Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
"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).
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.
Everytime i read "Valve" my thoughts pavlovianly go to HL3. Still not a single word about it?
Lately someone got snooping into Valve's Jira and some conclusions made were that HL3 was either inactive or in developmental infancy. L4D3 was advancing nicely and the Source 2 engine had huge development resources behind it.
But who knows.
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.
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.
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!
tbh, Walla Walla really sucks as a town. I couldn't imagine the college being any better. I figured all they did was trained people for the Walla Walla State Prison.
Be seeing you...
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.
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.
[...] assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition.
I have notice how you have failed to quote the part about how that separate competing business that she started turned out to be quite successful. So it was her partners fault, after all.
[...] 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.
I have noticed how you have failed to quote the part about her being a success prior to attending this college, or how much bigger of a success she became after leaving college.
This is a girl that forges ahead to success, not a failure like you claim. Starting to think that you are that original business partner. A person that completely missed the boat, and it was your own fault.
"His name was James Damore."
25 person team. $100k per person salary, just to keep it on the cheap side. Salary, per year is $2.5million, plus 25-40% benefits.
Add to that material and equipment cost.
Add to that rent, electricity, toilet paper.
This project, per year, $5 million sinkhole, easily.
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.