Comment by buran77

> Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure

Valve has ~300 employees and operates in a field where they can afford more freedoms (try building large infrastructure projects with flat structures). Valve struck a good balance between autonomy for employees while still having some informal central coordination. Formally there are few bosses but in practice project managers and some people with seniority also act in those roles. At scale it can't work if you don't delegate any of the authority to smaller units.

It's bad to have too many or too few layers. Sometimes the result looks the same, lack of coordination and inability to deliver consistently.

Amazon has 1.5M workers. Can't imagine a flat structure working but I'm sure they were overdoing it with layers of management.