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Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

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Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#101

Post by malnourish »

mkopinsky wrote: post #95
Jach wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who haven't heard, hammock-driven development is great: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586 (The short infographic version: http://incanter.org/images/misc/hammock-driven-dev.png ) The mindless job of dishwashing is just another way to think about a problem away from a computer, plus it's useful.

The mindless job of dishwashing is just another way to think about a problem away from a computer, plus it's useful. This works if your coworkers are happy to leave you alone to think. I often pace the halls at work while I think, but the moment I step into the breakroom I get greeted with "Hi Michael how are you so nice to see you how was your weekend" which makes the exercise kind of pointless. Not that I have anyt…

And there's nothing wrong with breakroom time being for, well, breaks.

Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#102

Post by codeonfire »

wpietri wrote: post #44
kabdib wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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).

And 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.

followed 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."

Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#103

Post by gauravk92 »

bdunbar wrote: post #89
gauravk92 wrote: post #2

1. 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…

Related 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 r…

I 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.

Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#104

Post by joezydeco »

loboman wrote: post #19
wpietri wrote: post #11

Do 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_requ...

Does 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...

What if one of your fellow developers is looking for a clean dish and glass and there are none to be had? All he sees is a sink full of dirty shit that nobody has touched.

So you may have saved some time dropping your stuff in the sink, but now you have another developer who's spending the identical amount of time cleaning up...but in addition he's pissed off as well. Sounds like a positive outcome to me.

Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#105

Post by maaku »

lgieron wrote: post #98

Job 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

Presumably because they only hire when they have a need?

Re: Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?

#106

Post by bdunbar »

gauravk92 wrote: post #103
bdunbar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related 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 r…

I 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 d…

They 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.

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