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I'm an anarchist at heart so I love these types of stories but I'm also very pragmatic. I work for a very large multi-national concern and I know that eventuall

I'm an anarchist at heart so I love these types of stories but I'm also very pragmatic. I work for a very large multi-national concern and I know that eventually you're going to get employees who are more concerned with things at home than their job. For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy. No "operating system" in the world has a cure for that. Personally I know I would thrive in a management-free environment, if anything has been positive in my reviews it has been that I am self managing and do not need any guidance to find things to do. But people around me do their best to avoid hard work all day long. They have what we in Sweden call "tillsvidareanställning" and that means it's practically impossible to fire them. Seems to me that Holacracy is great if you manage to find driven employees who care about your business. I'm not saying they should dedicate their lives to it but they should feel pride in what they do and a sense of responsibility for their company. So far I've only seen this in small startups, and even then it wasn't prominent.

aryastark 13y ago
I do not even believe Valve is immune to this, despite the hoopla. I've worked on games on my own. I know that there are a 1000 different parts of a game that you simply do not want to touch. The tedious bugs and polish, that every video game has to have. The endless hours of play testing. Even working for myself, where I have total stake in the product, I have to force things. Startups are a special breed of crazy. Initially they emulate a dorm-like environment, where you go and hang out with your friends and make "killer" this-or-that. But in the end, it's just a sham. The founders are there to make money. And in Silicon Valley terms, that means urgent breakneck growth. No startup culture survives the onboarding of an HR department and the associated growing pains.
VLM 13y ago
"For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy." The implied assumptions, such as the above, are more than a little suspect, sending the resulting calculations based on them off the rails.
NoodleIncident 13y ago
I heard a great quote about this some time ago that I'll have to paraphrase. I'm not sure if it was about Valve, or from a Dilbert comic: "Managers exist to protect the company from their poor hiring decisions."

aryastark 13y ago

I do not even believe Valve is immune to this, despite the hoopla. I've worked on games on my own. I know that there are a 1000 different parts of a game that you simply do not want to touch. The tedious bugs and polish, that every video game has to have. The endless hours of play testing. Even working for myself, where I have total stake in the product, I have to force things. Startups are a special breed of crazy. Initially they emulate a dorm-like environment, where you go and hang out with your friends and make "killer" this-or-that. But in the end, it's just a sham. The founders are there to make money. And in Silicon Valley terms, that means urgent breakneck growth. No startup culture survives the onboarding of an HR department and the associated growing pains.

VLM 13y ago

"For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy." The implied assumptions, such as the above, are more than a little suspect, sending the resulting calculations based on them off the rails.

NoodleIncident 13y ago

I heard a great quote about this some time ago that I'll have to paraphrase. I'm not sure if it was about Valve, or from a Dilbert comic: "Managers exist to protect the company from their poor hiring decisions."