8 ms·

Who's the Boss? There Isn't One

140 points by gruseom 14y ago

keithpeter 14y ago
"Firings, while relatively rare, work the same way: teams decide together if someone isn't working out." Wonder if that kind of 'firing' ends up in court?
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Why would it? The reasons for firing someone can be documented just as well by a team as by an individual. And remember, these are US companies, so employment is at-will.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Yes, I'm in the UK. Forget about mob sackings, would not last a second at a tribunal. But, in the US are there not even civil remedies? Could someone claim 'mob rule' or 'whispering campaign'?
    - Spooky23 14y ago
      In the US, you have protections if you have a union contract. Otherwise, you pretty much need to be considered a protected class (varies by state), and your sacking was related to your class status.
- eli 14y ago
  Forget about the legal risks; how does that even work? If I don't think my coworker is doing a good job, am I supposed to secretly whip up enough votes to have them fired?
  - crazygringo 14y ago
    In my experience, it generally becomes clear to everyone if someone is really not working out, and it's already been the subject of hushed conversation. If you need to "whip up votes", this will say more about you than the person you think isn't doing a good job. Borderline cases are trickier, but they are for managers too.
    - eli 14y ago
      I guess so. But I really think this scenario is better for everyone involved if the employee in question has a single boss.
      - planetguy 14y ago
        And of course there always is a single boss even if this fact is hidden; in the case of Valve it's presumably gaben, who owns the majority of the company and must presumably be the final arbiter of everything that happens. I can only assume that the actual firing process involves a lot of hushed talking followed by an approach to gaben followed by a discussion followed by a "sorry, bye". One could in fact suggest that the flat management structure only works when there is exactly one clear owner of the company. Everyone can pretend that everyone gets a say, when it's clear to everyone who really has the final say.
      - alxp 14y ago
        The only time that a "single boss" would know better than the team would be if the single boss was as knowledgeable about the development process as the team was, and knew that the team was, for some reason, cooking up a conspiracy to fire a certain employee who didn't deserve it. Probably pretty rare, especially compared to the number of people who get let go because they just didn't click with their supervisor.
datalus 14y ago
So this is why Episode 3 is taking forever...
- zanny 14y ago
  I get the sarcasm, but Gaben said that is exactly why. Nobody came forward with some great idea to make the game really good, so they never started it, and instead worked on things like Portal 2.
  - gringomorcego 14y ago
    I thought they were working on it, but they have done a massive amount rewrites?
  - planetguy 14y ago
    So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel to the company's biggest franchise? It doesn't matter that much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance team to stop the existing dam from bursting?
    - codexon 14y ago
      It is definitely a flaw for the customers. But as long as Valve is making enough money, the employees can work on whatever they want and Gabe won't care. This is why many of the "unsexy" parts of Valve are in utter disarray. The Steam chat network and steamcommunity.com goes down at least once a week. And their security isn't very good. They lost credit card information earlier this year and they think encrypting your password with Javascript RSA ontop of SSL is going to help.
petercooper 14y ago
To help decide pay, employees rank their peers—but not themselves—voting on who they think creates the most value. Considering how larger society often 'ranks' and rewards people (e.g. celebrities, local politicians), I wonder if these schemes could be a breeding ground for contempt or cronyism.. or, more likely, people who are happy to work at such companies rank compensation as a high priority and mismatches aren't that important? The idea of worker autonomy is implied a lot here. Should that go hand in hand with workers having a direct influence and role in determining their compensation with whoever holds the pursestrings?
- ams6110 14y ago
  I came here to comment on that sentence. I think it's a great idea, at least compared to the alternative of evaluating yourself. That's how it's done where I work. I mean talk about the LEAST objective person you could ask.
- rrreese 14y ago
  While I don't disagree with your thesis, politicians and celebrities are usually unknown, or at least only known through small appearances in the media. You work with your colleagues so I would expect a fairly different dynamic when it comes to making these judgements.
patdennis 14y ago
To me, setups like this -- along with employee owned models like the one at the Mondragon Group -- are the future. It's always struck me as strange that we value democracy so much in our government, but not in our businesses. If you're interested, here's some info on Mondragon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Sivart13 14y ago
I'm super sick of these articles patting Valve on the back for its super-innovative business structure. The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host. Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they were early movers in a very profitable space.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Did they play around before they were successful? Did others try and fail in the same space? Valve didn't invent software downloads.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    Valve is pretty unique in that it was founded by Microsoft millionaires. They had their own personal fortunes to play around with (much like Curt Shilling, except they also had backgrounds in shipping very successful software) while they figured things out. However, while Steam is certainly a very big deal now I think it is silly not to mention Half-Life as a very important part of Valve's early success. Half-Life was very successful and the fact that it, its sequels and the Source engine begat so many related franchises like Counter-Strike is a big part of the reason Steam was able to leverage a huge built-in audience and succeed in its early days while so many would-be-competitors failed.
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      One thing about Microsoft though is that they leverage things like email lists internally to provide many opportunities for participation one might think of as primarily characteristic of these flat organizational models. For example, a lot of the work that was being done on competing with Linux when I was there was taking place on the basis of this sort of flat model. The point I am making is that these wouldn't have occurred to the Valve founders in a vacuum. They were built on top of what they already knew worked. So it's not a matter of playing around but rather trying to copy what you think works well in your past experience and ditching the rest.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
codeonfire 14y ago
I applaud Valve's visionary business organization. As a developer I'm sick of having to work under liars and frauds who have misrepresented their technical ability and knowledge to get into an 'engineering management position' they are not fit for. The costs of job changes is very high to me, and if there were more companies like valve, tech would be a much better place to work.
- nerd_in_rage 14y ago
  This is fairly common (liars and frauds...), though there are some great managers out there: they're just as rare as great developers, and worth their weight in gold when you find them.
jiggy2011 14y ago
You might not have a manager , but you always have a Boss to a certain extent. There is always someone who is named as the companies MD/CEO , someone who has the authority to legally hire you / fire you. So therefor their opinion will always be more important. Also the problem with having the team evaluate someones performance is that teams are vulnerable to cliqueness and groupthink and you may therfor often end up with decisions that are based more on popularity than anything else. In theory at least a good manager should be able to step back from the inter-employee politics and make judgements with some degree of perspective.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  And the CEO can be hired/fired by the Board, and the Board can be hired/fired by the Shareholders...... My experience though is that it is rare for managers to step back and that they are just as susceptible to groupthink as teams are.
- rhizome 14y ago
  There's always someone more invested. Management can pay lip service to flat hierarchies and all that, but at the end of the day structure emerges more or less by consensus, the same way everybody realizes the guy who always farts or something. The common-if-not-genetic "desire to be led" causes people to produce hierarchies for themselves, to produce their leaders. This isn't robotic, but it comes naturally to a lot of people, even if only to confer authority upon that person.
  - alxp 14y ago
    But the difference is that in a structure like Valves the inertia of those structures is much lower. So institutions don't stagnate into structures concerned with preserving their internal structure. Some unit starts to become irrelevant exactly when the people who are the top producers turn their attention elsewhere. The dead weight doesn't exert power to keep itself afloat.
balloot 14y ago
Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones? Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task? Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?
- baby 14y ago
  It wouldn't be a problem if the company was not a +300 employees one. It's baffling me as well.
- goochtek 14y ago
  I imagine you'd advertise for a support specialist in the traditional sense, but once hired, they wouldn't have a job title. Their skills would be in customer support though so that's what they would naturally do. If they tried to work on development, but had no skills, then the group would remove them from the project. They'd then have to go back to support or find something else they can work on with their skill set.
  - planetguy 14y ago
    OK, so who cleans the toilets and empties the garbage? Contractors, presumably -- easier to get non-employees to do this than to incorporate menial staff into your oh-so-flat structure. Reminds me of the way ancient Rome ensured that all citizens were equal by creating a huge subclass of non-citizens. What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.
    - yuhong 14y ago
      It is not impossible to mix flat and hierarchical structures.
icandoitbetter 14y ago
I assume everyone has the same amount of equity then?
- vorg 14y ago
  This is the only true way a boss-less organization can work. And I assume you mean voting equity. Vesting requirements would be OK, but stuff like options or Google's non-voting shares wouldn't be.
tluyben2 14y ago
I think a flat-as-possible structure is a good plan, but no boss doesn't exist. There is always a bunch of bosses. Guided by ego or investments.
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
I just switched from a horrible boss/manager to a not that small private software company where the developers are very respected and don't have any managers. And... while it is a lot better than a bad boss, no management is not ideal in my experience. Ideally what you want is a good manager.
Scramblejams 14y ago
I'd like to see someone look at the mechanics of how boring, menial, repetitive grunt work is performed under this model. No doubt Valve/Gore/etc has a lot of that to do, just like any other business. And obviously it gets done. But I'm interested in how that looks up close. Does this kind of work tend to find its way to those in the company who don't have a problem rolling up their sleeves and gutting it out? And if so, do they ever end up resenting it? In my current (traditional) workplace, you're responsible for your own grunt work, there's no pushing it off on someone else. That is enforced by management, however, and if that traditional management disappeared, I imagine the distribution of grunt work is one of the first things that would change.
yuhong 14y ago
Also see this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304

140 points by gruseom 14y ago

"Firings, while relatively rare, work the same way: teams decide together if someone isn't working out." Wonder if that kind of 'firing' ends up in court?

crazygringo 14y ago
Why would it? The reasons for firing someone can be documented just as well by a team as by an individual. And remember, these are US companies, so employment is at-will.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Yes, I'm in the UK. Forget about mob sackings, would not last a second at a tribunal. But, in the US are there not even civil remedies? Could someone claim 'mob rule' or 'whispering campaign'?
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    In the US, you have protections if you have a union contract. Otherwise, you pretty much need to be considered a protected class (varies by state), and your sacking was related to your class status.
eli 14y ago
Forget about the legal risks; how does that even work? If I don't think my coworker is doing a good job, am I supposed to secretly whip up enough votes to have them fired?
- crazygringo 14y ago
  In my experience, it generally becomes clear to everyone if someone is really not working out, and it's already been the subject of hushed conversation. If you need to "whip up votes", this will say more about you than the person you think isn't doing a good job. Borderline cases are trickier, but they are for managers too.
  - eli 14y ago
    I guess so. But I really think this scenario is better for everyone involved if the employee in question has a single boss.
    - planetguy 14y ago
      And of course there always is a single boss even if this fact is hidden; in the case of Valve it's presumably gaben, who owns the majority of the company and must presumably be the final arbiter of everything that happens. I can only assume that the actual firing process involves a lot of hushed talking followed by an approach to gaben followed by a discussion followed by a "sorry, bye". One could in fact suggest that the flat management structure only works when there is exactly one clear owner of the company. Everyone can pretend that everyone gets a say, when it's clear to everyone who really has the final say.
    - alxp 14y ago
      The only time that a "single boss" would know better than the team would be if the single boss was as knowledgeable about the development process as the team was, and knew that the team was, for some reason, cooking up a conspiracy to fire a certain employee who didn't deserve it. Probably pretty rare, especially compared to the number of people who get let go because they just didn't click with their supervisor.

datalus 14y ago

So this is why Episode 3 is taking forever...

zanny 14y ago
I get the sarcasm, but Gaben said that is exactly why. Nobody came forward with some great idea to make the game really good, so they never started it, and instead worked on things like Portal 2.
- gringomorcego 14y ago
  I thought they were working on it, but they have done a massive amount rewrites?
- planetguy 14y ago
  So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel to the company's biggest franchise? It doesn't matter that much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance team to stop the existing dam from bursting?
  - codexon 14y ago
    It is definitely a flaw for the customers. But as long as Valve is making enough money, the employees can work on whatever they want and Gabe won't care. This is why many of the "unsexy" parts of Valve are in utter disarray. The Steam chat network and steamcommunity.com goes down at least once a week. And their security isn't very good. They lost credit card information earlier this year and they think encrypting your password with Javascript RSA ontop of SSL is going to help.

petercooper 14y ago

To help decide pay, employees rank their peers—but not themselves—voting on who they think creates the most value. Considering how larger society often 'ranks' and rewards people (e.g. celebrities, local politicians), I wonder if these schemes could be a breeding ground for contempt or cronyism.. or, more likely, people who are happy to work at such companies rank compensation as a high priority and mismatches aren't that important? The idea of worker autonomy is implied a lot here. Should that go hand in hand with workers having a direct influence and role in determining their compensation with whoever holds the pursestrings?

ams6110 14y ago
I came here to comment on that sentence. I think it's a great idea, at least compared to the alternative of evaluating yourself. That's how it's done where I work. I mean talk about the LEAST objective person you could ask.
rrreese 14y ago
While I don't disagree with your thesis, politicians and celebrities are usually unknown, or at least only known through small appearances in the media. You work with your colleagues so I would expect a fairly different dynamic when it comes to making these judgements.

patdennis 14y ago

To me, setups like this -- along with employee owned models like the one at the Mondragon Group -- are the future. It's always struck me as strange that we value democracy so much in our government, but not in our businesses. If you're interested, here's some info on Mondragon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Sivart13 14y ago

I'm super sick of these articles patting Valve on the back for its super-innovative business structure. The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host. Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they were early movers in a very profitable space.

Evbn 14y ago
Did they play around before they were successful? Did others try and fail in the same space? Valve didn't invent software downloads.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Valve is pretty unique in that it was founded by Microsoft millionaires. They had their own personal fortunes to play around with (much like Curt Shilling, except they also had backgrounds in shipping very successful software) while they figured things out. However, while Steam is certainly a very big deal now I think it is silly not to mention Half-Life as a very important part of Valve's early success. Half-Life was very successful and the fact that it, its sequels and the Source engine begat so many related franchises like Counter-Strike is a big part of the reason Steam was able to leverage a huge built-in audience and succeed in its early days while so many would-be-competitors failed.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    One thing about Microsoft though is that they leverage things like email lists internally to provide many opportunities for participation one might think of as primarily characteristic of these flat organizational models. For example, a lot of the work that was being done on competing with Linux when I was there was taking place on the basis of this sort of flat model. The point I am making is that these wouldn't have occurred to the Valve founders in a vacuum. They were built on top of what they already knew worked. So it's not a matter of playing around but rather trying to copy what you think works well in your past experience and ditching the rest.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

codeonfire 14y ago

I applaud Valve's visionary business organization. As a developer I'm sick of having to work under liars and frauds who have misrepresented their technical ability and knowledge to get into an 'engineering management position' they are not fit for. The costs of job changes is very high to me, and if there were more companies like valve, tech would be a much better place to work.

nerd_in_rage 14y ago
This is fairly common (liars and frauds...), though there are some great managers out there: they're just as rare as great developers, and worth their weight in gold when you find them.

jiggy2011 14y ago

You might not have a manager , but you always have a Boss to a certain extent. There is always someone who is named as the companies MD/CEO , someone who has the authority to legally hire you / fire you. So therefor their opinion will always be more important. Also the problem with having the team evaluate someones performance is that teams are vulnerable to cliqueness and groupthink and you may therfor often end up with decisions that are based more on popularity than anything else. In theory at least a good manager should be able to step back from the inter-employee politics and make judgements with some degree of perspective.

einhverfr 14y ago
And the CEO can be hired/fired by the Board, and the Board can be hired/fired by the Shareholders...... My experience though is that it is rare for managers to step back and that they are just as susceptible to groupthink as teams are.
rhizome 14y ago
There's always someone more invested. Management can pay lip service to flat hierarchies and all that, but at the end of the day structure emerges more or less by consensus, the same way everybody realizes the guy who always farts or something. The common-if-not-genetic "desire to be led" causes people to produce hierarchies for themselves, to produce their leaders. This isn't robotic, but it comes naturally to a lot of people, even if only to confer authority upon that person.
- alxp 14y ago
  But the difference is that in a structure like Valves the inertia of those structures is much lower. So institutions don't stagnate into structures concerned with preserving their internal structure. Some unit starts to become irrelevant exactly when the people who are the top producers turn their attention elsewhere. The dead weight doesn't exert power to keep itself afloat.

balloot 14y ago

Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones? Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task? Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?

baby 14y ago
It wouldn't be a problem if the company was not a +300 employees one. It's baffling me as well.
goochtek 14y ago
I imagine you'd advertise for a support specialist in the traditional sense, but once hired, they wouldn't have a job title. Their skills would be in customer support though so that's what they would naturally do. If they tried to work on development, but had no skills, then the group would remove them from the project. They'd then have to go back to support or find something else they can work on with their skill set.
- planetguy 14y ago
  OK, so who cleans the toilets and empties the garbage? Contractors, presumably -- easier to get non-employees to do this than to incorporate menial staff into your oh-so-flat structure. Reminds me of the way ancient Rome ensured that all citizens were equal by creating a huge subclass of non-citizens. What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    It is not impossible to mix flat and hierarchical structures.

icandoitbetter 14y ago

I assume everyone has the same amount of equity then?

vorg 14y ago
This is the only true way a boss-less organization can work. And I assume you mean voting equity. Vesting requirements would be OK, but stuff like options or Google's non-voting shares wouldn't be.

tluyben2 14y ago

I think a flat-as-possible structure is a good plan, but no boss doesn't exist. There is always a bunch of bosses. Guided by ego or investments.

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

I just switched from a horrible boss/manager to a not that small private software company where the developers are very respected and don't have any managers. And... while it is a lot better than a bad boss, no management is not ideal in my experience. Ideally what you want is a good manager.

Scramblejams 14y ago

I'd like to see someone look at the mechanics of how boring, menial, repetitive grunt work is performed under this model. No doubt Valve/Gore/etc has a lot of that to do, just like any other business. And obviously it gets done. But I'm interested in how that looks up close. Does this kind of work tend to find its way to those in the company who don't have a problem rolling up their sleeves and gutting it out? And if so, do they ever end up resenting it? In my current (traditional) workplace, you're responsible for your own grunt work, there's no pushing it off on someone else. That is enforced by management, however, and if that traditional management disappeared, I imagine the distribution of grunt work is one of the first things that would change.

yuhong 14y ago

Also see this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304