4 ms·
> Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company This reminds me of just a few years ago when I was arguing with some
by trustfundbaby 14y ago
> Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company
This reminds me of just a few years ago when I was arguing with someone about this, when 37signals was in their infancy and were kinda trucking along with the same 'bossless' philosophy. I was trying to show that it could be successful and the person hacked me off at the knees by saying "come talk to me when they get to 100 employees" ... well Github and Valve seems to be doing just fine with that philosophy ... but now the goalposts have suddenly shifted.
I wonder if they get to 50,000 people (how many companies even have this many people anyway?) if somebody isn't going to pop up and go "50k people? pffffft ... come get me when they have 200,000 employees!"
- caw 14y agoThere's a number of companies with that many, particularly if you do manufacturing in addition to tech. Intel - 100,100 Dell - 110,000 HP - 349,600 Google - 54,604 Microsoft - 90,000 Apple - 60,400 (I don't know what fraction is retail sales) Numbers from Wikipedia, which I assume are from the annual reports these companies put out.
- suppressingfire 14y agoIBM - 433,362
- mkramlich 14y agoI think if you're very picky about having just the right people at the "bottom", and just the right people/person at the "top" (because even in Valve's supposedly flat hierarchy there's still someone on top: Gabe) then it can go up quite aways. But yes, it's probably inevitable that it eventually fails and devolves into department, fiefdoms, politics, etc. You can push it out but can't put if off forever. But you know what? That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of companies that can be viable and successful with 5-100 employees. Not everything has to be a megacorp.