Seems as if we are talking in terms of 'self organising/flat' or 'hierarchy/pyramid' with this being a binary choice. What made Valve go for the 'self organisi

Seems as if we are talking in terms of 'self organising/flat' or 'hierarchy/pyramid' with this being a binary choice. What made Valve go for the 'self organising/flat' option in the first place? Was this in reaction to the founders experiences of working in technical roles at 'hierarchy/pyramid' style companies? I think that society currently is quite fearful of the technically able folk who can put people out of work with algorithms and robots. These technically able people can also put processes in place and bring in efficiencies that lead to a bigger business and the need for more people. If you sell twice the amount of stuff you might need twice the amount of people doing customer service, quality control, production, warranty and other things for the new business brought in. However these people need to be thinking people, not the people that did stuff by rote and were automated out of existence by algorithms. Despite there being a veritable internet based industrial revolution underway society wants to promote people with accounting skills or a law degree to the top of the org chart lest the technically able class end up running the show. In fact techies are only allowed to go into management if they abandon actual tech and keep their hand out of it. To be honest a lot of office departments could be obliterated with a few well designed website forms and a few API calls. There isn't any need for A.I. or self driving cars for this level of revolution to happen, a lot of people really could be replaced by a few 'if statements'. Then there are the pointless jobs that congeal into existence in any medium sized company that are absolutely not needed. Yet the people that put the company business logic into code know how the whole thing works. They also have the data. If your tool of business is the phone and your idea of work is shuffling from one meeting to the next then it must be hard to accept that customers prefer the website and even harder to accept that you should be way down the org chart compared to the people that can code. It might not have been cool twenty plus years ago to learn tech so those that didn't can't really accept that they missed the boat on the tech revolution. I think that this fear of the unknown, this idea that code is voodoo, this insistence on keeping programmers in the basement is the bigger problem than 'flat/hierarchy'. We have ended up with a management class that are about as useful as our politicians and there is real danger that in the Anglo-West we will lose to China bigly like how the Germans and Japanese reamed us out so badly with engineering during the last century.