Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
I think the problem is not managers/engineers/etc per se. The problem is not the job function so much as the deadwood doing the function. I have known useless engineers, and I have known useless managers, and I have known useless administrative staff. The problem is the people: they are no good at their job and don't care to get better. The problem is, those people need to eat and pay their bills, so they have to have a job somewhere.
I think a large part of society's ills could be cured with something akin to a basic income that basically pensions off people who don't want to be there so that those of us who do - who are highly motivated and capable - can get on with things. Let the manager who wants to spend all day fishing do exactly that. I want to spend all day building robots and educating students. The work will get done, and our industrial processes can produce enough for everyone.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
so that those of us who do - who are highly motivated and capable
Actually, I think society's main problem is a bunch of mediocre people who think they are "highly... capable".
But universal basic income is a sound idea, and modern capitalism's worst fear (how can you enslave those who have choice?), giving me two reasons to love it.
You haven't really thought it through or you don't understand. The garbage collector would get paid for doing his job, which would be separate from the basic income. Maybe the price of garbage collection goes up to pay the collectors more, but someone would certainly do it.
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?
The work will get done, and our industrial processes can produce enough for everyone.
I don't think that's really true. I sure wouldn't be doing that work. I would be doing some work, but it would be work for me, that I enjoy. The world would look like the open source landscape at best. At worst we'd have no garbage collectors.
Thats the point, you would be living on basic income in a trailer park doing whatever it is you like to do. Smart capable people would do useful stuff and move civilization ahead. This is one of the scenarios of post scarcity world (goods/food manufactured by automatons leaving people unemployed). :). I forgot the name of the story :(
Plenty of examples in Science fiction literature. From the top of my head I can remember a short story where mandatory state IQ tests determined class you belonged to. Lowest class was forbidden from working and was provided for, higher classes were forced to work to utilize their mental capacity. Story was about a hacker helping people cheat IQ tests so they could classify as higher class and work. Incidentally that hacker had to pay another hacker to hide his own high IQ so he didnt have to work
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Ok, I'm curious. Let's run the numbers for my home country - Australia. The total taxation rate of GDP is about 22%; our GDP per capita is about $71k. That's about $15k per person. The minimum cost of living in Australia is about $16k per person assuming for a typical family of four. The Mincome experiment showed that people do not stop working on basic incomes, but in fact contribute to produce and to gain higher education. It could be quite possible to set the minimum income to be something like $7.5k per annum per capital (as many people will not need it, if paid a higher wage) and use remaining tax revenue to fund defence, infrastructure and health (which account for about half the budget). It does not appear to be outlandish to me.
CAVET EMPTOR: this post and its figures were hastily researched using google and are probably deeply flawed and entirely wrong... but they're a starting point for facts-based discussion.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.