mechanism regardless of race, gender or religion. So ValveSoftware, even with
good intentions, is fighting against a trait that is part of being human.
Regardless of how flat Gabe wants it to be, some people will become more and
more important on the part of the company they are working on as their time
goes by at Valve. And they will form old-timers club who will feel like they
are on the next level, and start to form the barrier from the rest.

Only viable solution towards truly flat structure would be to not give anyone
a chance to become an old-timer, a.k.a., one too important/authoritative:
recycle people to different parts of the company as soon as arguments like
this one arises: "OK group, what you all are suggesting for this product's
next phase is really great and all, but we will need to ask Mr. X because he
had been working on the product since the first iteration, and he knows about
it all, so he knows what is best for the product."

------
patmcguire
Reminds me of CS Lewis's The Inner Ring - mostly the quote from War and Peace:

"When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general,
wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an
expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!”
he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he
used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped
listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be
heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of
the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side
by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down
in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the
system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait
respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with
a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be
guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system."

[http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php](http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php)

------
xedarius
I'd heard similar stories about Valve. Unlike many games studios they have a
continuous revenue stream in the form of Steam. Would be interesting to see
how this 'you have no boss' mentality works during the difficult times.

It also largely explains why we haven't seen HL3 (which I don't really mind as
long as there's another Portals soon).

------
MortenK
Seems like a case of misaligned ideas of what constitutes an environment like
Valve. Of course there will be a hierarchy any time humans are involved. The
idea of Valve's workplace, is that the hierarchy will establish itself
naturally and hopefully merit based, rather than imposed from above like in
"normal" companies.

Lots of projects in such a company will die. But I don't believe for one
second that it's due to some elite clique trying to hold everybody else down.

The much more obvious reason is that the concept was mediocre, hence why it
couldn't get any backing internally.

It's of course always easier to claim conspiracy and unfairness, than it is to
realize that whatever concept you thought up was no good.

There's a lesson in this situation about facing facts early, not being blinded
by your own perceived brilliance and not brushing off criticism too easily.

------
brongondwana
Article is 1/3 advertisement for naked women with nipples artfully tucked away
behind arms. Stay classy wired.

~~~
Tobani
Targeted ads? What other pages have you been visiting?

~~~
JackpotDen
Sandwiches!

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20](http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20)

------
jaimebuelta
I guess that we talk a lot about how a leader is not the same as a boss, and
how people should lead and not command. It seems that Valve have created an
environment that make leaders, well, to lead and to make decisions... Does any
of this remembers "Lord of the Flies"? (Of course, without all much drama, and
being able to leave it)

Of course, the risk of that kind of approach is that there's no really a way
of make external decisions, as there is no way of disrupting the spontaneous
organisation (because there's always going to be some organisation), so
consensus with "the group" (meaning basically the leaders) needs to be
reached. And that can be very difficult.

------
generalpf
One thing that always bugs me about the video game areas of Reddit is their
universal love of Valve, and their belief that Valve's management structure
and corporate policies is the CAUSE of their success. I think Valve succeeds
DESPITE their structure since they can stay afloat merely from Steam revenues.

I would like to know (and never will) if Valve's game development arm balances
out financially, or if it's just a loss leader to get people onto Steam, which
will provide them with more distribution revenues down the road.

Also, I didn't think Half-Life 1 or 2 were that good, so sue me. :)

------
jes5199
Does anyone know if the other companies emulating the Valve corporate
structure - particularly I'm thinking of Github - also have cliquish dynamics?

The only company I've seen in-person that was trying it is Basho, and while I
got a really bad impression of their culture, I think that had more to do with
their "Topgrading" cargo-cult hiring practices than with their
structurelessness

------
wowoc
Take a look at this quote:

 _Let 's say you and I have a chat in the corridor or the conference room and
the result of this chat is that we converge to the view that we need an
additional software engineer or animator or artist or hardware person._

The people dealing with software were called "engineers", and the ones dealing
with hardware "persons". Huh.

~~~
6d0debc071
-shrug- As far as I'm aware, it's generally considered bad style to use the same words twice in a sentence.

~~~
officemonkey
>As far as

~~~
pizza
as and far are barely words; just redundant filler

------
robert-wallis
interview video
[http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434](http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434)

