7 ms·

I suspect it might work differently in Valve's case. I'm led to believe that Microsoft had a fixed, conventional hierarchy, where every little group and person

by AimHere 10y ago

I suspect it might work differently in Valve's case. I'm led to believe that Microsoft had a fixed, conventional hierarchy, where every little group and person within the group was backstabbing everybody else to keep their jobs. If their handbook is to be believed, Valve has a much more flat management structure, where it's basically Gabe at the top, sortof, and everyone else doing whatever they think is best for the company, and there's a fluid system where people can move between groups according to their interests and how they perceive they can add value. So, unlike in Microsoft's case, Valve's people have an easy avenue towards putting 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' into practice. Valve has a radically different corporate culture from most other companies in it's space. It doesn't come from the 80s, or indeed almost any other time. Perhaps the stack ranking works a lot better because of it.

Karunamon 10y ago
Part of me wonders if the Valve management structure isn't almost completely to blame for things like their infamously bad customer service. I could see why - dealing with support tickets from irate people is not a particularly interesting (or judging by Steam's runaway success: particularly value adding) activity. Not that I mean to hijack this to complain about Steam, but you have to admit it's a benefit of a traditional management structure: someone is making sure the shitty-but-necessary work gets done.
- AimHere 10y ago
  I suspect it's much more that Valve is an insanely lightweight company for it's customer base. It has something like 330 employees servicing 100 million customers on the go-to PC gaming platform, and a lot of those employees are working on shiny tech and new games. As a comparison, Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put out one new game every 5 years or so. I suspect that if Valve wanted to, it could easily hire lots of people who would be happy to man the customer service helplines and who wouldn't be either able or willing to try to make TF2 levels or whatever. Maybe the management structure is what limits the size of Valve, though.
  - danso 10y ago
    [insert obligatory Half-Life 3 joke/reference here] I've never used Steam's customer support; do they outsource any of it to contractors and/or offshore?
    - wishinghand 10y ago
      They've tried and they discontinued doing so because they felt it was even worse than being apathetic about it.
      - Sebguer 10y ago
        What's your source on that? I'm fairly certain that all of Valve's customer support is outsourced, though not specifically overseas, but to contract support teams.
  - frik 10y ago
    > shiny tech and new games You mean Half Life with it's last full iteration from 10 years ago, and the second episode with a cliffhanger from 2009? Or the Source engine (HL2) which evolved from GoldSource (HL1) which was based on Quake 1 engine (with some parts from Quake 2 engine) - even the Call of Duty engine which aged well too is based on the more modern Quake 3 engine, and I wouldn't consider it shiny in 2016. Rockstar's RAGE engine as well as Crytek engine (StarCitizen, Crysis), and the Frostbite (Battlefield 1) are light years ahead and far superior in every aspect and that's what I would consider shiny tech. Valve is what Valve is today because of the success of steam. They produce little games like Dota2 more for fun than anything else, they gt rich with steam.
    - Johan-bjareholt 10y ago
      Source 2 is in DOTA 2, but that game doesn't show its full potential. Let's just wait for their next game until we say that they are "years behind".
    - AimHere 10y ago
      It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems). Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by any metric you care to choose). At least three of those games involve regular ongoing content infusions. Add in the development of the Source 2 engine, and the Steam Controller, and the work on the SteamOS platform and whatever else on Steam Machines. This is out of the 330 employees that also support those >100 million customers using the service on a regular, possibly daily, basis. As I pointed out, Rockstar uses more manpower than Valve just to create essentially one game every few years. The last GTA game I bought (San Andreas) did have graphics well behind the state of the art too. Even if we assume that those 330 employees are doing nothing but working on Steam, it's still a tiny number compared to the customer base. AirBnB, for instance, has had 2 million listings in it's lifetime, and it has about 2300 employees. Uber has over 6000 employees on about 8 million customers, and both those cases are ones where people aren't typically regular users.
- tikhonj 10y ago
  I mean, it's not like traditional companies—from Google to Comcast—consistently provide great customer support either. So you can't really make strong conclusions about why Valve is having issues there without additional insight; there are too many confounding variables to pin it just on its management structure. This is a common story with people trying something new. If you do the old-fashioned thing—buy IBM, so to speak—and fail, well, these things happen. A lot of factors could have contributed to the problem. But if you try something new, the new thing must be at fault—even though all those other factors apply just as much now as they did in the IBM case.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    That's a fair point, but I'm struggling to think of a way in which it isn't at least partially to blame. The handbook (and Valve insiders) say it's pretty much a do-your-own-thing company. Who'd want to deal with angry users all day?
    - robbiemitchell 10y ago
      If they increase the weekly/monthly pay for people who choose to deal with angry customers, it should reach equilibrium eventually.
    - hodwik 10y ago
      I work for a software company very much like Valve in structure, who has been operating this way since the 70s. Support still gets done, because when you hire you specifically hire people who love doing support. Those people exist, and they get tremendously emotionally involved in the quality of their work, just like anyone else. In every department there are people who struggle with the flat hierarchy and free range to work on what you like, who have a strong emotional need to know who is in charge, and to be told what needs doing. Those people struggle, but they are by no means relegated to any one department -- plenty of them are engineers.
    - Bjartr 10y ago
      Surely there are some people out there who really do have a passion for, and get satisfaction from, dealing with upset customers. The questions left are how hard are they to find and how expensive are they to employ.
- touristtam 10y ago
  Or someone is making sure to look like their are doing some work. I have seen plenty of managers, that are nothing more than a human layer between the CEO/CTO and the engineers.

by AimHere 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago

Part of me wonders if the Valve management structure isn't almost completely to blame for things like their infamously bad customer service. I could see why - dealing with support tickets from irate people is not a particularly interesting (or judging by Steam's runaway success: particularly value adding) activity. Not that I mean to hijack this to complain about Steam, but you have to admit it's a benefit of a traditional management structure: someone is making sure the shitty-but-necessary work gets done.

AimHere 10y ago
I suspect it's much more that Valve is an insanely lightweight company for it's customer base. It has something like 330 employees servicing 100 million customers on the go-to PC gaming platform, and a lot of those employees are working on shiny tech and new games. As a comparison, Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put out one new game every 5 years or so. I suspect that if Valve wanted to, it could easily hire lots of people who would be happy to man the customer service helplines and who wouldn't be either able or willing to try to make TF2 levels or whatever. Maybe the management structure is what limits the size of Valve, though.
- danso 10y ago
  [insert obligatory Half-Life 3 joke/reference here] I've never used Steam's customer support; do they outsource any of it to contractors and/or offshore?
  - wishinghand 10y ago
    They've tried and they discontinued doing so because they felt it was even worse than being apathetic about it.
    - Sebguer 10y ago
      What's your source on that? I'm fairly certain that all of Valve's customer support is outsourced, though not specifically overseas, but to contract support teams.
- frik 10y ago
  > shiny tech and new games You mean Half Life with it's last full iteration from 10 years ago, and the second episode with a cliffhanger from 2009? Or the Source engine (HL2) which evolved from GoldSource (HL1) which was based on Quake 1 engine (with some parts from Quake 2 engine) - even the Call of Duty engine which aged well too is based on the more modern Quake 3 engine, and I wouldn't consider it shiny in 2016. Rockstar's RAGE engine as well as Crytek engine (StarCitizen, Crysis), and the Frostbite (Battlefield 1) are light years ahead and far superior in every aspect and that's what I would consider shiny tech. Valve is what Valve is today because of the success of steam. They produce little games like Dota2 more for fun than anything else, they gt rich with steam.
  - Johan-bjareholt 10y ago
    Source 2 is in DOTA 2, but that game doesn't show its full potential. Let's just wait for their next game until we say that they are "years behind".
  - AimHere 10y ago
    It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems). Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by any metric you care to choose). At least three of those games involve regular ongoing content infusions. Add in the development of the Source 2 engine, and the Steam Controller, and the work on the SteamOS platform and whatever else on Steam Machines. This is out of the 330 employees that also support those >100 million customers using the service on a regular, possibly daily, basis. As I pointed out, Rockstar uses more manpower than Valve just to create essentially one game every few years. The last GTA game I bought (San Andreas) did have graphics well behind the state of the art too. Even if we assume that those 330 employees are doing nothing but working on Steam, it's still a tiny number compared to the customer base. AirBnB, for instance, has had 2 million listings in it's lifetime, and it has about 2300 employees. Uber has over 6000 employees on about 8 million customers, and both those cases are ones where people aren't typically regular users.
tikhonj 10y ago
I mean, it's not like traditional companies—from Google to Comcast—consistently provide great customer support either. So you can't really make strong conclusions about why Valve is having issues there without additional insight; there are too many confounding variables to pin it just on its management structure. This is a common story with people trying something new. If you do the old-fashioned thing—buy IBM, so to speak—and fail, well, these things happen. A lot of factors could have contributed to the problem. But if you try something new, the new thing must be at fault—even though all those other factors apply just as much now as they did in the IBM case.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  That's a fair point, but I'm struggling to think of a way in which it isn't at least partially to blame. The handbook (and Valve insiders) say it's pretty much a do-your-own-thing company. Who'd want to deal with angry users all day?
  - robbiemitchell 10y ago
    If they increase the weekly/monthly pay for people who choose to deal with angry customers, it should reach equilibrium eventually.
  - hodwik 10y ago
    I work for a software company very much like Valve in structure, who has been operating this way since the 70s. Support still gets done, because when you hire you specifically hire people who love doing support. Those people exist, and they get tremendously emotionally involved in the quality of their work, just like anyone else. In every department there are people who struggle with the flat hierarchy and free range to work on what you like, who have a strong emotional need to know who is in charge, and to be told what needs doing. Those people struggle, but they are by no means relegated to any one department -- plenty of them are engineers.
  - Bjartr 10y ago
    Surely there are some people out there who really do have a passion for, and get satisfaction from, dealing with upset customers. The questions left are how hard are they to find and how expensive are they to employ.
touristtam 10y ago
Or someone is making sure to look like their are doing some work. I have seen plenty of managers, that are nothing more than a human layer between the CEO/CTO and the engineers.