Former Valve Hardware Designer Recounts Management Difficulties

DavidGilbert99 writes "Jeri Ellsworth has opened up about her time at games developer Valve and has hit out strongly at the so-called flatpack management structure. She says that despite Valve's claims of a democratic structure, there is a layer of powerful management in place and when she was fired she felt like she had been stabbed in the back. 'If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I am really, really bitter. They promised me the world and then stabbed me in the back.'" Develop Online has a good transcript. In the end, Gabe Newell at least let her team keep the rights to their augmented reality hardware. She also notes that she still loves Valve, but the management and bonus structure resulted in communication breakdowns at Valve's size. It does seem that a flat structure can work: Andy Wingo has been weblogging about working at Igalia and seems pretty positive about the experience.

Comments

Boo Hoo

[Reliable Windmill]

Baby crying because she couldn't run the show the way she wanted. I lost all respect for her back when she heckled some poor fellow on Twitter, accusing him of trying to steal from people and calling in her boys to join the taunting, despite knowing that this guy had just severely underestimated the scope of his project.

Attempted communism, obviously failed.

[roman_mir]

Well, those who are not aware of history are bound to repeat it.

Quote:

equity
The theory in Igalia is that we pay everyone the same. Everyone should be working with approximately the same effort, and everyone should be working on something that is valuable to the business (whether in the short-, medium-, or long-term), and so everyone should share in the income to an equal extent.

end quote.

Looks to me that the people involved should have studied history, real history, real economics and real politics. They would have immediately understood that they were trying to implement a communist experiment on a smaller scale and it was obviously going to fail, you don't need to try it to realise it. They could have learned this from history of American pilgrims that tried this with disastrous consequences, and every other attempt at this failed before and since that time. Obviously people have written about this extensively. Again, not paying attention to history ends up biting you in the ass.