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> Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective structure. I wouldn't call 300 people a small number for the size of a company. I
by epsylon 13y ago
> Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective structure.
I wouldn't call 300 people a small number for the size of a company.
In fact, Jeri Ellsworth addresses this point (I'm quoting the transcript by develop-online [0]):
"Their structure probably works really well with about 20 people, but breaks down terribly when you get to a company of 300 people. Communication was a problem. That's where management… Well if I had anything to do differently, would be to make sure a layer of management could do communication correctly."
So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure.
[0] https://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-High-School https://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-hir...
- EthanHeilman 13y ago>So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure. Such scaling problems are not binary. They are probably less effective than they were at 20 people but they would be even less effective at 30,000. One way we might look at this is to assume (incorrectly) that a flat hierarchy is a complete graph which is the way most small informal groups are run. A complete graph of 30 people has 435 edges. A complete graph of 300 people has 44,850 edges. A complete graph of 3000 people has 4,498,500 edges.