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Can Valve's 'Bossless' Company Model Work Elsewhere?
glowend writes "I just listened to a fascinating podcast with Valve's economist-in-residence, Yanis Varoufakis, about the unusual structure of the workplace at Valve where there is no hierarchy or bosses. Teams of software designers join spontaneously to create and ship video games without any top-down supervision. Varoufakis discussed the economics of this Hayekian workplace and how it actually functions alongside Steam — a gaming platform created by Valve. I kept wondering: assuming that his description of Valve is accurate, can this model work for other tech companies?"
Too many entrenched managers who provide nothing to the company.
Just look at the number of Half-Life games they churn out. I haven't even finished HL6 and HL7 is coming out next week!
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
But only on Valve Time.
There must be bosses or no one will have a place to sit and work.
Isn't this how most companies work? In order to get anything done, you form an ad-hoc group of capable people to work on a project.
Seems to me the only difference is that in a normal company that group then has to figure out how to outflank the management hierarchy in order to complete the project, whereas this model skips that step.
WL Gore & Associates, which makes Gore-tex and applies the similar technology across dozens of other industries from medical devices to space suits and military gear, also operates as a (very successful) Theory Y organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y#Theory_Y
If you think about how they describe pushing out people that "don't fit" by group consensus, you quickly begin to see how such a workplace is actually fairly toxic. Everyone would be trying hard to get along and not piss anyone off, because, like on the reality show Survivor, once the team gets a bug in their bonnet for you, you're gone, despite your productivity or ethics. It also leads to monocultures - people will want to hire and work with people like them, the complete opposite of diversity hiring. I would be interested to see the cultural vectors for Valve. I'm betting they don't have a lot of ethnic minorities or women working there.
Valve addresses this very question in the Handbook for New Employees:
Q: If all this stuff has worked well for us, why doesn’t every company
work this way?
A: Well, it’s really hard. Mainly because, from day one, it requires a
commitment to hiring in a way that’s very different from the way most
companies hire. It also requires the discipline to make the design of
the company more important than any one short-term business goal.
And it requires a great deal of freedom from outside pressure—being
self-funded was key. And having a founder who was confident enough
to build this kind of place is rare, indeed.
Another reason that it’s hard to run a company this way is that it
requires vigilance. It’s a one-way trip if the core values change, and
maintaining them requires the full commitment of everyone—
especially those who’ve been here the longest. For “senior” people
at most companies, accumulating more power and/or money over
time happens by adopting a more hierarchical culture.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
The short answer is no.
The long answer is probably no, as you need a certain mix of incredibly talented people with very specific attributes. Valve is notorious for only hiring the absolute best, going for those with wide specialist knowledge (but shallow knowledge of all other aspects of game development... some kind of "T" metaphor is used by them?), and ensuring everyone they hire can be an effective leader/is capable of following an effective leader when needs be. And you can't just have a few people with those attributes; everyone in the company has to be like that.
If you can hire only people that meet the above qualifications, then sure, you could make another Valve. But it's a very difficult (or at least expensive) proposition, and no doubt incredibly challenging to scale.
If you have the right kind of people, namely competent, motivated, result oriented professionals, that do not care one bit for power, but are willing to assume it temporarily in order to take responsibility for a specific part of a project (only to relinquish it freely afterwards), then this works very well indeed.
The two reasons for people to go into management are absent here
1. Incompetence: Doing management is often a way for people that have no real skills with regard to the product being made to join or stay in an organization.
2. Lust for power: The other primary motivation for going into management is wanting to tell others what to do.
In bad managers (the predominant type), both things combine. Good engineers, artists, writers, etc. almost universally want to practice their craft and get better at it. Doing any management-like function is something they will only do willingly (and temporarily) for the greater good and never as their sole function. If you have such a pool of people, the only permanent (but critical) management function to remain is to make sure nobody incompetent at or not passionate for their (non-management) job and nobody with lust for power joins the team. People that are passionate about what they do are easy to identify. Skill is harder, but doable if you invest some time to find out. Lust for power is still harder, but people that have gotten good as their primary competency rarely have it as it gets into the way.
This also means that most companies cannot use this model, as they have been taken over a long time ago with those of no valuable skills and/or a craving for power and, from my observation, usually have quite a few incompetent non-managers in addition.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Running a real company or a real government requires dealing with people who don't want to be there. Not everybody wants a career, some people just want jobs. They want to punch the clock and go home. Some people steal habitually from the till. Had I my druthers, I'd spend all day at home reading, and I'm considered a sociopathic workaholic. Some people are going to cheat. Some people are going to lie on their interviews. The test of any organization isn't how it does when it's doing well, it's how it does when its under extreme stress. Valve hasn't been under extreme stress, so the question of the effectiveness of their organization is effectively mooted. We can look to other game companies with strong egos (Origin for example, or Ion Storm) and get a good idea, though.
Who authorized all the recent "layoffs" ?
So while my answer might seem quite pessimistic, I think, and sadly, it is true because much like Communism it works fine on paper but almost never in practice and happily Valve has found one of those rare exceptions in time when it does.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
If they had a boss, perhaps they could finally count to three!
Valve has been in the unique position of having some hit titles in the past that they had good publishing deals on. That's given them the financial cushion to run things however they wanted with whomever they wanted, without any of those pesky obligations most developers have to meet to pay the bills. And then of course they stumbled onto Steam, the patching platform turned online store where they get a cut of all the other developers profits.
To highlight a similar scenario, 3D Realms was able to dick around for almost 15 years (1996-2009) thanks to the big pot of cash they had from the first Duke 3D game and a few farmed out expansions. We know for sure now that those years where not spent under some masterful system of management creating the most polished game ever, they where terribly managed years in which the same game was reinvented every 4-6 months everytime Broussard saw a new game.
Valve management is certainly not the disaster that was 3D Realms, but at the same time it's very hard to apply their near-zero management style without also having access to their near-zero financial obligations. Valve can afford to mess around in the kitchen for years tossing meal after meal into the garbage until they have something they like. Other developers have to feed their family tonight.
So I guess what I'm saying is that regardless of whether the bossless model works for Valve, other companies have to actually produce games on time and on budget. Where exactly is Half Life 3...
I think the best management style is like the best government for a country. It's not necessarily about which one is best, it's about which one is best for that particular group of people.
Participatory Economics, perhaps?
For any company that actually wants to be productive? No. The fact that they don't actually seem to do anything besides sell other people's shit anymore bears that out.
But when your primary business model is a fanboy-powered perpetual motion machine, it doesn't terribly matter what you do so long as you keep the masses stocked with achievements and discounts on other people's shit.
It's easy to get by with less management if the team is more capable.
The common hierarchical management systems are better suited to organizing groups of people towards achieving a common goal when those people aren't all above average.
The idea goes back at least two decades in the tech industry, probably more if you count research-oriented institutions like Bell Labs.
I think it works best in companies where all of the following is true: 1) the pace of technology is moving swiftly and is interesting work, 2) there is not a heavy continuing engineering/customer support role that the engineers are required to pay attention to, 3) the competition and deadlines are obvious, 4) the team is mostly under one roof, 5) there is sufficient funding in the short term that the team has adequate resources and layoffs aren't an immediate issue, 6) senior management is confident that if the development team succeeds, there will be ample financial reward for the shareholders, 7) senior management is not populated primarily by financial/sales/legal types who are concerned mostly about showing increasing quarterly earnings, 8) there are strong architects and technical leaders who aren't jerks and are respected by the rest of the team, and 9) there is a quorum of experienced, motivated engineers who don't require hand holding.
If any of those assumptions become invalid, then bye bye self-managed teams.
"I think, and sadly, it is true because much like Communism it works fine on paper but almost never in practice"
Quite an interesting comparation because then, how is it that the vast majority of companies are governed by Communism, just the Soviet Russia style?
Valve hires incredibly self-motivated and talented people. Most people are *NOT* incredibly self-motivated so taking Valve as a role model for the rest of workplace environments is utter foolishness. As the late and famous physicist Einstein once eluded to, the only thing larger than the universe is human stupidity, that's what you're drawing from if you try to think "big picture". So um, no.
Valve would be an exception if they were actually funded by their own products.
In reality they're only able to do whatever they please for as long as they please because they're taking 20-30% of the top of nearly an entire market... which is actually a lot like the way that communism "works" in the real world too.
I mean it works for a tomato company in Florida (Morning Star), it can work for just about anything, but it takes a lot of time to cultivate the culture, and you've got to have the right people initially for it to work.
The Israeli kibbutzim are some of the longer-lasting ones.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If there is no hierarchy I wonder how they decide on raises...a vote?
"I just listened to a fascinating podcast with Valve's economist-in-residence, Yanis Varoufakis, about the unusual structure of the workplace at Valve where there is no hierarchy or bosses.
Can't remember the book, but there was a Brazilian oil company that had a similar structure.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Whaddya mean communism almost never works in practice? I'm sitting on a Linux box right now as I type this RIGHT NOW!
I spent the weekend thinking about the Marissa Mayer's decision to bring people back in the office. Is this what she's trying to create? Spontaneous ideas when you meed in the hall or break room?
Or, is valve's style of management (or the lack thereof) possible via telecommuting? Granted, this is a different stage of creativity - the inception. This isn't at a stage where the idea and the rough architecture is already in place.
Brainstorming.
Although I have some political differences with Russ Roberts, I'm a fan of his podcast. The guests and the discussion are usually interesting (this guy included).
One thing that drives me nuts though, is Robert's eagerness to call anything that's not obviously a top-down process 'Hayekian'. If Roberts had his way, people would try to get their video to 'go Hayek' to support their 'Hayek-starter' project about 'Hayek-oriented programming'.
Because they don't follow the Dilbert Principle to manage the project schedule.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Many mobile apps are created by a single developer. So, certainly many of them could be done with a small team. If the projects are small enough, then it makes sense for you to not have an artist (for example) 100% dedicated to a single project. With large projects, there is a lot of learning about the domain specific requirements and the code base and how everything fits together. But, in a smaller project, a new developer who is competent can get up to speed quickly.
If you have a great team that can gel together then sure. A good team is like a well functioning machine that doesn't break down. The problem comes when you have team members who want to steal the spot light and not work with others.
In my last big project we had two members who felt they were the next big Nobel prize engineers, however really they just screwed large portions of the project, they fought the documentation and the requirements and they felt they were above everyone else. That kind of group can't work with out higher management getting involved.
Once they were axed from the project the entire team became a smooth machine, each member knowing what the others were working on. We had smooth integration, smooth code reviews and a great release. Management only got involved at the end to thank us.
So yes and no, management free company's can work in certain cases, in most cases I would never recommend it.
Michael O.Church has blogged a lot about the "open allocation" model used by Value. A LOT. Like a TL;DR lot. But if you're into thinking deeply about these things, go read his blog.
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/
There's an entire business model based on operating a business with no boss -- it's called a worker cooperative. As a founder and member of one, and a friend of dozens more, I'm here to say that it works.
The existence of one bossless model makes it easy to believe that others could exist. The presence of an authority figure, or of any kind of hierarchy, is not a requirement for business success. This isn't speculation -- there's proof in black and white.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Github also has a flat organization structure. Read: http://www.elezea.com/2012/06/user-centered-organizations/
What word rhymes with buried alive?
We are so emmersed in top down organization we don't even notice the word team implies leadership and a top down organization. The word to describe the organization we're discussing is groups. The programers work in groups to accomplish their tasks. Group work is very hard but really worth it - I've done it and we were able to accomplish significant things rapidly.
Just sayin'
If you expect me to think gabe newell isnt the boss, or a boss then you should go into business selling what youre smoking. Bossless would mean no chain of command, no management, no nothing. The entire place would be chaos. Idiot ideas would get implimented everyday with no one to say no, no one to decide who is hired and fired, work wouldnt get done without a chain of command. The concept of a bossless workplace is stupid and does not happen, valve although will allow this rumor to run rampant because valve wants to be seen as this shining gem of a company, some utopia and so on. Thats valves thing, they let the fans put them up on a pedastal and praise them but they dont actually do anything to be worthy of said praise. Its just their fans want so badly to elevate them they do so with no real foundation.
Valve is a really low producing company. They dont do shit really. Steam is their bread and butter but it is built entirely on other companies and developers. Steam itself is a slow and poorly designed store for others to sell their products on. There is no great mystery to it, nothing that somehow makes them better than other companies or magically untouchable. Its just simply a store.
They dont make hardly any games themselves. Like they branded left 4 dead as a valve game despite the fact turtle rock actually made the game but they have no problems with slapping their name on it, they bill counter strike as their own game even though it was a independant mod to begin with, they try and make dota2 sound like its entirely theirs even though its originally a independant mod made by someone else and so on.
The few games they actually do make are sequels to someone elses game that isnt as good as the original, or its them just pimping out the same tired games they have been doing for a decade. Portal and portal 2 were the only good games they ever put out that lived up to this name valve as created for themselves.
And what are they working on now? Eh steambox. They basically took other peoples idea of creating a small inexpensive linux box you can hook to your tv. This idea was pitched many times by other companies and even the ouya was announced on kicstarter long before valve said they were doing it. Only difference is? Steam runs on it. Woopie, they took someone elses idea and put steam on it.
But like I said gabe and other people at valve will talk about this bossless idea and I guarntee you their answers will be vauge, non commital and pretty much them talking a lot, giving a lot of what ifs but at the end they wont actually say anything.
I know valve has made some great games but really if it works that well wheres Half Life Episode 3?
Been bossless can be beneficial in some regards like creativity but detrimental in others ways like getting a team to actually finish a game.
our company is like that, we have "bosses", but they are more focused on how to grow the company, gain new contracts, keep the money flowing in the right direction, but most of us are our own managers, and once a quarter we do a MBO excercise (management by objective) with our teams to make sure everyone is heading in the same direction of the company goals.
But its a lot easier when your desk is within earshot, of the owners and presidents, not so much when you have a multinational conglomerate with hundreds of offices spread across the world all with different goals and reasons for existing.
So can it work for other tech companies? yes, will it work for all of them, no ... welcome to the world n00b.
To claim there is no hierarchical structure of any kind at Valve is complete and utter bullshit. Who interviews? Who makes sure Legal's decisions are implemented? Who manages payroll? Who manages salaries? Who gives raises?
Stupid feel good bullshit. Like Google.
Yes! This!
Honestly, it's the back edge of the proverbial double-edged sword of promoting "hiring from within". If your company really feels (as most do) that the people already working in a business know more about it than outsiders, the only viable option becomes promoting technical people to management positions.
If the financial motivator (of a nice pay raise for becoming management) wasn't in place, though, a lot of the technical people would refuse to switch roles to management -- because hey, why stop doing something you're comfortable doing and know you're pretty good at?
I'd say that in my entire career doing I.T. - every single person who was promoted to a management role over me (from a role doing pretty much what I did, before that) was pretty poor as a manager. But in the big picture, what would have been better? I mean, if they decided just to skip the whole "promote from within" concept and hired outsiders with management experience, would we have respected them or their opinions? I'm not so sure? Many a company has been ruined by outsiders coming in and trying to do things their way, despite really not having much of a handle on the dynamics of the workplace they were tossed in to manage.
This idea of scrapping the whole hierarchy, as Valve has apparently done, sounds great IF and ONLY IF your business focuses squarely on producing a good or service that doesn't require much diversity. I mean, consider the fact this is not only a firm that focuses on software development, but they're focused on only one genre of software development; games.
I think even with that narrow a focus, a company like Valve surely has a lot of business challenges requiring a different type of employee than the creative software developer. For example, they must have to deal with accounts payable and receivables. I imagine they almost have to treat that work as something they outsource, since those people would have no direct involvement in the creation of the products (and that means no motivation or drive to see those ideas become commercial successes, enjoyed by millions of players).
In many other businesses I can think of, you almost need at least one layer of management, simply because a big part of your core workforce will be people doing tasks that nobody in their right mind would REALLY enjoy doing for any length of time. Their primary motivation is money and the concern that someone above them in rank in the company has the power to yank that money away from them if he/she becomes displeased with the quality of their work.
Some places have UP OR OUT and UP = management.
And being in management in some places is you go into what ever slot is open.
As is always the case with stupid headlines asking a question.
One could also argue that it doesnt' work at Valve either considering how long people have been waiting for the next half life episode.
In reality however, I'd bet a months pay Valve has a clear hierarchy of people who just control the situation even though its not written on some org chart somewhere. Dominant personality will create leadership hierarchies naturally without any outside influence.
And lets just common sense. Gabe is beyond any doubt, 'the boss' and it trickles down from there probably loosely related to time at the company.
Pretending its Anarchy and everything 'just gets done' because everyone knows the parts that need to be done is just for those too stupid to recognize whats going on.
Best part is how the self-entitled morons that think this is a great idea how modded down every comment that points out how much bullshit of a statement the headline and summary are. Just because you can mod down on slashdot doesn't make it true.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Quite an interesting comparation because then, how is it that the vast majority of companies are governed by Communism, just the Soviet Russia style?
It's an interesting comparison because the basic idea behind communism was that fundamentally the same as that behind Theory Y style organisations. The idea, that is, that left to their own devices, without the imposition of formal authority (remember that in theory 'communism' was to be a stateless and non-hierarchical society), humans will be self-motivated and express themselves by what they produce. You will recall from your reading of Marx, that one of the great criticisms communists levelled at capitalist production methods (Taylorism), is that the assembly line robbed the factory worker of their human identity by 'alienating' them from the products of their own labour. For Marx you are what you make.
just the Soviet Russia style?
OP wrote about "Communism on paper," so a comparison with Soviet Russia (which never claimed to have a communist system in place anyway) is a little unfair. I do agree, however, that the human management in the Soviet state seems to have a more in common (and if I understand it this is your point) with that in the majority of modern corporations, than with this self-motivated pride in one's own work approach.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I would think that the bossless structure would work until some sort of feedback loop kicked in driving everyone into something stupid. A simple example of this would be the recent sub-prime property bubble. Each of the various parties were successfully working toward profitable goals, you had real-estate sales, mortgage companies, wall street, the Fed, the buyers, the people getting home equity loans, the developers, the contractors, even the people making "flip this house" TV shows. All these players could justify what they were doing by simply pulling out the bottom line and saying "What, you want to destroy this? You are a fool." Yet nearly all the companies involved have since imploded or, if they were lucky, taken serious damage. So none of those parties were willing to say, "Whoa just a minute, this party bus is heading straight for a cliff." So you not only needed someone watching out for the cliff you needed someone who could be a royal party pooper when needed, you also needed this person to somewhat not be a party to the party, hence a boss and a boss with potential dictatorial powers. If you look back to say 2003 when the property party was enroute to the cliff but there may have been time to change course with far less pain than 2008 any "boss" who changed course at that point would have been reviled and since people wouldn't ever believe that 2008 had been averted they would have been out for blood.
I love Valve's model but a sign that all is not perfect is definitely HL3. I am willing to bet that employees are adverse to working on that project for one reason or another so it just never gets moving. So a possible solution to a "bossless" company avoiding being a directionless company would be to have at least the ability for an individual leader or sort of supreme court of leaders to be able to provide extra incentives for employees to do certain things. So you might say, "You work on HL3 and your pay goes up 30% or you get more vacations, or even just way better parking." Then if something disastrous like all the employees start working on Blackberry apps then you have to pull out the big guns and say, "You are risking the company on what we believe is a really stupid idea. We won't say no to what you are doing but while you take these huge risks we are cutting your pay 50%. If it pays off great but we believe that we are cutting our losses." So if the developers are correct and the Blackberry becomes the gaming platform of the century and they are sure they are right then they can continue. But the market inside of Valve would have then at least changed the math of potential stupidity."
The key here is game theory. In GT you often have what are called Nash Equilibriums. These result when all the players do what will benefit them the most while also avoiding pain. The result is often that a Nash Equilibrium can be predicted by asking "What would a bunch of assholes do?" The problem is when a few assholes start doing it then the remaining players may be forced to do the same asshole thing just to stay alive. There are two solutions to prevent nasty Nash Equilibriums. One is that every single player is kind hearted and cooperates. The other solution is to change the math making being an asshole too costly. So the ideal boss in a bossless company would be able to change the math when they see it becoming a problem. I suspect that it wouldn't take much math changing to effect huge changes. In the case of valve I suspect that something as small as preferred parking spaces or nicer chairs for preferred projects could change the output to something desired. It probably would only show up statistically. Most people would ignore the directive but a tiny number would begin heading in the desired direction resulting in an increase in desired output. If you had a bag of incentives you could apply them one after another like a throttle until you achieved the desired thrust. Ideally this person would be using zero incentives most of the time and also would not be asked to use those powers for this pet project or that. But the person would need to be able to act without interference once they felt they needed to act.
How does a company with no bosses lay off a good chunk of workers?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/14/layoffs-hit-valve
Valve is as profitable as they are because of Steam. They act as middlemen, selling games. They also provide little in the way of support on it so costs are low.
That's fine and all, but doesn't work unless you can get in that niche. That's also why the Windows Store scares them so much: They have little outside of their store. Most game companies don't care much, they make their money on games, their DD service is somewhat secondary. For Valve, Steam is where all the money is and if someone else takes it, they are in trouble.
It allows them to play around with their development, take as much time as they want, and all that jazz, but that doesn't work if you have to make money on the games to keep the doors open.
Valve is the least productive game producer going. If it wasn't for Steam, they would have gone bust a decade ago.
You must really hate that so many people love them and their games, huh? Probably chaps your caboose something fierce.
Intriguing... so who decided who got layed off a few weeks ago? I call bulls**t on this article. They have bosses. Now back to work people!
This article should be called "Why we still haven't seen HL2: Episode 3"
In a company with no boss... who makes the decision to make lay-offs? Didnt they shed 10% of their workforce?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/13/valve-layoff-hardware-mobile/
Why is there so much of the libertarian, sociopathic Austrian economics worship in the software industry? Is there really that much Asberger's syndrome as stereotyped? Protip: it's actually healthy societies that cultivate the widespread "disposable income" that allows there to be an industry devoted to entertainment software. There are no Rugged Individualist John Galts in this story, as much as the linked-to "liberty economics" website would like us to believe.
Communism works just fine. There's plenty of very successful communes around the world.
What communism can't do is scale. Get beyond the size of a commune, and it doesn't seem to work.
Soviet Russia wasn't communist after Lenin died. It was an aristocracy that said the words "the people" a lot.
michaelochurch on HN have talked about open allocation, basically allowing people to transfer between groups and managers freely.
I am getting a bad rap these weekend for this but I have a better option that works just as well.
Fire them. After needing to pay their bills they will do better and have a stronger worth ethic. If you ask any manager they do not like to hire 21 to 23 year olds. The reason being is without real world experience they do not quite get the reason they are there and how management and customers see things. Typically most everyone gets fired in life at least once and it mostly happens in this age group.
The last 4 years I have seen employers simply demand excellence and fire people left and right if they are nto the best. Average is just not good enough as we all do more for less.
I would be fuming if I am working so hard in fear of being fired every day knowing my limited earnings are being taxed to some guy to go fishing all day?! If I have to do it and multitask to be the most efficient to meet my metrics why do other people get any slack? Maybe I have just not been lucky and see companies today put up with useless employees where you can show up more than 5 minutes late for work more than 3 times and keep his or her job.
http://saveie6.com/
First, let me say that I have a deep admiration for your country and your countrymen. [Not so much for your countrywomen! :-)]
Now, for a moment, please forget that you are Swiss, or a bean-counter or an economist.
Who pays for the air you breath?
Right, it doesn't come from taxes; it comes from Nature, so it's free.
Why do you pay taxes? It is a serious question. Basically to pay for paving the streets, lightning the streets, providing basic education, etc.
Hang on one more second.Perhaps public services in your country are a little different, but the first reason for taxes is to pay for common services.
A second reason, is to spread the wealth. Yes, even capitalist countries such as the good ol' U.S. of A. does that. Take from the rich to give to the poor, minus a percentage to run the programs, of course! (I won't get into what is reasonable percentage and how much really is politicians creating jobs for supporters, etc.)
Now suppose that production of essentials such as food and power, was automatic, as automatic as the air you breath.
It won't happen tomorrow but it certainly is possible.
Would you still pay taxes?
Try to see a future as different from today, as today is from the 16th century.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
How about the last person who got hired?
This is why it takes years instead of months for the halflife episodes to come out.
They have been doing it for ages.
I has exposed to their style as a case stud durng my MBA. I do not have the files handy, but you can research them on the ionternet.
I leave you this link to get you all started:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/S-Semco.html
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Only if you honestly and truly love what you do.
The software devs at Valve have an genuine desire to make games. Hell, most of them probably make games *they* want to play. They fact that they get paid to do so, and that the rest of us get to play them too is all bonus. They certainly don't need a boss telling them to do more of it. So for them, the lack of direct leadership works.
I can't see the same method working for wage-slave type positions, or jobs without distinct landmarks and end goals. An IT call center worker or retail worker probably has no real motivation to come back from lunch and get to work. No real reason to spend all day working instead of slacking of browsing slashdot, or just dicking around on your phone. So what, they answered 10 calls instead of 20, or helped a few less customers find what they were looking for in housewares. Without a boss to "crack the whip," can't see a lot getting done in those types of jobs.
This signature is false.
No bosses? Then none of them are "too good" to get on there, watch some matches, and ban cheaters. I used to be a content moderator for a gigantic corporation in the US and I can tell you I could easily ban 30 people per hour. The average cheater seems to play over 1000 hours of a game so I'd eliminate 30,000 hours of cheating. Seriously, someone should get bored and hop on and start a ban-fest. That could be the official office downtime activity. Oh well, I guess no bosses doesn't get anything done.
That must be why we do not see bug fixes for Valve created games or for the Steam client either. Yet they will create another way to take peoples money *cough*marketplace*cough*.
Fuck you, Valve. Fuck you, Gabe.
My experience is that people don't show up on day one knowing exactly what needs to be done. Someone has to keep track of which parts of the project need to be done. That "someone" who keeps track of things is a project MANAGER. A skilled, experienced tech in that role is good. They are more valuable managing the project than writing code. To get me to take on that stress, you have to pay me more. That's two reasons why I do management - because it has to be done and someone is willing to pay me more to manage coders than to be a coder.
Within a decent sized project, you'll have less experienced or less knowledgeable people. They'll need some management by more knowledgeable people guiding them. As much as I would like to just code all day, SOMEONE has to point out to the new person that copying and pasting the same code in six different places causes problems.
While the project manager is busy with the $800,000 project, someone elese has to think acout how that fits into the organization's $12million total budget and the five year plan. Otherwise, you may win the battle but lose the war, you may succeed at doing the wrong things. Your best and brightest people are a lot more valuable making five-year and ten-year $xx million decisions than having the best people writing "while" loops. I prefer to just work on algorithms, but someone needs to plan for what happens when this three-year contract is over.
It's not a power trip. It's a job someone needs to do. Heck, most of the management I do now is for a non-profit where I don't get paid and the managing board resented by those too lazy/apathetic to take on any responsibilities themselves. I do it simply because it needs to be done, or the organization would fail in it's mission.
In every software development company I've ever worked where the group worked well and created good products, a meritocracy is always what wound up forming naturally and becoming the organization of the group. "Bosses" pretty much just stepped back and kept any corporate or political crap from affecting the group.
The situation of Valve is unique. The culture there, from everything I have read on the company, is one comprised of highly skilled, motivated individuals committed to conceiving and developing incredibly high quality products. The hiring process for the company is unique, most of their hires come from people in the company noticing something of quality that the person has accomplished. Their artists, designers etc. are hired almost exclusively based on previous accomplishments. They find people that have already demonstrated their passion and self motivation. Not every company is capable of fostering that kind of environment. The companies that tend to have something close to Valve's extreme case are other creative companies. So, could other game studios do the same thing? Yes. Could Ford accomplish this? Nope.
It's a neat idea, but it has a certain ADHD vibe to it. Maybe that's why they never actually finished a trilogy.
this is an interesting idea: let people be "rated" by their peers. it's from this ted talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BqLQW06vi4 ("The Future Of Work")
I found a Forbes article [forbes.com] which estimates that Google makes a profit of 350k per head, while Valve's is in the 87.5 million per head...
No, that's not right. Read the article again. " More specifically, Newell says of the 250-person company that on a per-employee basis, Valve is more profitable than tech giants like Google and Apple. Google made an average $350,000 in profits per employee in 2010. That means Valve sees profits of around $87.5 million at least." The $87.5 million number is total profit, not per employee.
Well, the scenario's in this thread is actually what I tried to examine in a sci-fi short story that I wrote, free for download from over here (leave a review - it always helps me to know what readers think).
I think, that since happiness and satisfaction is something that can be controlled both chemically and genetically, the nirvana that results might not be so bad after all. If you genetically program a creature to be happy doing $FOO (where $F)) could be anything - making boxes, watching television or fighting wars), then by definition that creature will be happy doing whatever it is they were programmed to do, much like Colin the robot from THHGTTG. If I am genetically and chemically predisposed to enjoy slaving away in a sweatshop then imposing rest and relaxation on me would be torture.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It all sound like a work cooperative. But it is a corporation so the looming question is how much do it's owner make?
Assuming a billion dollar per year revenue stream and divided that by 300 employees, that would give you the average worth of an individual as 33 million. Lets assume a $3 million working budget per individual which would be ridiculous. That means each employee is producing is at least 30 million dollars in profit per year for the average individual. I doubt even a third of them make 10 million a year.
The owner must be taking a huge chunk of the profits. The number is people making a even million dollars a year is probably less than ten percent.
So my question is what is preventing a bunch of valve employees from splintering off? They could form the same type of cooperative but with bigger pieces of the pie each since they wouldn't have the overhead of the company founders bigger slices.
I think that is the inevitable future. The company model functions almost biologically and evolutionary. When a bee or ant hive gets too large it splits. If I were the owners of valve I would jump the gun and split the organization early so as to insure an interest in each. One hive might be socially a little different than others and have different approaches and mindsets. It would certainly allow the evolution of such cultures.
Once upon a time I worked in a pretty big and pretty advanced company in Silicon Valley, which name is synonymous with "rhyme". The job paid well, and didn't demand much.
Every once in a while, I would come up with some initiative. "Look guys, this area is really weak, we could do better. We could improve here and here, need to redo this and fix up that. Let's take some more items on our annual plan."
What really happened as a result? The manager told me that I have an "itchy hands". He said that my propositions were way too risky, and it was much safer to stick to a more modest annual plan. Eventually I got some negative points on my review as a result. And people who didn't show much initiative did better with their reviews.
Reality of most companies is that employees aren't expected to be too good. Being better than the average is punishable.
Create your own business, and work hard there. Large corporations, with 7-10 layers of management, and workplace politics generally aren't the right place for over the average workers.
The more you wait, the higher your expectations become. I think HL3 long passed the "Duke Nukem Forever" threshold, when anything they make will only disappoint people (no matter how good it is). Valve is dying as a game developer, recent layoffs of developers proves it.
Is this why we havent seen half life episode 3 yet ? :)
"Limes Inferior" by Janusz Zajdel
Capitalism, communism, socialism: all the financial models and systems are broken now by a thing not anticipated by their models: plenty.
When food is limited it makes sense to limit it to those who contribute to the commonweal. When it is so plentiful that we plow half of it back into the ground to keep the price up, and throw half of the rest away - not so much. Likewise with shelter, clothing, all the basic needs. It makes sense to leave some homeless in the winter to freeze to death when there is no room in built homes - but of that now there is no lack. Money is just a proxy for production units.
We have at some estimates 40% of our able population idle for the simple reason that they're not required to produce what we need. That is a serious problem because if we don't figure it out when that figure hits 50% they will be the majority. It's also an opportunity, as these folk are quite capable and eager to produce. The one who figures out how to empower them to produce a social good will be canonized.
We need a new model.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Have we considered the possibility that there is some management there, and that they have faith they've hired good, and competent people? I feel as though if I were managing a group of engineers/IT staff and I had made good hiring decisions I could leave them to their own devices and expect a good product. I've heard it said that a good manager doesn't need to manage because he's done his job of hiring staff well. I don't actually know if this is anything like how the company is structured. But food for thought.
Common Sense (+1)
LOL.
Yes it can work elsewhere
No it can't work everywhere.
In short: It doesn't scale.
If you don't have any bosses.... who do you fight at the end of the level?
But wasn't Episode 3 of Half Life 2 supposed to launch something like 5 years ago? There are very positive things about this corporate culture, but "delivering on promises in a particular window" does not seem to be one of them. In a more highly regulated industry, this would be even harder.
Few people look at the full picture when they look at Valve's org structure. Valve is very particular about the people they hire and when you hire talented, motivated people who are compelled by personal accomplishment, the best thing to do is get out of their way so that they can work. They don't want to have meetings about the meeting schedule, they don't appreciate being "volunteered" to be part of workplace committees, and they hate red tape and drama. These kinds of people can work at a place like Valve. But these kinds of folks are also gems, the kind of people who prop up society. It wouldn't work in every organization.
I'm not familiar with Aussie social security, but I assume you get some money if you have no other income. If you put the "new" minimum income at the same level and just adjust taxes to compensate, it wouldn't cost a cent.
Do realize that a minimum income isn't just randomly extra money that would need to be paid for with current taxes. You can always adjust the taxes to compensate.
Looks like someone hasn't heard of "college professor." At least in Engineering fields (which is what I'm familiar with), you're given startup money and the mandate to teach and do research and find funding for more research. You're your own little mini-business, where you get to do whatever you want, as long as it's productive. You get to hire as many students as you can afford, and you form groups with other faculty to do collaborative research. And don't forget that universities are for-profit businesses; sure, the state schools get public subsidies, but that's not anywhere near enough to run the school. The rest comes from tuitions, grands, and endowments. So it's not like this is all fun and games.
They can't make steam and TF2 stop crashing at least once a day on the Mac and Windows.
What should be simple state systems in TF2 MVM - upgrading weapon bonuses - often allows you to add more items than you have money for, and if you were a different class previously in the game, often upgrades your previous class's canteen with the previous class's upgrades. (Engie switching to medic)
Also, you buy a "premium" upgrade, gift it to another player you have and then they downgrade your player. Screw you guys. I spend enough money on this game.
How can the game ship like this and stay broken for so long?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
If I am genetically and chemically predisposed to enjoy slaving away in a sweatshop then imposing rest and relaxation on me would be torture.
Sometimes people need saving from themselves.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
This sounds like a really interesting read. If someone could post the name of the story, it would be much appreciated!
If they don't have bosses who did all that firing a few weeks ago? They may have less managing than any place else, but they still have bosses. This isn't Lord of the Flies
Obviously not since they cant even come out with HL EP3 or HL2.
Fast Company published this article about GE's Durham, NC jet engine factory: http://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy
The plant opened in 1993 and is still running. The factory had 1 boss and 170 employees in 1999 when the article was written.
It predates Valve but tells the same basic story: doing a very hard thing in surprisingly smart ways with extraordinary people yields success. GE Durham also delivers on schedule, but they're engineering and manufacturing, not making creative entertainment on Valve time.
Who are Valve's real competitors right now?
*crickets*
When Valve gets competition who, using traditional management:
* Puts out a cheaper product
* More quickly
* At equal or better quality of product
* Or, when someone makes a version better than the Source engine which allows the above
That will be the real test to see if Valve Time and their Hayekian workplace will succeed. (And maybe the above won't happen... but from what I read of Valve, their methods eat time and money so personnel build a better product. Doesn't mean someplace else can't or won't do it better. Really, all it means is that at this moment in time their management structure allows that particular business to succeed - it doesn't even mean it will continue to be that way or that it can translate to any other business.)
It's impossible to have a social situation without leadership, even if it isn't officially organized. In any group, a natural leadership and accountability structure will emerge.
We all read about the recent firings. What did they do, decide to fire themselves?
Wait till the company division is merged or something happens and the Sh!t hits the fan.
Survive that with no Hierarchy... and get back to me. Until then it's just fun-time while the "cotton" is high.
No leadership. Well, that explains Half Life 3.
Would you still pay taxes?
Unless you're going to tell me roads, schools, parks, police and fire service, etc. also grow on trees, yep.
Taxes pay for the things that are silly to pay for separately.
Maybe 100 years ago, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, but nowadays the term "fire" does not quite mean what it did in the workers paradise. Plus, no corporation is compelling anyone to work in the gulag, and they are even paying taxes to keep the rest of us home reading Slashdot and guzzling beer and eating pizza. However, the command and control model definitely is in play.
I kept wondering: assuming that his description of Valve is accurate, can this model work for other tech companies?
That is a really stupid question. Probably arisen due to lack of working in the real world, end to end.
That is how it works in literally all companies. That is how many products across many companies across many markets gets developed and delivered.
But it is unknown to the outsiders, mostly because managers (like-wise many others) would never admit that in the end, all capable people were simply put into one room and allowed to work without distractions.
No company would ever admit that it is not really in control of its development process. Valve does. Other do not. That's all what there is to it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
However, the command and control model definitely is in play.
Of course any comparison to the gulag would be overwrought. However being generous to GP, I think his point (at least that was what I was agreeing with) is the the internal organisation of the modern corporation bears more similarity with that of the Soviet factory (or the polity in general) than it does to the self-motivated boss-less approach described here. This actually foregrounds the hypocrisy of the Soviet regime in instituting "relations of production" which reproduced the very 'alienation' their scriptures sought to repair. Imagine if there were Christians who don't literally love their enemies, unthinkable really.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
In prisons, work is a privilege! When prisoners could do nothing all the time, most choose to do something. Even with things to do to pass the time they WANT to work at a variety of things; you earn a right to work and are punished by losing it. It also gives you something extra above the minimum if you work... it isn't much but it is above the minimum and that is enough to motivate people. Those controlled closed environments are great to experiment with these things on humans... they are not made up of the best kinds of people which is perfect because they are the ones who screw up the existing system. (That is... you need to put all kinds of criminals into the mix -- assuming you jail corporate criminals at all anymore.)
Now if you make prisoners work - the forced labor makes them resent and hate the whole thing. a reward is to NOT work. Just think about how the approach to the problems drastically change the perceptions! (all things being equal, forced labor doesn't have to be horrible.)
People will find things to do, out of desperation. Most people I know have NO hobbies and limited interests; the older people do but the younger generations are pathetic. Consuming is what they are raised for and that is all most seem to be able to do. Even that doesn't fill up their time that well and they'll like to break from it. If you gave them money, they'd spend too much of it... but that is what they do already. So some people would be no better off in that they'd end up wage slaves for the crap they buy in a sick addiction cycle which could continue to be promoted as it is today. But the poor would spend money that otherwise wouldn't have been spent and they'd be contributing more to society instead of resorting to damaging it.
I would much rather have "lazy" people doing something they want to do instead of bringing down all of us and our organizations by their forced labor which rewards incompetence. Being a hard worker, I make everybody else look bad. If the lazy ones were gone then somebody who was just there for some extra money would stand out and be made to raise their performance if they wanted to continue (or be really likable-- in the real world if you can be likable you can be Homer Simpson. I've met three such people, everybody knows they are morons and their pity keeps them cleaning up the messes.)
Banking ruins the world. It is heavily involved in history as well. Even when it helps 1 place while it harms another with most people being happy about it -- that is temporary because its power and influence are so great that it becomes damaging. Power draws corruption/evil like a magnet. Weak banks eventually become stronger as they attract evil which wants more power... which attracts more evil... it repeats every REBOOT and often goes largely unchanged even when governments reboot or economies reboot.
If one killed the bankers from making money from inflation and other evil schemes never before imagined but are accepted today... we could cut the HUGE amount of money that is stolen from the populace by more than enough to fund a system to pay everybody! negative income tax (milton) or whatever. Right now everybody is funding a HUGE wage to those at the top -- and nobody deserves that kind of wealth.... unless you invent working Fusion power or are president of the world, you don't deserve to ever have a billion dollars. off topic-- the banks do not deserve what they get; we fund them to loan our money back to us. it is totally crazy. One doesn't need to KILL money and replace it with DEBT to encourage investment, we had plenty of REAL investment before money was killed and replaced with debt. Now we call gambling investment. The capital markets would exist as they did in the past but it would be slower and instead of harming things it would be funding them as it was designed to do long ago. None of these things need to go with a massive minimum wellfare system. But they could go as well... lots of ways to slice the thing.
Not matter what, the current economic religious beliefs are going to be proven as shit. You can't fight reality forever, eventually reality will be unavoidable as you go splat on impact with it.
Why is it silly to pay for them separately? You pay for any number of other services and facilities separately. Even if they're to the mutual benefit of the public, like a museum ticket.
No, I think the reason those things are paid for by taxes are because 1) some people can't afford them, and 2) some people have ideological reasons for not paying for them. Taxes are how the gov't (i.e. all of us) force everyone to pay for these things.
If most parents could afford to send their kids to private schools, I wouldn't get stuck paying for your antisocial brat to jerk off in the back of the classroom.
Why is it silly to pay for them separately? You pay for any number of other services and facilities separately. Even if they're to the mutual benefit of the public, like a museum ticket.
Guess what - your museum almost certainly is *also* funded by taxes. Otherwise some businessman would open up Bob's Museum and Smokeshop and make a profit.
Way to miss the point that people are willing to pay for it out of pocket. Pick any of a million things you pay for every year without saying "dalgurn gummit should be providing this!"
I tire of working at a company that is effectively bossless. I have a team lead who only took the position because it offered a $15k raise. He doesn't know how to lead a software team and is making no effort to do so. I have a project manager that has no ability to write product requirements. I have a software director that has no ability to figure out the direction a product should take.
So I essentially work in a "boneless" company because I have to make all the decisions to do my job as effectively as possible to produce a good a product as I am capable of delivering while other people make more money then me because of a title.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
... or don't create any garbage.