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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?

#91

Post by wpietri »

Locke1689 wrote: post #77
wpietri wrote: post #29

How do you deal with the 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 unusual…

The 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.

Competence isn't a single axis. Nobody's a genius at everything. E.g., great programming skill does not automatically confer high social skill, good business sense, appreciation of experience design, or ability to wrangle meetings.

If it will help everybody, please forget I mentioned Dunning-Kruger in specific. That's the inspiration for the question, not the heart of it.

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

#92

Post by wpietri »

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?

In 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.

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

#93

Post by wpietri »

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'…

Specialization introduces opportunities for dysfunction, because it breaks a feedback loop. Dev -> QA is one of those. Google "throw it over the wall" to see how common the problem is. E.g.: http://kdc-blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/dont-throw-it-over-wall...

People are skilled economic resources, but they are also status-seeking monkeys that were mainly evolved for foraging, fucking, and fighting. If you don't keep that in mind when setting up an organization, there are risks. I'm asking how Valve handles them.

Regarding dishes, I'm not saying that one has to pick suboptimal solutions just for the sake of symbolism. Google, for example, has industrial dishwashers. But still, everybody picks up their trays, sorts the compost, recyclables, and landfill into proper bins, puts the utensils in the bins for used silverware, and then slots the tray and dishes into a conveyor that feeds into the kitchen. Could Google hire busboys? Sure. But they didn't, and I'd bet it's not an accident.

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

#94

Post by wpietri »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #67
jrockway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sweep…

Agreed.

The high-end design firm IDEO specifically looks for "T-shaped people", by which they mean people who are deep in one area but have a broad set of skills outside their specialty. They believe that creative work is essentially collaborative, and that you can't be a great collaborator without a good understanding of what people are up to and the ability to step in and take a swing at anything that comes up, expert or not.

Another reason to avoid specialization comes, I'm told, from queuing theory. Unless your workload is perfectly regular, specialization leads to bottlenecking and global underutilization.

I'd also consider how Toyota, the world's #1 car company, looks at this. They do an immense amount of crosstraining, and line workers are specifically discouraged from specializing too much. Much of their efficiency comes from bottom-up innovation, which you don't get if people are focused only on their one little piece of the problem. (For more on this in particular, Toyota Kata is a great book.)

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

#95

Post by mkopinsky »

Jach wrote: post #85
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...

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 anything necessarily against small talk, but the time spent in the breakroom is unproductive time.

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

#96

Post by wpietri »

jodrellblank wrote: post #56
brown9-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, which types of employees are not too important to watch the dishes which they dirty?

Where 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.

The 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.

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

#97

Post by wpietri »

jquery wrote: post #61
jsprinkles wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who said nobody could have an automatic dishwasher? But even if you have one, at some places dishes pile up in the sink, and at some places they don't.

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

#99

Post by brown9-2 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #56
brown9-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, which types of employees are not too important to watch the dishes which they dirty?

Where 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.

"Time too valuable" and "too important" seem like synonyms to me.

Both are ways of arguing that you should be exempt from certain tasks that the rest of society / your group is not.

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

#100

Post by cheald »

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...

By extension, developer time is too expensive to be wasted on long lunch breaks, socialization with co-workers, or toasting your bagel in the morning rather than eating it untoasted.

Basic hygiene/workspace maintenance is everyone's job. There are people who specialize, of course (the cleaning staff; if you have them, developers aren't scrubbing toilets and steam cleaning carpets, of course), but it takes literally 5 seconds to rinse a dish and put it in the dishwasher, the act of which improves the entire workspace and contributes to overall order in the environment. If you don't have a dishwasher, it might take upwards of 30 seconds to wash your plate, dry it, and put it away.

Developers are actually in a unique position where they can do their job while doing other things; much of a developer's job involves thinking through problems, and menial physical tasks are actually a pretty great way to get your brain engaged on the problems.

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