While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing.
I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable.
In groups of humans operating in "communal" mode, this invisibility of the hierarchy is by design. It's not the top brass that's doing it. It's the "will of the people."
> In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.)
>I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
Sounds like it. It sounds like a complete vacuum, void of any responsibility. Rife with cowardly management and lack of direction, I could only imagine...
I don't think I have ever read any employee account that's made me want to work in the games industry.
There's been plenty written on Valve's somewhat rare management system and how it works/doesn't work. Just do a HN search for valve and you'll find some explicit ones, and likely good discussions in more than a few in the discussions on submissions about Valve that are about other things.
Just as a side, the way Valve works is quite unusual in the games industry, most studios are more traditional with better defined roles and hierarchies.
> Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not
now.”
...
> The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.
> "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives.
It may sounds naive, but what on your opinion would have been the result if you'd knock on the CEO's office door, asked if he has 10 minutes to talk to you & then earnestly and honestly (but as diplomatically as you can) have told him exactly that story?
> I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me
Isn't it an environment for creating ideas, rallying people around them and then leading them?
If you're new with fresh ideas then you can directly go and try to do that because formally there is no boss. You only have to fight the informal hierarchy.
Your boss reports to his boss. He can deny responsibility and blame his team, but normally if he has the power to hire/fire people that's still his problem.
From what I've heard about Valve, it sounds like there's a class of people that can fire you and therefore force you to do things, but you are still directly responsible if things go wrong. So the high-level people have power without accountability, and the low-level people have accountability without power.
That doesn't sound like a bad deal if you enter with a lot of political capital (maybe you are a world-renowned expert or friends with Gabe Newell). Doesn't seem like a particularly great place to work for everyone else though.
So, Valve is a terrible company bogged down by incompetent middle managers, just like many other terrible companies run by incompetent middle managers. The only difference is that at Valve their official title is "co-worker" instead of "boss".
Well, it can help if your boss's job description says they're responsible for your performance. Theoretically, that's why they're given the power to fire you in the first place.
