>Criticism we've seen from ex-employees, however, suggests that while Valve works for the in-group it can be alienating and anxiety-inducing for others. Multiple ex-employees have now said that Valve's non-hierarchical structure is not what the company says it is, and that projects and people are subject to power dynamics and executive decisions just as they are in any other workplace.
My takeaway. At organizations that pretend to be egalitarian, you're golden if you're in the in-group. But if you're outside of that group, you matter zilch.
Basic primate social behavior.
My experience with corporate development has people in 3 buckets:
* beginner or crappy
* moderate or senior-delusional
* seniors/experts
Most of the time the actual seniors are not the people trying to prove themselves or validate their existence. They honestly know how they perform. If the current job doesn't work out they know they can get another easily enough. If anything this camp may even try to hide some of their skills to avoid getting pegged into those crappy tasks you cannot seem to hire anybody else for.
The middle group is composed of people who are honest about their station in life. These honest people are happy where they are and aren't dicking around with office politics, but they do play the game just enough to avoid rocking the boat.
Then there are the dishonest people in the middle group. Sometimes this dishonesty is intentional because they are an imposter... to the point of fraud. Usually, the dishonesty is unintentional. These people are often disillusioned into thinking they are some sort of senior level rock star but curiously wonder why their management completely disagrees. These people are easy to spot because they talk a big game and their work is hilariously out of sync with the hot air.
Warning. Dishonest people are dangerous to your career and will run you over because they are too busy looking out for themselves. If you challenge their dishonesty they may put up a fight that pits you are as the evil aggressor. If you don't challenge the stupidity you can easily get stuck cleaning up their code failure. Pick your battles wisely.
Likewise there are honest beginners who understand their station in life and are eagerly learning to improve their skills. These are the people you dream of mentoring. Then there are also really crappy developers who can't figure out why nobody wants to mentor them or why they always get the worst assignments.
In a hierarchical organization I can usually hide from this stupidity well enough. I can only imagine the horrid levels of back-stabbing that occurs in a flat organization.
Yehuda Katz [1]:
> Any sufficiently complicated company [without] management contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of management.
I think there's merit in a flat structure if the company is inherently small (~10). But once it gets to a medium size company (100+), that usually degrades because the degree of separation is too low.
What a flat structure entails is a star-like structure where everyone is just 1 degree of separation removed from everyone else. This high degree of coupling is bad in design and IRL because it creates high interdependency like the ex-valver mentioned. As others have mentioned, every action you do effects practically everyone else since people are so closely connected.
There's a reason why most structures are tree-like such that people are sufficiently insulated from others. Creating a comfortable degree of separation will allow better separation of concerns in the things you do.
Value created the 2nd greatest lie in tech about "not having a boss is cool" because it attracts people who think they're too smart to be working for someone else. But if you're working for no-one in the company, you're practically working for everyone.
There is a trade off between flat and deep org structure. Deeper org structures build familiarity, process, etc. It works when there is a stable process, but doesn’t turn well.
Shallow orgs can move quicker, but that isn’t free. Because the designated leaders cannot actually manage up to dozens of direct reports, you end up with what I call a “circle” org structure. People get voted on/off the inner circle, and the downstream leaders get disempowered.
I’ve never worked in a place with no explicit command structure. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot see that ever working. Fundamentally it’s a lie, because some individuals have to control the money.
In my experience, shallow orgs also have a half life. They need to be purged every 18-24 months.
Yanis Veroufakis on how pay is determined[1]:
> This is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment.
Yanis Veroufakis. Greece's former finance minister, known for his ability to describe Greece's financial collapse and negotiations with the EU in terms that the average Greek citizen could grasp-- called the Valve's bonus system "complicated."
This in a piece where his position as Valve's economist-in-residence ostensibly meant he was trying his best to paint Valve in a positive light.
Did anyone here decide to work for Valve after reading his interview at Gamasutra[1]? If so I would love to have a glimpse at the decision tree that led down that path. I can only imagine three nodes in that tree, one of which is, "Must eat."
[1] (linked from the article) https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187296/How_Valve_hires_h...
IMHO the proof is in the pudding. What was the last first party title that Valve released? Left4Dead 2? It can't take that many people to make hats or ignore the numerous longstanding issues on Steam. It's not like they are providing tech support or policing the marketplace. What have all of those people accomplished in the last decade?
If there is still a games division in Valve it is exceedingly dysfunctional.
> As for why he does not name Valve directly, Geldreich tells one person that he did not use "the V word" specifically to avoid press.
Trying to avoid press, only to have said press knocking on his door and asking for an interview. Classy.
That being said, it doesn't surprise me a bit. I worked on a startup for a year or so that touted a flat structure. I was lucky to be in the in-group and in the end, our decisions (A couple other senior engineers + me, plus the founders themselves) were the only ones that mattered. Not gonna lie, it was a rather enlightening and profitable period in my life, and when I parted ways I made sure I did so in good terms, but it still leaves me with a slight bad taste in my mouth. Had I not been a childhood friend of one of the co-founders, I'd probably have gotten treated like nothing, or worse yet, not hired at all.
Later on I found out the company had gone bankrupt and the founders had parted ways, probably fishing for that buyout or that VC money they never got. Every once in a while I correspond with the friend that let me in, but we try not to talk about our time in the company.
As a retired (read: old school) IT Exec the "flat" management concept has always intrigued (and terrified) me.
Clearly a military like hierarchy doesn't work well in systems development. Most aspects of systems development are fundamentally creative processes that are somewhat diametrically opposed to being micromanaged. At least this is what I have found in my experience.
As jofreeman.com notes there are fundamental constructs of organizational structure that are critical. Ie: one of the most important (IMHO) is the top down delegation of duties. A good leader ensures critical things like cross training and staff development are achieved.
Bottom line: every organization has the same human dynamic - no matter how it's organized - if you get face time with the leaders, you wield power through association.
> The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment.
Triggered. Are they trying to create an office politics cluster-fuck on purpose?
"various layers of mutual assessment" sounds like the ultimate tit-for-tat game where compensation has no longer any relation to the real-world and is strictly determined by internal politics, especially in the face of a limited total bonus fund.
This doesn't surprise me. Without a hierarchy, one will naturally form anyway and the person that is most agressive will win.
This self-organizing company fad rears it's ugly head under different names every decade or so, and it usually ends in utter disaster.
Clearly "non-hierarchical" is a pr term and the people that work there don't buy the bullshit. From the examples, it sounds extremely hierarchical with the only difference being that the hierarchy is hidden from most employees. I worked at a place like that in sf for a few weeks. It was a giant clusterfuck of clusterfucks. Didn't do anything productive the whole time there. Half the time the internet didn't work and the rest I was required to browse the web and wait around but not allowed to work from home. The server room literally caught on fire. There certainly were bosses and a hierarchy especially at the executive level but we all pretended, as I imagine they do at valve, that there was no hierarchy. Stupid. I left there after being physically hit in the head with a paper ball by some drunk guy before he left to jump in his car and drive home drunk. Got decent severance for being there less than a month. I can't imagine they lasted much longer after that. Flat management just means a hierarchy one can't see and a whole lot of lies to cover it up. I'm amazed valve gets anything done but it sounds like the employees really pay the price for this pr lie.
I worked at a vary traditional company that had a "peer recognition" system you could use to send bonuses for colleagues to reward them for going above and beyond.
Sounds good on paper, and execs love to brag about how this brings people together to recognize excellence and talent and blah blah blah, but what really happens is that people start to condition their work to your likeness to recognize them. If you are known to send bonuses often, your requests are magically fulfilled. If you are not into it, prepare to have support tickets forgotten for months.
In the end, you can't expect much from increasingly large groups of people. Eventually interests will diverge and self interest will prevail, politics will emerge and abuses will happen. Some kind of governance is required to counterbalance that, even if it usually fails catastrophically.
I think self-organizing lead to more secretive hierarchical structures. People's positions are inherently insecure, and there is more pressure to organize cliques for people to secure their positions and then shut out everyone, who isn't part of the clique. I think it inherently ends up reward, whoever is best at political maneuvering.
I've seen various people organize their own hierarchy where certain people take control of the ability to push the code or access to the founder. This control is premised upon getting everyone to maintain the party line, and shunning anyone who deviates from the party line.
I think people who are interested in this subject should look at Sensorica and open value networks.
Self-organizing structures are not necessarily the most effective structures because they are given form by the information technology that the agents are using and are shaped by the constraints placed by the environment.
When there is no mold (the information technology is too shapeless - human speech or something like forum software) then the whole thing will essentially implode once the information grows out of bounds for every individual to keep up with all of it (delegation and separation of concerns is not explicit so it doesn't happen so readily).
Coming up with a sensible communication system that gives shape to organization without restricting the freedom of the agents is an interesting 21st century problem that should get more attention.
When people say that no structure works with few agents it has to do with the fact that humans, when in small groups (tribes), establish informal hierarchies that are very fluid and natural. However at larger scales the group needs to be fragmented into several factions which are also ranked, sometimes explicitly, it becomes important for individuals to signal a visual indication of rank or somehow show which group they belong to (this can be seen throughout history, I recommend a book called "The Dominant Man: The Pecking order in Human Society"). I think the trick is to try and create an "unstructured" network out of units that are small enough that they don't reach the threshold of needing formal structure, these cells can be informal and comfortable (tribes) but compose to create the organisation.
Effectively this means thinking of 'two pizza teams' as individuals when organisations are at scale and abstract out the individual as just a member of his team. Giving the team complete autonomy over how it handles its internal affairs and only judging it based on the work it produces i.e. as an "individual".
Anyone who has read even the tiniest amount outside of HN and Zed Shaw knows that there is no such thing as a group of humans where everyone is equally powerful. It is a stupid fantasy or deliberate lie in all circumstances.
It's worth reading the whole series of tweets, even if twitter is kind of an inconvenient medium for this. I read them a few days ago after a friend recommend the read, was a little disturbed at how closely it matched my experience working at a much less visible and less developed "self-organized" organization. I especially enjoyed his references to "Barons" and "Supporters", with the implication being that the actual dynamic of a decentralized self-organizing company with a few ultra-influencers (founders / board of directors) is much closer that to feudalism than to the ideal of a democratic or syndicalist meritocracy.
Ursula Leguin nailed the problems with "anarchist bureaucracy" in The Dispossessed.
The worst thing about not having an explicit hierarchy is that it allows the emergent tyrants to claim that everyone had equal influence on the decisions, everyone was consulted, and everyone agrees. Then when things go wrong, it wasn't their fault.
I've run into this problem a couple of times. Ultimately it means you can't really discuss problems and you can't place responsibility.
>No matter how hard you work, no matter how original and productive you are, if your bosses and the people who count don't like you, you will be fired soon or you will be managed out.
Is there any organization where this is not true? Every single organization has stories of talented people who lost out because they could not convince the right people of their value to the organization.
Unsurprisingly no seems to have mentioned Mondragon yet, which would derail from the "typical primate behavior" type of comments. Worth noting that while not without its problems, Mondragon is one of the largest employers in Spain.
There certainly are many things wrong in these descriptions. But they aren't unique to flat companies. Tech organizations always self-organize to an extent, but it only becomes painful when the hierarchy and the self-organization don't match up. In a good company, they'll be aware of what is going on, mentor and guide the unofficial leaders as necessary, promote and reward everyone based on how well aligned they are to business goals. The hierarchy will set strategy and deal with money, while the self-organization will figure out the best way to get the creative work done.
It sounds like Valve may need some work. It also sounds like the author may need some work. There are two sides to every story, and we're getting the tweetstorm from someone who has built up years of frustration and is now letting it out.
Sitting in a place where you aren't happy, or where you are envious of the positions of others, isn't a good place to be either personally or for your company. All companies are flawed in some way - you need to find a place where you are accepting of the flaws and can be productive and satisfied with your work anyway. If you aren't in such a place, take action - either invoke change to make it better, or leave.
> At self-organizing firms you might be placed into a huge open office and given massive monitors. This is to normalize all communications and for more effective surveillance. Everything will be monitored either directly by a corporate arm employee, one of their barons or friends.
This. I'm a compsci master-student and currently (since 2017/03) work at a big german tax-software company.
This company is not a self-organizing firm, but has a clear hierarchy (from small groups of 5 ppl to several divisions with up to ~300 ppl. Nevertheless, they tried to adapt some aspects of thr american work big players - such as the open office concept.
The situation there is even worse, as students/interns have to dynamically choose a random workplace every day.
In the open office -filled with ~100 ppl in total- I felt surveillanced and could not concentrate on my current projects as every now and then someone passed my desk and glanced into my code etc.
Lucky for me: I do have a pretty exotic status&job at this company and was able to get a company laptop that enabled me to wander from place to place within the company until I found a pretty isolated room for ~20 ppl (full with software testers). I managed to get access rights for this room and am officially allowed to work there.
Although the ambient noise is worse than in open workplace (those software testers are chatty as shit :-) ...), I'm generally more concentrated and prefer wearing hearing protection now and then, instead of working in an panopticon.
Conclusion: after my graduation I'm looking for a small/middle sized company and consider buzzwords like 'flat hierarchy', open office, free fruit, etc. as red flags.
To me, it sounds like the bonus's and firing policies are huge factors in how things self organize. I'd expect the experience could be quite different depending which pockets of the company you end up in.
I think it would be an interesting thing to analyze, I wonder if anyone at companies like this track this stuff, looking at what structures get created, key people, how things shift, and who lets go,etc.
I'm not sure that the story here is that a non-hierarchical structure is impossible- but rather that just changing the org chart is not really enough. I've heard stories of widespread sexism in 60's hippie communes, for instance. The problem is that you've still got the same old people, just in a new situation. For the change to be real you have to change the culture and the way people see things, but all these people were born and raised within the traditional hierarchies. So they end up recreating them in a different form. But that's not to say that it's impossible to really flatten the org structure- it's just going to take a lot more work and self-reflection than just printing a new employee manual.
At some point over the last 30-40 years, the word “bureaucracy” became a bad word.
I felt the same, until I read “Requisite Organization” by Elliot Jacques. It changed how I run my company. Jacques explains very clearly why hierarchy exists and is needed in any organization of people. It’s instinctual.
On the surface, it does seem to somewhat prevent the proliferation of bullshit jobs as described by David Graeber. I don't have an updated figure on the number of employees at Valve, but it's usually in the 3 figure range.
This stuff makes me cringe. Self organising teams. As soon as that’s old news there will be something else that the consultants start peddling.
Does Valve even make anything other than Steam anymore? Why do they hire developers at all?
Valve hasn't released a game in YEARS... What the hell is the 300 odd programmers doing over there?
Seems as if we are talking in terms of 'self organising/flat' or 'hierarchy/pyramid' with this being a binary choice.
What made Valve go for the 'self organising/flat' option in the first place?
Was this in reaction to the founders experiences of working in technical roles at 'hierarchy/pyramid' style companies?
I think that society currently is quite fearful of the technically able folk who can put people out of work with algorithms and robots. These technically able people can also put processes in place and bring in efficiencies that lead to a bigger business and the need for more people. If you sell twice the amount of stuff you might need twice the amount of people doing customer service, quality control, production, warranty and other things for the new business brought in. However these people need to be thinking people, not the people that did stuff by rote and were automated out of existence by algorithms.
Despite there being a veritable internet based industrial revolution underway society wants to promote people with accounting skills or a law degree to the top of the org chart lest the technically able class end up running the show. In fact techies are only allowed to go into management if they abandon actual tech and keep their hand out of it.
To be honest a lot of office departments could be obliterated with a few well designed website forms and a few API calls. There isn't any need for A.I. or self driving cars for this level of revolution to happen, a lot of people really could be replaced by a few 'if statements'. Then there are the pointless jobs that congeal into existence in any medium sized company that are absolutely not needed.
Yet the people that put the company business logic into code know how the whole thing works. They also have the data. If your tool of business is the phone and your idea of work is shuffling from one meeting to the next then it must be hard to accept that customers prefer the website and even harder to accept that you should be way down the org chart compared to the people that can code. It might not have been cool twenty plus years ago to learn tech so those that didn't can't really accept that they missed the boat on the tech revolution.
I think that this fear of the unknown, this idea that code is voodoo, this insistence on keeping programmers in the basement is the bigger problem than 'flat/hierarchy'. We have ended up with a management class that are about as useful as our politicians and there is real danger that in the Anglo-West we will lose to China bigly like how the Germans and Japanese reamed us out so badly with engineering during the last century.
The way any big corporation fails - there is that strange notion that Managers know better than Engineers and can make technical Decisions.
Good engineers, who love coding, can design a big system, are unlikely to rule over the Design. It'll be bad engineers, now Managers, with good political skills, that got promoted because its their only way to survive, being otherwise useless.
It is totally upside-down, hence the mess, unless you have Bill Gates at the top, true coder.
The site is not accessible unless I authorise all advertizement companies. There is no way to scroll down the list of advertizers on iPads. The only button accessible is accept all on top of the list.
Is there any mirror of the article without the advertizement nd tracking trap ?
Lobsters
An essay written in 1971, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" really nails the failure forces that are active against structureless orgs, and well as how you can combat those forces.
It's one of those essays that is just plain important to read for life, because you will see the forces it describes everywhere around you, for the rest of your time on earth.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm