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

Flat structures never, ever happen

[David Gerard]

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.

Re:Flat structures never, ever happen

[Arrepiadd]

I haven't had the time to read the text you post, I'll try to do it later on tonight. So, this may be a bit off, I'm posting this based on your tl;dr.

W. L. Gore and Associates (the company responsible for Gore-Tex) can be used as a counter-example to what you/Jo say. There are no bosses (everyone is an associate) and people work in small teams. No one bites others in the ass. And the company, while not the biggest in the world or whatever, works fine and people in it seem to be happy.

One key element seems to be the size of each of its campuses. They limit them to 150 people. More than that and what you mention starts happening. A de facto hierarchy arises and bickering ensues. But below these numbers (and this seems to be corroborated by other sources) people work as in a small community/village and peer pressure keeps everyone working nicely. Above 150 people clustering of people occurs and, while peer pressure still occurs within these groups, the problems still occur in between groups.

So, perhaps flat structures do happen, but only in small groups because "friends" take care of their friends, but employees don't necessarily take care of other employees (especially when the employee he's supposed to take care of is his nasty boss).

Re:Flat structures never, ever happen

[FriendlyLurker]

if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.

...and it will form around the worst, most manipulative personality types... which also happen to be the worst leaders.

Re: Flat structures never, ever happen

[readingaccount]

I only played the original Half Life in multiplayer.

You disgust me.

Re:Flat structures never, ever happen

[JDG1980]

tl;dr: if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.

Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. Officially, there isn't supposed to be any hierarchy of editors. Administrators are supposed to be "janitors", just doing non-controversial maintenance work, and aren't supposed to have more rights than regular editors on articles. In practice, of course, it doesn't work that way, and there is a very clear hierarchy which usually remains unspoken. What you can get away with on Wikipedia depends a *lot* on whether you're an administrator, how long you've been on the site, whether you are an old friend of Jimbo's, and whether you kiss the right butt on IRC.

Re: Politics ruins everything

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not much of a sample size.

[crioca]

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.

Re:Not much of a sample size.

[Anonymous Coward]

She got paid, got to do what she wanted, didn't get enough resources because the rest didn't believe in it and she couldn't convince them, then she and team got sacked but got to keep the stuff and continue with it.

Doesn't sound that terrible to me. What other company would have paid her and let her do that?

Maybe the sacking bit and run-up to it was done badly. But in most other companies you wouldn't even be able to do that project in the first place, much less keep the rights after you got fired.

Re:Not much of a sample size.

[epiphani]

I actually thought this through... my first reaction was wow, that sucks. Maybe Valve isn't the utopia that people think it is.

Then I stepped back and remembered what I've heard about Valve. You make your own decisions - and you're accountable for them. They said they had a million dollar lab, but couldn't hire anyone to do the machining. But who decided to build that lab? Did they spend a million dollars on equipment then not use it?

A flat organizational structure doesn't mean there's no politics. It means politics are MORE important - it's harder for some team to simply burn cash, because everyone's eyes are on you. It's hugely increased freedom - but all of the responsibility that comes with it. Assuming that anyone in Valve could decide to go build a million dollar lab, what do you think would happen if it failed to get utilized?

This is one side of the story from one person. I'm sure there's more to it than the lab, but the lab example shows a basic misunderstanding of the personal responsibility one has in a flat org structure.

Re:Not much of a sample size.

[Ash Vince]

And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". Now it's happened again. It's "their fault! Nothing to do with me at all." Give me a break. She should just grow up and accept that she's not as special as she thinks she is.

Actually she might be very special, but that is utterly irrelevant when you work as part of a team.

It sounds like she was easily able to drive her own team, and manage those beneath her. But those are the easy part of management, the hard bit is called managing up (In this case it is probably more like managing across).

What she needed to do was go round every different person in the company she could and get their buy in and input into what her project should do and most importantly why it was a good idea. This probably seemed very strange to her as the boss had given her a task and she wanted to do it. She was probably expected to recruit other people from within the company who liked her idea to spend a bit of time on it. This is why they kept her department under resourced. That means long hours learning what everyone else does, forcing yourself into the existing social scene within the company, talking to people to find people who might be able to help you even though they are not strictly part of your team.

It sounds what she actually tried to do was hire a microcosm to work for her and just drop in a hierarchical department within a company that has no hierarchy. That was obviously never going to work and the company was never going to allow it to flourish.

It seems like her biggest problem is that the masses at Valve simply did not get behind her idea, that is why she was allowed to keep her product as they did not hold it in high enough esteem. Maybe they were right, maybe she was, only time will tell.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[fastest fascist]

"Stopped thinking at birth", you mean.

Re:Yes

[mellyra]

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).

Re:C64 DTV designer

[hamster_nz]

I assume this is the same Jeri Ellisworth that designed the Commodore 64 Direct to TV unit?

Yes, uber-hacker-maker. Has a collection of self-restored electron microscopes.

Much smarter & more creative than your average person.

Re:Sadly

[jones_supa]

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.