Comment by pksebben

Comment by pksebben 21 hours ago

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The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.

The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.

For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.

I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.

inejge 19 hours ago

> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat.

I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.

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  • rixed 19 hours ago

    My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.

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  • pksebben 8 hours ago

    The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.

    Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.

    With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).

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port11 17 hours ago

Also: GitHub before the Microsoft acquisition, as supposedly the teams could self-assemble to work on whatever they wanted.

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rixed 19 hours ago

Thank you for the references; Is there any article/blog describing that secret sauce from the insde for the curious outsider that you would recommand?

I've always been interrested in organisations, but not so much by the theory that I've always found too dry.

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