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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?

#61

Post by jquery »

jsprinkles wrote: post #51
loboman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is this what brogramming sounds like? Too much Rockstar to rinse off the plate, leave it for somebody else? Are we engineers or high schoolers these days?

Yes, because only male developers might not want to spend their valuable work hours scrubbing dishes because the company is too cheap to have a working dishwasher.

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

#62

Post by jrockway »

wpietri wrote: post #26
loboman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Well if developer time is that valuable, I think Mel Brooks has an innovation for your office that you should look into: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0 More seriously, I think that allegedly financial calculation often ends up covering up for laziness, arrogance, and hierarchies of social class. Make sure the code works? That's QA's job. Make sure it runs well? Oh, that's ops; file a ticket. Wash my own d…

If you have a unique skill, it makes sense to pay you to mostly utilize that skill. If you're great at programming and terrible at system administration, why should you have to administer your servers, especially when there are people that are great at it?

Testing is a little different: most professional software engineers consider testing an intrinsic part of software engineering, and so would never say, "that's QA's job". (But even then, there are some especially hairy testing problems that would benefit from a specialist's touch.)

Anyway, I think you're conflating dysfunctional organizations with specialization. In your example, developers say "that's operations' job" because they are lazy and don't care about maintaining a sane production environment. In a functional organization, they'll say the same thing, but they'll mean, "that's operations' job because they will do a better job than me". It sounds the same, but it means something entirely different.

(The same goes for washing dishes. I could wash my own dishes, but I would use a lot of water. If we batch up all the dishes in a 3000-person company each day and wash them in an industrial dishwasher, it will take less aggregate time and use much less water and energy. So while washing your own dishes may be symbolic of teamwork, it's actually a dumb thing to do.)

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

neilk wrote: post #33
loboman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Please shoot me if I ever start thinking my brain is too valuable to waste on basic hygiene. There is a dishwasher. It's five seconds to rinse your dish and put it away. At the WMF, there is someone whose job it is to make sure the kitchens are clean and the dishwasher gets run, but that's only effective because most people exercise common sense.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by jrockway »

wpietri wrote: post #15

In 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 numbe…

How 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.

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

#65

Post by jrockway »

wpietri wrote: post #17
brentpayne wrote: post #5

How 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?

I 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.

If I can do whatever I want, I would change lightbulbs when broken. Why would I want to work under a burned-out light bulb. (Pedantic note: light bulbs are pretty much illegal now, so I assume you mean fluorescent tube or something.)

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

#66

Post by jrockway »

matznerd wrote: post #54
appleaintbad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't a K-cup, it probably isn't fresh enough. Also, the place I just left had awful coffee. It was so bad that once when a coworker cleaned the grime that built up in the coffee pot for the past few years of use, it made the coffee taste worse. When grime is the only thing making the coffee better, you need to get better coffee.

get http://www.craftcoffee.com delivered to you like our office does

No, people will still complain. At Google, we have Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and Gorilla coffee. People complain that the coffee is not fresh enough (unused coffee is only thrown away every 14 days), that the blends purchased are not acceptable (blended coffee is evil, donchaknow), and that the full-auto single-serving coffee machines tend to retain dust from the past user and hence mix a tiny bit of Blend A with Blend B.

(I've personally complained about how some of the espresso tampers are not heavy enough, and how the Barista station closes at 3:55 instead of 4:00. If you give a moose a muffin...)

Coffee is hard :)

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

#67

Post by erikpukinskis »

jrockway wrote: post #62
wpietri wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if developer time is that valuable, I think Mel Brooks has an innovation for your office that you should look into: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0 More seriously, I think that allegedly financial calculation often ends up covering up for laziness, arrogance, and hierarchies of social class. Make sure the code works? That's QA's job. Make sure it runs well? Oh, that's ops; file a ticket. Wash my own d…

If you have a unique skill, it makes sense to pay you to mostly utilize that skill. If you're great at programming and terrible at system administration, why should you have to administer your servers, especially when there are people that are great at it? Testing is a little different: most professional software engineers consider testing an intrinsic part of software engineering, and so would never say, "that's QA'…

I would love to see some evidence that complete and total specialization is the maximum possible way to achieve business goals.

I know in my work, I've found that doing a variety of things, including "grunt work" leads many times to great works of creativity and discoveries of new ways to be more efficient. If you have a Ph.D. sweeping floors, you can bet they're going to take a stab at making the entire "floor sweeping" problem disappear. Not so much for a professional janitor.

Putting your head down and focusing is great when you have a mountain of obvious work to do. But that's not always what the business needs.

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

#68

Post by erikpukinskis »

jquery wrote: post #59
lifeformed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of living with roommates. It takes literally 10 seconds to wash (not just rinse, but entirely wash) a bowl and a spoon. Nothing has to stay in the sink - just wash things right when you're done using them.

A proper dishwasher spends 20-60 minutes throwing water at dirty dishes. 10 seconds leaves tons of bacteria and dirt still on the dish.

It's good practice for your immune system, for later in life when the real shit hits the fan.

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

#69

Post by codeonfire »

wpietri wrote: post #15

In 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 numbe…

So 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?

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

#70

Post by rory096 »

codeonfire wrote: post #69
wpietri wrote: post #15

In 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 numbe…

So 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?

Sounds like each specified a percentage of the pool they deserved, and the percentages added up to >300.
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