4 ms·

A sad day indeed - What are the implications for the open allocation philosophy?

michaelochurch 14y ago
It is being tested. This would be a very interesting (if difficult) time in which to be at Valve. Ultimately, companies have to do this. Businesses can't expand indefinitely and, at some point, contraction becomes part of the process. The hard part, assuming the best of Valve, is how it will describe what it did to preserve its culture while being respectful of those who are affected.
- confluence 14y ago
  Here's what I don't understand about firing. Why not give any warning? Why not give people time to find another job? I mean if they were good enough for you to hire them and sit through the 2-3 week interview/hiring process - it should be fair to give them say a month of warning to tap their network, and hop over to another company. It seem unnecessarily painful and arbitrary to just say - "Your fired. Get out" - especially if they are great people, and all you are doing is shutting down their project. Acts like these remind me of the old courts held by Kings during the medieval times.
  - jzwinck 14y ago
    Because time and time again, disgruntled and often soon-to-be or recently-former employees sabotage or steal from their employers. It's an IT security best practice to disable logins immediately when someone is notified or gives notice of termination. Often during the first HR sit-down. It's cold, but at least remaining employees aren't put at risk.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      I have never seen this happen when someone quits a job, but I am sure it happens in some places.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Well, usually that's part of the severance arrangement: you get to represent yourself as employed for some amount of time. You do want people out of the office once you deliver the news, because even if you fire people fairly, they're not going to be doing useful work. Otherwise, I agree 100%. Many companies use PIPs instead of severance offers in order to build a "performance"-based case against an employee. (This is sometimes part of a layoff being dressed up as a performance-based cut, and sometimes not.) That works out horribly. It's actually cheaper, considering morale issues, to cut a 3-month severance than to put someone on a 2-month PIP, because most people turn toxic during the "walking dead" period of the PIP. What PIPs are about is externalized costs: the HR office claims it "saved money" on severance payments, but the team and manager have to deal with a walking dead employee for 2 months.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      I have never heard of severance being used to artificially extend the termination date (and I expect health insurance vendors would crack down on it), but I have never heard of termination date mattering in terms of getting the next job anyway.
  - _dps 14y ago
    The reason is threefold: morale, liability, and inability to use the worker for any long-term planning. Having a person who knows they will be fired roaming the halls, poorly motivated is an obvious risk for the morale of the remaining employees. And it just drags out the pain of separation, even if the separation is otherwise amicable. Second, there is some risk, no matter how generous the severance package, that the employee will become disgruntled and desire to harm the company. Even if it's a 1 in 1000 chance, the damage that a disgruntled insider can wreak is enormous. Huge downside, very little upside. Finally, if they stay, they are now effectively temps. They can't be used in anything but short-term work because you don't know when they'll get the magic offer and be out the door. A good severance package (say 2 months of salary, plenty of buffer to find a new job) costs just as much as keeping them on for two months after a warning, but has none of the downside risk. The only thing you lose by doing this is the very marginal short-term work you could allocate to them in the interim, which they would be poorly motivated to execute to the top of their ability.
_delirium 14y ago
It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge. Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one? If that becomes the expectation, suddenly people are back to feeling like they have bosses and assignments they need to fulfill to keep their jobs, only it's even worse because those aren't transparent... Perhaps more problematic, there's an incentive to try to get yourself into an "indispensable" position that's core to operations. My read of the existing Valve policy is that they wanted you to ignore those kinds of jockeying-for-position considerations and pick something you were passionate about & good at, as long as it was helpful to Valve somehow.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge. That's why it's imperative that there be only 1 round of layoffs every 5 years or so. One round = shit happens, this sucks, but it's impersonal, so let's get back to work. 2+ rounds = people get paranoid, and typical corporate politics set in. Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one? Open allocation doesn't mean "people work on whatever they want". It means they're individually responsible for making their work useful to the company, and choosing projects that have this effect. It shuts down the traditional middle-management extortion of "you work for me or you don't work here" and gives everyone the same "freedom of the castle" in their choice of projects, but it's not a free-for-all. suddenly people are back to feeling like they have bosses and assignments they need to fulfill to keep their jobs, only it's even worse because those aren't transparent... Actually, that's a false security, in that you can do all your assignments well and please your boss and still get laid off... I know what you mean, though. I agree with you: it's going to be hard for Valve to preserve its culture. These are the kinds of times that test people.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    True, I agree with you that if they can credibly convince the remaining employees that this is a one-time event due to extraordinary circumstances, and they are sure (as much as anything can be sure) it is not going to be repeated for >=5 years, culture is recoverable. I've never seen that happen before, but I also mostly have information about more bureaucratic companies (especially my dad working for a top-100 global conglomerate as I was growing up), so Valve might do it right. One reason to think they might is the lack of lots of layers of management: multiple layoff rounds are often due to trying to cut the least possible to fulfill a target, but using the most optimistic assumptions, so finding out a few months later that, surprise, it wasn't enough. I also agree that one round is pretty much the max you can explain away. Once you've gone to two, nobody believes that this is the last one.
cmccabe 14y ago
The laid off people can keep allocating themselves however they want. They just will discontinue receiving a salary.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Can they allocate in the office?
  - cmccabe 14y ago
    Probably better to relocate them to City 17. It's safer there.
    - thoughtcriminal 14y ago
      Ahh, good times. Thanks for the flashback :)

It is being tested. This would be a very interesting (if difficult) time in which to be at Valve. Ultimately, companies have to do this. Businesses can't expand indefinitely and, at some point, contraction becomes part of the process. The hard part, assuming the best of Valve, is how it will describe what it did to preserve its culture while being respectful of those who are affected.

confluence 14y ago
Here's what I don't understand about firing. Why not give any warning? Why not give people time to find another job? I mean if they were good enough for you to hire them and sit through the 2-3 week interview/hiring process - it should be fair to give them say a month of warning to tap their network, and hop over to another company. It seem unnecessarily painful and arbitrary to just say - "Your fired. Get out" - especially if they are great people, and all you are doing is shutting down their project. Acts like these remind me of the old courts held by Kings during the medieval times.
- jzwinck 14y ago
  Because time and time again, disgruntled and often soon-to-be or recently-former employees sabotage or steal from their employers. It's an IT security best practice to disable logins immediately when someone is notified or gives notice of termination. Often during the first HR sit-down. It's cold, but at least remaining employees aren't put at risk.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    I have never seen this happen when someone quits a job, but I am sure it happens in some places.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Well, usually that's part of the severance arrangement: you get to represent yourself as employed for some amount of time. You do want people out of the office once you deliver the news, because even if you fire people fairly, they're not going to be doing useful work. Otherwise, I agree 100%. Many companies use PIPs instead of severance offers in order to build a "performance"-based case against an employee. (This is sometimes part of a layoff being dressed up as a performance-based cut, and sometimes not.) That works out horribly. It's actually cheaper, considering morale issues, to cut a 3-month severance than to put someone on a 2-month PIP, because most people turn toxic during the "walking dead" period of the PIP. What PIPs are about is externalized costs: the HR office claims it "saved money" on severance payments, but the team and manager have to deal with a walking dead employee for 2 months.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    I have never heard of severance being used to artificially extend the termination date (and I expect health insurance vendors would crack down on it), but I have never heard of termination date mattering in terms of getting the next job anyway.
- _dps 14y ago
  The reason is threefold: morale, liability, and inability to use the worker for any long-term planning. Having a person who knows they will be fired roaming the halls, poorly motivated is an obvious risk for the morale of the remaining employees. And it just drags out the pain of separation, even if the separation is otherwise amicable. Second, there is some risk, no matter how generous the severance package, that the employee will become disgruntled and desire to harm the company. Even if it's a 1 in 1000 chance, the damage that a disgruntled insider can wreak is enormous. Huge downside, very little upside. Finally, if they stay, they are now effectively temps. They can't be used in anything but short-term work because you don't know when they'll get the magic offer and be out the door. A good severance package (say 2 months of salary, plenty of buffer to find a new job) costs just as much as keeping them on for two months after a warning, but has none of the downside risk. The only thing you lose by doing this is the very marginal short-term work you could allocate to them in the interim, which they would be poorly motivated to execute to the top of their ability.

_delirium 14y ago

It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge. Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one? If that becomes the expectation, suddenly people are back to feeling like they have bosses and assignments they need to fulfill to keep their jobs, only it's even worse because those aren't transparent... Perhaps more problematic, there's an incentive to try to get yourself into an "indispensable" position that's core to operations. My read of the existing Valve policy is that they wanted you to ignore those kinds of jockeying-for-position considerations and pick something you were passionate about & good at, as long as it was helpful to Valve somehow.

michaelochurch 14y ago
It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge. That's why it's imperative that there be only 1 round of layoffs every 5 years or so. One round = shit happens, this sucks, but it's impersonal, so let's get back to work. 2+ rounds = people get paranoid, and typical corporate politics set in. Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one? Open allocation doesn't mean "people work on whatever they want". It means they're individually responsible for making their work useful to the company, and choosing projects that have this effect. It shuts down the traditional middle-management extortion of "you work for me or you don't work here" and gives everyone the same "freedom of the castle" in their choice of projects, but it's not a free-for-all. suddenly people are back to feeling like they have bosses and assignments they need to fulfill to keep their jobs, only it's even worse because those aren't transparent... Actually, that's a false security, in that you can do all your assignments well and please your boss and still get laid off... I know what you mean, though. I agree with you: it's going to be hard for Valve to preserve its culture. These are the kinds of times that test people.
- _delirium 14y ago
  True, I agree with you that if they can credibly convince the remaining employees that this is a one-time event due to extraordinary circumstances, and they are sure (as much as anything can be sure) it is not going to be repeated for >=5 years, culture is recoverable. I've never seen that happen before, but I also mostly have information about more bureaucratic companies (especially my dad working for a top-100 global conglomerate as I was growing up), so Valve might do it right. One reason to think they might is the lack of lots of layers of management: multiple layoff rounds are often due to trying to cut the least possible to fulfill a target, but using the most optimistic assumptions, so finding out a few months later that, surprise, it wasn't enough. I also agree that one round is pretty much the max you can explain away. Once you've gone to two, nobody believes that this is the last one.

cmccabe 14y ago

The laid off people can keep allocating themselves however they want. They just will discontinue receiving a salary.

Evbn 14y ago
Can they allocate in the office?
- cmccabe 14y ago
  Probably better to relocate them to City 17. It's safer there.
  - thoughtcriminal 14y ago
    Ahh, good times. Thanks for the flashback :)