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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.
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.
Yes, but they make virtually all their money off of other companies products. Steam itself is poorly coded and buggy. It's good enough that people don't run away from it, but the software itself is in bad need of a rewrite.
The latter half-life projects are laughably far behind.
So, I'd say that Valve really demonstrates why bossless isn't a good idea. Somebody needs to be in charge and making sure things are done at some point.
Who authorized all the recent "layoffs" ?
Exactly.
The claim that there are "no bosses" is complete rubbish. There has to be a few people in charge who make decisions and act as the final authority when a group of people cannot agree about something. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done due to the fact that people are horribly imperfect.
Should we hire this person? What if the "group consensus" is that they don't like him because of his race? Who's going to tell them thats illegal?
Do we need to buy some new servers? What should we buy? How much should we charge for this latest game?
Somebody has to make those decisions. And a few million more. They might not actually have a job title with "boss" or "manager" in it, but they are still bosses and managers.
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.
I submit that the most common reason why technical people go into management is not listed. That is: HR puts an arbitrary cap on what technical people can make and it is less than what managers make. In order to progress in your career and make more money, you have to go into management, and therefor remove yourself from the productivity pool. It seems counter-intuitive, but most everything that companies do is counter-intuitive.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It is slow, a memory hog, and the web browser takes forever to load (especially the store page). Half of the updates seem to try to reapply themselves every time I open Steam.
Steam may not be the worst program in the world, but it is far from perfect.
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There is another reason for going into management. Apparently there is considerable 'ageism' out there in the tech industry. If you don't have management experience by a certain age, you end up getting sidelined because the non-tech people tend to hire younger developers for development positions (This seems to be the position I find myself in at the moment). Younger developers are seen as more exploitable (longer hours, less pay, no benefits etc) over more experienced employees who will expect to command higher wages.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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
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.