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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.
The standard text is The Tyranny Of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman.
tl;dr: if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Everytime i read "Valve" my thoughts pavlovianly go to HL3. Still not a single word about it?
When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people, and selfless people attract parasites and tempt honest people in to taking advantage of the situation when their feelings get hurt.
Frosty Piss for everyone.
If all it takes is for one laid-off ex employee criticizing the management structure for it to be deemed not to have worked, then there's no such thing as a workable management structure.
a software company. Was always going to be difficult. Seems to me they should perhaps have split into a new division - not kept it under the same roof/structure
We`re all equal
"Stopped thinking at birth", you mean.
I assume this is the same Jeri Ellisworth that designed the Commodore 64 Direct to TV unit?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Maybe this is not news to you but as far as I can recall the overwhelming reaction after the Valve Handbook became public was unreflected admiration for the structure-less utopia described therein, not "Wait, maybe the lack of official structure means that the actual structure does not cease to exist but only becomes less visible to newcomers and maybe that is not a good thing." If you read the interview transcript you will see that she is in retrospect quite harsh with herself for having drunk the cool-aid and being sorely disappointed as a result. Of course she could have known better from the beginning but she didn't, just as the vast majority of slashdot commenters apparently didn't after they read the Valve handbook for the first time.
The actually existing elites may have a strong interest in perpetuating the "structureless" myth as their current informal influence may be much larger than what they could reasonably expect as part of any officially acknowledged social structure. So they take recruits that are already attracted by the company's utopian visions, indoctrinate them further to protect their own influence and when at some point the brighter amongst the employees realize the cognitive dissonance between what everyone says and what actually happens and start to lash out in disappointment they get fired to protect the company cult(ure).
Weblogging??? Did i fall into a timewarp and end up back in the 1990s or something?
Ironically your last sentence describes Microsoft over the last decade (ex-emp here). Bureaucratic management nightmare, less-than-zero vision at the top, subpar product execution/innovation, etc. yet constant promises of pink ponies to the grunts, i.e. the way it used it be in the mid-90's. Ironic because they are the exact opposite of the "structureless" environment yet the concept is right on the mark as they continue to slide into the tech heap of oblivion.
This is no excuse for not releasing a Left 4 Dead 3.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Regardless, a failure of one within such a proclaimed 'structureless' system is not necessarily a failure of the system, at that or any size.
The yardstick to measure success or failure by is whether "HL2E3" or "HL3" or "Half Life:Eternal Wait" or whatever it is titled now ever is released.
Silence is a state of mime.
They promised me the world ( and you beleived them ? ) and then stabbed me in the back. ( Really ? )
Playing nightly right here in Neurotica. Lesson of the week : Never trust management. Never ever the hell ever.
And if you are management , don't trust yourself or the rest of it.
I remember an Adam Curtis documentary that basically described those old 60s communes the same way. Communes were set up as completely power free institutions, places were no one would have power over anyone else and all important decisions could be made communally.
But of course power did exist, it was just being hidden. Someone owned the land, someone had some important income maybe someone was just too damn charismatic. And so because the power was hidden, it was never confronted or addressed. There were no checks or balances or mechanisms of redress. What was supposed to be a democratic paradise became worse than the institutions it was supposed to replace. And the people who really were in charge just ran roughshod over everyone.
I don't mean to divert attention away from Valve's management structure and handbook, but... well...
[...] assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition.
[...] she moved to Walla Walla, Washington and attended Walla Walla College, studying circuit design for about a year. She dropped out due to a "cultural mismatch"; Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.
Seems like it's always someone else's fault and never hers. The world is persecuting her!
If you look at "income", Valve is successful. Very, indeed. But money is not the only metric. It all tells us Valve got lucky developing two games aaages ago and the being the first to set up a working Digital Distribution System. That they combined it with their second (and last!) successful game was a masterstroke, but only pure luck.
Had Half-Life 2 not been such a success (say a title in the 80s/100), Steam would not have been taken off like it did.
If you use the metric "releases successful products" for success, Valve is working mediocre at best.
They shovelled in a lot of cash with Half-Life and Half-Life 2 until Steam was running with full steam ahead... and that digital distribution platform is carrying them since then. After the initial phase it was a self-sustaining thing that you just need to maintain without screwing up too much. That is basically what Vale has been doing since Half-Life 2 and I ask you: What other successful projects do they have to show that we can use as proof for their successful system? You say "not much" and I agree.
Valve seems to me very similar to 3DRealms. Both had a major success which gave them money and on that they kept running. Load words once in a while, punching their own chests how successful they are, both claim(ed) to offer a "free and creative" environment without "administrative overhead!!!1" - but both totally lack in coming up with more or better products than companies with "classical" structures. In fact, those classical structures are much more successful at chewing out successful and often high quality products.
The difference is that Valve has Steam, a product that keeps generating revenue with Other People's Successful Games if you manage to maintain it (which is no problem with the money Valve has, it is not really requireing a lot of insight or creativity), so they can afford to be totally incompetent at creating own games (which they are).
All Valve achieved lies in the past. And with "past" we need are quickly approaching "a decade and since then the existing stuff just has been maintained".
They have as truly notable things
Half Life (1998) + AddOns (1999, 2001)
Half Life 2 (2004) + Nice AddOns that basically are TechDemos for the Engine
Portal 2 (see below)
That is it.
Portal and Left4Dead they bought in (good call, but more a Publisher-Decision than actual a Develeopment-Success). Buying the right stuff requires money and one or three managers who make the right call, it's no sign your Development Hierarchy works.
and a bunch of other people. holy fuck.
Jeri pissed ( understandably ) , asks and gets given tech she was working on, moves on to form startup.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-valve-hardware-designer-recounts-management-difficulties
It's Valve policy to never make that game.
Are you and APK /.'s only regular kooks?
/. has a rich and varied collection of kooks, grown organically from the fertile ground of the internet. Your attention is fertilizer.
augmented reality?!! weren't we all going to be gleaning the cube and having cyber-sex soon after the 90's? that's like millenia in computer years. hell, this is so stale the relevant patents have probably expired by now.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't know how many millions this project cost, but come on, we have rapid prototyping tools so it could've at least been made looking better than a high school science fair project.
Add to that the fact that people refuse to wear their 3d tv glasses. Or glasses in general.
Points to this being a smart executive decision to cut losses and move on.
When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people...
I kind of agree. I think part of the problem is that people are searching for a magical formula. Bad managers like to think in terms of, "If I just do [x], then every one will work hard, there will be no conflicts, and I will get rich." They just want to know what "x" is. The problem is, "x" actually includes all of the following (plus more):
Sorry. There's no magic.
It wasn't so that they pulled the rug from under her feet and changed everything after she started working there just to get at her. There was a framework for employment and operation in place before and during her poor performance as an employee, and she agreed to this framework and other terms when she accepted employment.
She's a big-headed cry-baby, and you should feel bad for defending her.
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It does seem that a flat structure can work
Uh, it can work at Valve. Because Valve has a LUDICROUS amount of cash. They're getting money for nothing because they have Steam. They managed to seduce the users with easy digital downloads and seduced the content owners with a promise of DRM. It's simply a better way of doing things. This is really bloody obvious, but getting that sweetspot of wooing both sides into letting you be their middleman was tight landing spot. Valve did it. And now they dominate digital distribution of gaming. Making Valve a game distribution company rather than a game developer who can't count to three.
This let's them have a profit per employee which is simply ludicrous... and I wish I could find that number... damn. Anyway, they're flush with cash with no end in sight.
Of course a flat structure can work when money isn't an issue. If, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if you're productive or not, yeah, all sorts of crazy management structures can work. The "Let everyone eat cake all day" structure can work as long as you have Steam printing money for you.
And I say this as a strong believer in alternative management structures. That co-op tomato plant down in Florida where there is no management? Fantastic. I've worked at places where the management has been good, where it's been missing in action, and where it actively worked against the people getting things done. Democracy is horribly inefficient and committees are grueling, but I think it's a better choice than having a few people on top. But Valve is not a good example of the possibilities of alternative management, simply because they have too much money.
Pretty good, if short read.
Kinda explains why "Big Picture" is such an unholy mess. I tried using this as a replacement for my XBox. I really did.
But every single game (including Valve one's) seemed to have a different mechanism for configuring the controller. Sometimes it was in game, sometimes it was by editting .properties files. Sometimes, I couldn't get the controller to work at all, despite steam indicating that the game had controller support.
Even in the Big Picture interface, the menu's were messy and non-intuitive. And even their, sometimes the controller would not function and I'd have to reach for my keyboard / trackpad.
The annoying thing is that when it worked, it worked well. But as it is, I have very low expectations for the steam box.
See Twilight of the Elites:
http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-Meritocracy-ebook/dp/B006OI2BMC/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1373382255
What you call "seduction," I call "good business." The market had a need. Valve met that need and was rewarded.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I'm hoping you are a troll but you probably don't even know who Jeri Ellsworth is. It is worth noting SHE is very very smart and quite brilliant and quite well known in the hardware hacker community. Jeri was working on some interesting hardware over at valve but I think with the way that the Oculus Rift was advancing Gabe was most likely looking to head in another direction from her tech. I think it was pretty awesome that he signed off on Jeri taking the hardware she was working on with her when she left I don't know of many companies that would knowingly do that. It also indicates that the hardware she was working on was of no interest to Valve any longer and was most likely the reason she was let go.
Well, those who are not aware of history are bound to repeat it.
That is a strange statement from someone who knows as little about history as you, roman.
Looks to me that the people involved should have studied history, real history, real economics and real politics.
You would really do well to take your own advice.
They would have immediately understood that they were trying to implement a communist experiment
Where did you actually grow up? You claim to have lived in the soviet union yet you know essentially nothing about communism. Granted, the USSR leaders up to Gorbachev weren't following anything close to communist ideals - and neither was anyone since Stalin - but you should have at least heard enough from the party to have known what communism wanted to accomplish.
on a smaller scale and it was obviously going to fail
Actually, anyone who knows anything about communism knows that it only works on a small scale. Companies, up to very small states, can implement it successfully. Otherwise it falls apart due to the power vacuum that it creates that will draw in someone to take over the system.
not paying attention to history ends up biting you in the ass.
That is probably the most truthful statement you have ever made. Unfortunately you are willingly ignorant of much of human history and encouraging people to subscribe only to your favorite theology without regards for history. Many other religious movements have told their followers the same and ended up in the same dust bin you are headed towards.
These days, Valve,s money comes from Steam. Their profits on that are stupid, like tens of millions per employee. Basically they just get to sit back and sell other people's stuff, and take a nice cut (30ish percent). As anyone who's ever had trouble with something will tell you, they have a minimal support staff, there's no phone number to call or anything, and responses take forever. Also when you really look at Steam it isn't that great. It isn't bad, but it is not some masterpiece of software engineering. Rather it was the first DD service to do a reasonable job, and thus it is what everyone started using and is in a nice positive feedback loop. Gamers buy on it because it has all the game and publishers sell on it because it has all the gamers.
Those massive profits let them do whatever the fuck they want in the rest of the company. They can goof off as much as they like, spend as much time as they like, release every game for free if they like, Steam makes WAY more money than they need.
That is also why Valve is so worried about the MS store in Windows. Supposing MS does a competent job of it (which at this point seems very unlikely), it could take away their golden goose. If people decided to start buying from the Windows store instead, because it came with the system and was integrated (like the Play Store on Android or the like) they could see their sales market evaporate and that would leave them in a rather uncomfortable situation. Hence the look at expanding Steam to other platforms, and the Steambox. They didn't just suddenly decide this was a good idea, they decided it when it looked like there might be a threat to Steam. Now given the utter hash MS is making of things, I don't think they need to worry, but that is the reason.
Also going back to the start of Steam, again you are correct. People seem to forget that Steam was hated, maligned, when it came out. The reason people used it was because they wanted to play Halflife 2, and that required Steam. They weren't pleased with it, but they wanted HL2. In that way, Valve got Steam to a large market. From there they worked on improving it, offering more games, etc, etc until eventually it is the juggernaut we see today.
Also, in line with the "Peter Principle," when some people are "promoted" into management they think that their job is to bark orders or to make proclamations to be followed without questions and that their title of manager makes all of their decisions right. These people enjoy the arbitrary power they think they have. I hold that a leader (manager) is a servant who's job it is to keep things out of the way of their team. It is also a leader's job to identify what motivates each team member and use those factors to get work done while making people happy to come to work. Profit.
The people who bark orders and use people to do the things they don't want to do just create an environment that makes people averse to work and causes them to focus only on themselves as a defense mechanism. Liability.
As a manager I let people do what they like to do and gain their respect. If they get out of line and I have to confront them it is a lot easier if they like their job and respect me. When the "order barkers" confront someone it is probably because they caused the issue and the person responds by gathering up evidence against them to present to HR. I wish they put this stuff in textbooks.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Still, the whole thing just feels like "software company starts hardware division, does not adequately fund or staff it, hardware project fails". Not exactly unheard of.
I think the problem runs a bit deeper as the machinist example shows.
Ellsworth might well be right in saying that a machinist simply doesn't fit into the framework Valve has created for its employees: ...) because he/her might well make significant contributions to the project - machinists often do "simple" engineering work (which can be quite sophisticated in practice, incorporating a wealth of practical experience that more theoretically minded engineers might lack) in addition to machining - on the other hand he doesn't have the qualifications to freely move around project teams as other Valve developers are allowed to (he would need a software engineering background or be brilliant enough to start his own projects for that). He would be tied to Ellsworth's hardware team for the foreseeable future, essentially being her minion which is antithetical to the Valve culture.
you can't just treat the machinist like support staff (cleaners, cooks, accountants,
Maybe there are some things you just can't do within the structure Valve chose for itself (such as hiring not ridiculously overqualified machinists) and that is imho an insight that warrants further thought and investigation (what are the limits of this structure? is there always a way to work around these limits? could one extend/stretch the culture without killing it? ...)
There are plenty of organizations with little heirarchy that work well... they're called co-ops.
I have never heard of flat-pack, and the quick google I did found me (in addition to plenty of flat-pack kitchen stuff, and flat (apartment) management), was pure academic bs. Without some structure, trying to get anything done is like walking through mud, at best.
From Ms. Ellsworth's post, it reminds me very much of what, in the early nineties, was called matrix management - which also sounded good, but meant, in reality, we weren't sure *who* our managers were, and we were told that we had to act like "internal consultants", and find our own charges. Which, of course, was pure bs, and let the managers rate, and get that salary, and not have to actually do the work of managing those folks who they supposedly had budgetary authority over.
Every anarchy I've belonged to had management. What, you think *you* never belonged to an anarchy? "an-archy" means "no rulers", not chaotic lack of organization. This, of course, means that any club you've ever been a member of is an anarchy - you're a voluntary member, and the worst they can do is kick you out. BUT every one has a democratic management....
mark
To (two) give yourself a Full Life?
No brain, no pain.
I think this is exactly the problem. I work at a small silicon start-up, and we have two major factions (predictably): hardware and software. The software guys only want to hire a certain type of personality, the alpha-geek innovator. However, and it is a good practice in general as the groups work closely together, they sit on interview panels for hardware engineers, and 90% of the time pan otherwise good, highly qualified applicants. "Not an innovator, very narrow focus, he's a doer not a thinker", or vice versa "He talks well but I'm not sure he has any skills at doing real work". They even pan software architects "because they can't code!". They've called recognized experts everything from gear turners to garbage men.
Software is a different creature in terms of what you can get away with culturally. You have people who see the big picture, possibly work directly with customers, but are also writing code. It's very nice to have such dynamic individuals and it does allow some efficiencies we don't see elsewhere. Outside of that, in other forms of engineering this is very unusual (or even highly undesirable, both by employers and employees). People tend to be specialized along the line of their expertise or chosen career path. They may not be entirely one trick ponies, but it's very uncommon to have highly analytic people in highly creative roles and vice versa. But without both, a product will not occur, or (especially in the case of silicon) that multi-million dollar investment will not work.
This isn't just a problem with Valve, the entire industry in suffering from this type of mentality. Everyone sees their niche, and believes it is a blueprint for the world. I worked for a time at Intel and was shocked at how they treat technicians: contract only, removing them every 1.5 years, bringing in new people to replace them. They had the work, they just didn't want to hire "people like that" as employees (except in a few rare cases). Yet they spent so much time and money continuously training new technicians, being disorganized and unable to "get lab work done", that it was clearly not a financial decision, it was simply a malfunctioning thought process. They truly believed that they weren't going to need that work in the long run, that it was not where they wanted to be. For years, probably over a decade.
Yeah, nobody uses an online pseudonym.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Of course people should have seen this coming. It just takes a little bit of experience in the real world to realize that there's no such thing as magic pixie dust.
There are things in that paradigm that just isn't going to work for a larger company or for a company where not every employee is doing work of equal importance.
If I wanted attention I wouldn't look for it on Slashdot, I'd throw a hissy-fit to get on the news like Jeri Ellsworth. Are you commenting on the topic at all, or are you just bitching on other people's comments? How ironic.
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What, no Joel on Software post?
Quoting a Joel on Software post is like violating Godwin's Law.
Kriston
It's one thing if Anonymous Coward gets fired from $BORING_INC and whines about it. But this is a story about a really cool well-known hardware geek getting fired by a really cool well-known games company because their believed-to-be-interesting culture is a mess and doesn't have a clue about hardware. That's news.
And it wasn't all that long ago that the tech news was excited that Valve had hired Jeri, because they wanted to do something with hardware that would obviously be amazingly cool since they were willing to start a whole new hardware group to do it and obviously must have some kind of vision about it, and also because our friend had gotten hired by a really fun company.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Considering how mouthy Gabe is publicly, I never expected that Valve truly has a flat management structure, just a hidden one. There is no way that a company can operate by having every employee equally weigh in on corporate decisions, and I am pretty sure Gabe is not going to allow that in general. I mean, isn't that why "design by committee" is used in negative connotations?
In a flat structure probably works if the company is small and new. But you are eventually going to get a mix new and old employees that eventually feel entitled to weigh in heavier on decisions because they have been their longer. You're not going to get some new junior developer that is fresh out of school having equal weight on corporate decisions over an employee that has been there from the start, or the actual owner? Bullshit.
And also lets not forget the fact that it takes 5+ years for Valve to release anything. Where is HL3? One of the most popular game franchises and not even a hint it's in production and they dropped making episodes for HL2 pretty quickly. Even the SteamBox has turned into vaporware, E3 just passed, didn't hear much about it. Suddenly Valve is in talks to do a bunch of movies based on their games? Obviously flat structure is NOT optimal if the goal is to actually produce a product, or at least stay on track as a game company and not turn into a movie studio on a whim.
I wish Valve (and Gabe) would end their bullshit about corporate philosophy and instead focus on actually running a more efficient and effective company instead of telling other companies they are doing everything wrong. Valve's lack of corporate structure seems to be failing on many many levels. I mean Gabe had the audacity to accuse Sony of being unfocused about the PS3, yet as a company Valve has no focus. Are you a game company? Game publisher? Game Retailer?, Console maker? Movie studio? I mean you can be all if that is your choice, but you have to produce at all levels, not dangle products and ideas around for years and then never deliver.
It's disappointing because when Valve does something right it's usually awesome, but I think they are stretching themselves too thin. Time for a real leader to emerge and bring focus back to the company. You can't have 100 people wanting to do 100 things and expect to excel at all of them.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people, and selfless people attract parasites and tempt honest people in to taking advantage of the situation when their feelings get hurt.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it Frosty Piss for everyone. Reply to This Share