

Who's the Boss? There Isn't One - gruseom
http://www.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303379204577474953586383604.html

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Sivart13
I'm super sick of these articles patting Valve on the back for its super-
innovative business structure.

The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've
already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear
ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and
Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host.

Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and
causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their
management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they
were early movers in a very profitable space.

~~~
schacon
I'm curious how you think it's possible for a structure like this to emerge
after some level of success? You think that any company sets up a traditional
management structure, accomplishes success and then fires all the managers and
tells everyone to work differently? Or do you think it might be more likely
that thinking differently early on about how to treat employees and how to
focus creative energy somehow helps to achieve that success?

GitHub has always run this way, since it was 4 people. When we tell people how
we operate, they have always responded that it will never scale - people have
told us that since we were 4. We're now at nearly 100 employees and it's still
working great. Valve is 300 and Gore has several thousand, so we're pretty
sure we can keep going this way. We are slightly different than Valve, but
their handbook really resonated with the way we do things. The main difference
between companies like Valve or GitHub and many other companies is that we
don't look at other places and ask ourselves how we can copy their structures,
how we can cargo cult their success, instead we look at our problems and ask
ourselves how we can address them in the best way possible. It appears that
Valve has done the same thing and we've come to some similar conclusions.

I think this is a big reason why we've been successful - that we ask ourselves
this when approaching product too. You say we're sitting pretty at the top,
but when we started there were tons of source hosts. Valve was just as bad -
starting in another industry that was totally saturated. The reason we were
able to break through I believe was largely due to the fact that we thought
about problem solving differently than the industry leaders that we started up
against.

The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or
GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different way
and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you read in
an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're missing
everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read the
article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to copy us
you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly copying the
least important of the many symptoms of this approach.

Approach problems from first principles. Figure out what the best possible
experience would be for the person using your product (not just the person
buying it). Make that experience a reality. Don't copy anyone. Do that same
thing internally. Now what does your company and your product look like? That
should be what you take from this article.

~~~
shrikant
> The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or
> GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different
> way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you
> read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're
> missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read
> the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to
> copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly
> copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.

Well said, sir. Reminded me of this article on cargo cult management [1]

[1] <http://gigaom.com/2009/06/21/cargo-cult-management/>

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jiggy2011
You might not have a manager , but you always have a Boss to a certain extent.
There is always someone who is named as the companies MD/CEO , someone who has
the authority to legally hire you / fire you. So therefor their opinion will
always be more important.

Also the problem with having the team evaluate someones performance is that
teams are vulnerable to cliqueness and groupthink and you may therfor often
end up with decisions that are based more on popularity than anything else.

In theory at least a good manager should be able to step back from the inter-
employee politics and make judgements with some degree of perspective.

~~~
rhizome
There's always someone more invested. Management can pay lip service to flat
hierarchies and all that, but at the end of the day structure emerges more or
less by consensus, the same way everybody realizes the guy who always farts or
something. The common-if-not-genetic "desire to be led" causes people to
produce hierarchies for themselves, to produce their leaders. This isn't
robotic, but it comes naturally to a lot of people, even if only to confer
authority upon that person.

~~~
alxp
But the difference is that in a structure like Valves the inertia of those
structures is much lower. So institutions don't stagnate into structures
concerned with preserving their internal structure. Some unit starts to become
irrelevant exactly when the people who are the top producers turn their
attention elsewhere. The dead weight doesn't exert power to keep itself
afloat.

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balloot
Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do
admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a
job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up
meetings and answer phones?

Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games
while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?

Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has
somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there
are specialists and support people involved?

~~~
goochtek
I imagine you'd advertise for a support specialist in the traditional sense,
but once hired, they wouldn't have a job title. Their skills would be in
customer support though so that's what they would naturally do. If they tried
to work on development, but had no skills, then the group would remove them
from the project. They'd then have to go back to support or find something
else they can work on with their skill set.

~~~
planetguy
OK, so who cleans the toilets and empties the garbage? Contractors, presumably
-- easier to get non-employees to do this than to incorporate menial staff
into your oh-so-flat structure. Reminds me of the way ancient Rome ensured
that all citizens were equal by creating a huge subclass of non-citizens.

What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical
structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances
and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.

~~~
gruseom
There's no argument here - just sarcasm and unsupported claims. You invoke
janitors to imply that non-hierarchical organization can't possibly work. But
you don't know that; no one does. People have barely begun to experiment with
these forms. How much imagination has gone into figuring out ways to
accommodate menial labor so far? It takes time.

If we can figure out how to build software without bosses, I'm confident we
can figure out how to clean toilets.

~~~
epochwolf
Some developers already know how to clean toilets. :)

~~~
gruseom
Indeed. One possibility (though I'm sure there are many others) is to divide
the work that no one wants to do. There's even a handy word for that: chores.

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patdennis
To me, setups like this -- along with employee owned models like the one at
the Mondragon Group -- are the future. It's always struck me as strange that
we value democracy so much in our government, but not in our businesses.

If you're interested, here's some info on Mondragon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation>

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petercooper
_To help decide pay, employees rank their peers—but not themselves—voting on
who they think creates the most value._

Considering how larger society often 'ranks' and rewards people (e.g.
celebrities, local politicians), I wonder if these schemes could be a breeding
ground for contempt or cronyism.. or, more likely, people who are happy to
work at such companies rank compensation as a high priority and mismatches
aren't that important?

The idea of worker autonomy is implied a lot here. Should that go hand in hand
with workers having a direct influence and role in determining their
compensation with whoever holds the pursestrings?

~~~
rrreese
While I don't disagree with your thesis, politicians and celebrities are
usually unknown, or at least only known through small appearances in the
media. You work with your colleagues so I would expect a fairly different
dynamic when it comes to making these judgements.

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codeonfire
I applaud Valve's visionary business organization. As a developer I'm sick of
having to work under liars and frauds who have misrepresented their technical
ability and knowledge to get into an 'engineering management position' they
are not fit for. The costs of job changes is very high to me, and if there
were more companies like valve, tech would be a much better place to work.

~~~
nerd_in_rage
This is fairly common (liars and frauds...), though there are some great
managers out there: they're just as rare as great developers, and worth their
weight in gold when you find them.

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keithpeter
"Firings, while relatively rare, work the same way: teams decide together if
someone isn't working out."

Wonder if that kind of 'firing' ends up in court?

~~~
crazygringo
Why would it?

The reasons for firing someone can be documented just as well by a team as by
an individual.

And remember, these are US companies, so employment is at-will.

~~~
keithpeter
Yes, I'm in the UK. Forget about mob sackings, would not last a second at a
tribunal.

But, in the US are there not even civil remedies? Could someone claim 'mob
rule' or 'whispering campaign'?

~~~
Spooky23
In the US, you have protections if you have a union contract. Otherwise, you
pretty much need to be considered a protected class (varies by state), and
your sacking was related to your class status.

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datalus
So this is why Episode 3 is taking forever...

~~~
zanny
I get the sarcasm, but Gaben said that is exactly why. Nobody came forward
with some great idea to make the game really good, so they never started it,
and instead worked on things like Portal 2.

~~~
planetguy
So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the
cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel
to the company's biggest franchise?

It doesn't matter _that_ much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half
Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in
the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project
like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they
really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on
the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the
water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance
team to stop the existing dam from bursting?

~~~
codexon
It is definitely a flaw for the customers.

But as long as Valve is making enough money, the employees can work on
whatever they want and Gabe won't care.

This is why many of the "unsexy" parts of Valve are in utter disarray. The
Steam chat network and steamcommunity.com goes down at least once a week. And
their security isn't very good. They lost credit card information earlier this
year and they think encrypting your password with Javascript RSA ontop of SSL
is going to help.

~~~
Dylan16807
They lost credit card info? I thought the database itself was breached but not
the servers with the decryption keys for the credit card info.

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fghh45sdfhr3
I just switched from a horrible boss/manager to a not that small private
software company where the developers are very respected and don't have any
managers.

And... while it is a lot better than a bad boss, no management is not ideal in
my experience. Ideally what you want is a _good_ manager.

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Scramblejams
I'd like to see someone look at the mechanics of how boring, menial,
repetitive grunt work is performed under this model. No doubt Valve/Gore/etc
has a lot of that to do, just like any other business. And obviously it gets
done. But I'm interested in how that looks up close. Does this kind of work
tend to find its way to those in the company who don't have a problem rolling
up their sleeves and gutting it out? And if so, do they ever end up resenting
it?

In my current (traditional) workplace, you're responsible for your own grunt
work, there's no pushing it off on someone else. That is enforced by
management, however, and if that traditional management disappeared, I imagine
the distribution of grunt work is one of the first things that would change.

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yuhong
Also see this: <http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304>

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tluyben2
I think a flat-as-possible structure is a good plan, but no boss doesn't
exist. There is always a bunch of bosses. Guided by ego or investments.

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icandoitbetter
I assume everyone has the same amount of equity then?

~~~
vorg
This is the only true way a boss-less organization can work. And I assume you
mean voting equity. Vesting requirements would be OK, but stuff like options
or Google's non-voting shares wouldn't be.

