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Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?
- gauravk92 14y ago1. How do you handle the logical conclusion of letting your workers do whatever they want, they don't do anything? This may not apply to all employees, but it surely applies to at least one, and I wanted to know specifically how you might handle that situation. 2. What sort of system do you have to address problems with the unconditional hierarchy? For example, if an employee disagrees with Gabe, who wins and how is that handled? UPDATE: addition to question #1
- strager 14y ago> they don't do anything I don't know about you, but not doing anything is boring to me. Working is so often much more fun than doing nothing.
- wpietri 14y ago100% this. To herd cats, you open tuna cans. Real management isn't telling people what to do. It's helping people find the intersection between what they want to do and what customers need, and then supporting them. That strikes me as especially easy at Valve, where the whole point is to create something that other people enjoy. If you can't find fun somewhere in the vast space of "create something fun," you're dead inside.
- gauravk92 14y agoI understand the parent comments point as well as yours. I realize this won't be an issue for most of the employees, but bad apples sneak through everywhere, it's human nature, and I specifically wanted to understand how they might handle that.
- wpietri 14y agoAh, got it. I thought you were talking about all workers rather than the occasional bad apple. Great question.
- lifeformed 14y agoWell, "creating something fun" is not an easy thing to do. When you get down to pure game design there can be wildly divergent viewpoints of what to do. Should we make this new game more interesting for hardcore players, or for casuals? Is increasing accessibility of the game worth the decrease in depth?
- gauravk92 14y agoGood point, I made an amendment.
- bdunbar 14y agoRelated 1. How do you handle jobs that suck, but must be done. Like backups ... nobody really likes the job of 'backup guy'. It's boring. Tedious. A backwater of a role with no meaningful career progression. Also - the software typically sucks, and is expensive. Also - the hardware typically sucks, and is super-expensive. But someone must pay attention to backups because stuff happens and you might actually need to recover everything from tape to get the company online. How does Valve get the tedious, boring, nit-picky, utterly necessary stuff done?
- gauravk92 14y agoI would imagine no one at valve is an expert at managing backups for hundreds of machines and keeping an appropriate level of redundancy. Valve is definitely a company that is going to focus on where it can do better then others. They probably use many outside services to handle the things they don't want to have to worry about or specialize in. Other companies will handle it better because that's their focus, Gabe definitely gets that.
- bdunbar 14y agoThey probably use many outside services We experimented with out-sourcing a few years ago. It was a disaster: the out-sourcing company was 'fair-to-excellent' with standard products and services. But we're a manufacturing company. The majority of our software is specific to our industry. Suddenly the vendor is dealing with dozens of apps they've never even heard of. And - whoops - some of the guys who dealt with that stuff are laid off. The rest of us got calls from confused techs in Austin plaintively asking what in the heck was the UmptyFratz service and who can restart it? Long way of saying that - I imagine - some of what Valve does is industry specific and hard to out-source.
- teach 14y agoIs it known that Valve employees frequent HN? I'm not sure why this story is here.
- Alterlife 14y agoSometimes, if you don't know who to ask, it makes sense to air the question as loudly as you can and hope it reaches your audience.
- connor 14y agoThis seemed like a curious enough question I had that followed from the original Valve Flat Org HN post. I imagined others might share my curiosity. It's possible no Valve employee reads HN (unlikely), but at the very least someone might point us towards a Valve employee answer elsewhere.
- flavien_bessede 14y agoNext up: "Poll: How many people consider switching to Valve organization?"
- RegEx 14y agoCue the Agile coaches switching over to teaching "Valve". "Refinery" meetings are held in a format called the "Engine room".
- kabdib 14y agoAnd they're all going to say, "We're just like Valve's flat organization, except here we do it a little differently because we have managers, and a CEO and a few VPs, and ..." (A cow-orker of mine went to Valve last year; he's incredibly, insufferably happy).
- wpietri 14y agoAnd after that, you'll see the inevitable HN posts about how the "Valve" adoption at their company didn't work, which proves the whole idea was bankrupt to begin with, and probably a conspiracy to increase book sales, consulting rates, and the amount of underpants collected by the gnomes.
- codeonfire 14y agofollowed by "a lot of people say they're doing Valve, but almost no one is doing Valve correctly. If they were really doing Valve, it would work."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- scrod 14y agoThey would never do this because only a manager would hire someone like an "Agile coach". A fully flat organization has no managers, hence, the hired consultant would be forced to advocate for the dismissal of his own client.
- brentpayne 14y agoHow many Valve employees does it take to change a light bulb? Who orders the light bulbs and who decides when and where it is to be installed?
- strager 14y agoDo you hire a light bulb changing contractor to change light bulbs in your own home?
- ddonnelly 14y agoMy time is too important to spend time hiring light bulb changing contractors.
- wpietri 14y agoI don't think this question should be downvoted. There's a lot of unsexy infrastructure stuff that just needs doing. If people can really do whatever they want, what happens to the stuff that nobody wants to do? Lightbulbs are a great example.
- evoxed 14y agoThis is a common "issue" in design studios and the like. I've always been the kinda guy who enjoys using a lunch break to clean/fix up/replace the small things, because it's just what I'd do at home. Obviously there are places where people feel like they're dumb tasks, but I'd imagine that as the quality and mutual respect goes up (as in a place like Valve) there are more people likely to behave similarly.
- wpietri 14y agoI would like to imagine that. But you run up against the "neatest roommate" problem. Suppose you share a house with a half-dozen people. You are all good people, so whenever something seems messy to you, you clean it up. Problem solved, right? In my experience, definitely not. Because the person who's best at perceiving mess tends to clean things up before other people notice anything. That person feels like they're doing more of the work. Because they are. And they feel unappreciated, because people generally don't notice the messy-to-clean transition. I'm a recovering sysadmin; I burnt out because I grew so very tired of caring about things that people never noticed until they were broken. What they said then wasn't, "Gosh, I really appreciate how well the printer has worked these many months." They said, "God damn it! The printer's broken just when I need it the most!" I'd love to know how stabby Valve's sysadmins and IT people feel.
- tomasienrbc 14y agoI know this question doesn't have bias, so I'm implying you're saying the organization doesn't work, but to me the results speak for themselves. Valve/Steam is just killing it right now, beating out huge, more established players in the gaming world. Doing something right.
- wpietri 14y agoDo the dishes in the office sink get washed? If so, by whom? And how clean is the kitchen area? This may seem like a joke, but the answer says a lot about an organization. For example, last time I was at the Wikimedia Foundation offices, this sign was above the sink: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:These_dishes_may_require_cleanup.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:These_dishes_may_requ...
- loboman 14y agoDoes this assume that developers should wash the dishes? If so, why is that a good idea? I would assume that developer time is too expensive for that...
- brown9-2 14y agoIn your opinion, which types of employees are not too important to watch the dishes which they dirty?
- jodrellblank 14y agoWhere did you get "important" from? He said 'time too valuable'. This is a practical salary versus return on work done calculation, not a human worth judgement.
- wpietri 14y agoThe two aren't totally separable. Status calculations are a fundamental human behavior, and social systems tend to move in directions of class and hierarchy. (For more on this, the books Chimpanzee Politics by DeWaal and Impro by Johnstone are readable and very compelling. Consider also that absolute salary differences matter less for happiness than relative salary differences, which is economically insane but very human.) I strongly believe that a lot of corporate idiocy is driven by hidden status games. E.g., the way that managers often have status in proportion to the size of budget or staff, which gives an incentive away from maximum efficiency. Unconventional approaches to management push against this. E.g., the notion of servant leadership, or Toyota's explicit focus on management's responsibility to support the people doing the real work. Valve presumably has something similar.
- wpietri 14y agoIn the dark days when I worked for financial traders, once a year the company would set aside a pool for bonuses and then try to figure out how to share it out based on contribution. If you went around and asked people what percentage they deserved and then added them up, the total would never be less than 300%. I don't think most people are quite as bad about this as financial traders, but I imagine no group's numbers add up to 100% exactly. What's the dynamic like at Valve, and how do you make sure people feel fairly treated?
- jrockway 14y agoHow would it be advantageous for anyone to ask for less than 100%? Nobody is ever going to get more than they ask for, after all.
- codeonfire 14y agoSo you are saying the requested bonuses were 300% of the pool set by management? There are two possibilities. One, the expectations could be too high. Second, the pool could be too small. Your assuming only the first is correct?
- rory096 14y agoSounds like each specified a percentage of the pool they deserved, and the percentages added up to >300.
- wpietri 14y agoIn this particular case, the bonus pool was basically the profit of the firm, so the pool was not variable. But my point was more about the perception of one's own contribution versus everybody else. Another way to look at it: a friend's marriage counselor said that if each member of the couple thinks they're doing 50% the work, that leaves another 50% of the work undone.
- talentdeficit 14y agoi don't work at valve, but i work at an organisation with a very similar management structure (there is none) and payment scheme (autonomous self organizing teams are paid by clients and distribute payments as negotiated by the group). we have virtually zero overhead and minimal residual or recurring income so we are not identical to valve, but their employee handbook could very easily be ours we have a number of 'bad apples', but they generally find themselves ostracized very quickly. as we have no downside income guarantees (we are organized as a group of independent contractors), people very quickly fall out of the organisation i assume valve accomplish similar by minimizing payments to individuals who act in bad faith. as they are probably primarily financially motivated and valve is likely a great entry on a cv, i'm sure they don't stick around long
- wpietri 14y agoThat is incredibly interesting. If you're uncomfortable saying who you work for in public, please contact me. I would love to understand more about your organization and put it on my list of potential companies to hire.
- jscn 14y agoI second this, would love to hear more. I'm really interested in alternative organisational structures of this kind.
- Paul_Morgan 14y agoBest Buy has something similar called ROWE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE The business measures performance instead of hours. At Valve the performance appears to be measured as 'shipped'. I'd also guess that Gabe is practicing his own version of servant leadership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
- sycr 14y agoHow's that working out for Best Buy?
- Paul_Morgan 14y agoI couldn't say. But it's implemented at the company headquarters and they are experimenting with it in the stores. They haven't gone back on their commitment to it. It's also been implemented at The Gap: http://www.gorowe.com/2009/09/14/gap-goes-rowe/ http://www.gorowe.com/2009/09/14/gap-goes-rowe/ FYI, this is just my opinion and doesn't represent the views of my employer.
- mtodd 14y agoA Rails consultancy (I used to work for) in Atlanta called Highgroove also implements ROWE, going so far as to incorporate it into the way they deliver to the customer. It was a great way to work and operate as a business. http://highgroove.com/ http://highgroove.com/
- righteous 14y agoROWE at Best Buy was great. Friday 1pm, no more meetings and work is done for the week? Bail. Or, take a day and work from home. It got employee's and managers focused more on outcomes than duration of activity.
- codeonfire 14y agoROWE isn't similar. You still have people telling everyone what to do. Only now the deadlines and expectations will be ridiculous. "I don't care how many hours it takes you this week, just get it done! We only care about results here.". The valve method would imply that middle manager would not exist.
- cypherpunks01 14y agoFor more context, here's their employee handbook that explains their flat org: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
- _casperc 14y agoThat was an incredibly inspiring read. Now I want to work there more than anything, but I don't feel worthy. Off to make myself more T-shaped. Edit: I would still love to hear how it actually is to work there in practice though.
- wpietri 14y agoHow do you deal with the Dunning-Kruger effect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect The short version is that people who are good at things generally get that way because they have a strong ability to tell good work from bad. People who are bad at things can't tell the difference, so they a) have a hard time improving, and b) think their low-quality work is pretty swell. Is your culture perhaps unusually frank? Alternatively, is it very supportive in a way that makes critique more comfortable? Might you have a formal (or informal?) mentorship program so that people get useful feedback? Are there peer groups that meet around particular skill areas? E.g., do visual artists get together regularly to show recent work and discuss it?
- mgallivan 14y agoI don't think you explained the effect correctly. I think it's: lower skill -> higher confidence in ability (overestimation) higher skill -> lower confidence in ability (underestimation)
- wpietri 14y agoI agree my summary was a bit breezy. But I think an essential component of their theory is the focus on domain knowledge and metacognition, not skill as it is normally used. Consider the title of their first paper: "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". In the conclusion, they write, "We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it." Anyhow, for those who want their full take, the original paper is here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.2655&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64....
- Locke1689 14y agoThe most important horn of the effect is dependent upon hiring incompetent people. What makes you think they hire incompetent people? Moreover, this question could also be reduced to a question about their hiring in general.
- wpietri 14y agoHow do you settle disputes? In hierarchical organizations, people often look to authority figures to decide between competing alternatives. How does Valve avoid or deal with deadlock, forking, cliques, cabals, butthurt sulking, and other common group dysfunctions?
- wpietri 14y agoHow many hours a day does the average Valve person spend in meetings? How are they organized? I've looked into some co-ops, including San Francisco's venerable (and very profitable) Rainbow Grocery. One of the biggest complaints is the amount and/or difficulty of meetings, but they see them as necessary to settle issues with sufficient buy-in from all stakeholders. How does Valve minimize that pain?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- FreakLegion 14y agoHave you read Valve's article on cabals? It's fairly old, but should give you some insight into how they approach meetings. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_cabal_valves_...
- irollboozers 14y agoThis is actually great, I had the same idea last week coming across that handbook, so hopefully someone at Valve can shed some light. I was mostly curious about project management. It seemed like everyone could be very fluid going from one project to another, or even proposing one on the spot and going on to execute it. There has to some sort of enforcement for this though. Are there expectations, do the self-selected leaders lay out milestones or goals, what happens when those aren't met? Valve doesn't necessarily seem to have a reputation for having too many product delays vs. always shipping on time. They definitely seem to have constant flow of different products getting out the door though. Hopefully someone answers, otherwise I might just hitchhike across the lake into Bellevue and see if I can meet with someone there. Very curious to learn what makes their system actually work well.
- richcollins 14y agogithub has a similar structure. Maybe a githubber will chime in.
- lemming 14y agoAnother notable company that does this is Gore & Associates (of GoreTex fame): (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates) Unlike the traditional management structure that Bill Gore had experienced at DuPont, he proposed a flat, lattice-like organizational structure where everyone shares the same title of “associate.” There are neither chains of command nor predetermined channels of communication. Leaders replace the idea of “bosses.” Associates choose to follow leaders rather than have bosses assigned to them. Associate contribution reviews are based on a peer-level rating system. I always assumed this sort of org could only function with relatively small companies (e.g. Github, maybe even Valve) but Gore has 9000 employees - pretty impressive.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoGore divides the company into business units, each in their own building with their own parking lot and staff. In fact, they know when to divide a growing unit - when people start parking on the grass (the parking lot gets full). So no not 9000 people; 90 units of 100 people ( or something like that)
- threepipeproblm 14y agoI think it's sad that so many commenters genuinely can't seem to fathom anything positive happening without a hierarchical / top-down / command-and-control approach. Especially when a few billion years of evolution has basically never selected that approach (something like a bee colony may seem similar, but is radically different... it's not like there is a manager bee for every 5-7 worker bees). Please don't vote me into oblivion for saying this.
- lgieron 14y agoJob postings on Valve site tend to be very specific about the person's duties. To me, it seems to be in contradiction with being able to choose how one contributes to the company. http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html
- maaku 14y agoPresumably because they only hire when they have a need?
- serverascode 14y agoI go home for lunch. So I wash my dishes at home because that's where I use them.