I was curious about it too and there was a paper about it with the following summary:
Valve is a “flat” company without a management hierarchy or traditional boss roles: instead of top-down organization and management, Valve employees are free to work on whatever projects they choose and to convince other employees to join collaborative groups. Decision-making is thus “democratized” rather than centralized in key management positions. This peculiar structure, or lack thereof, seems to challenge conventional ideas about organization not only in the video game business but also business in general.
Uhhh, that sounds really nice! I think that also explain why I personally dont have the feeling that it is completely derailing, like a lot other companies. In the end, while I’m not the biggest fan of Valve, I’m more than willing to recognise the impact they made, especially for Linux gaming. Without them, we would be in a completely different spot now. I’m sure that these kind of decisions, which oftentimes turn out to be industry-changing, are facilitates by this organisational structure.
So yeah, thank you Gabe for not making the company accountable to shareholders and actually not completely driving your user base against the wall. It is highly appreciated.
It’s not all nice unfortunately, but definitely one of the better models.
They have pretty sad problems with being a male dominated cutthroat environment. The workers can fire each other over stupid things and get status from harsh mutual overseeing and that, so it’s not very humane in there
Thanks for sharing that, but I was already aware of their flat structure.
What I was asking specifically was for elaboration on the comment of the analysis of the ‘symptom’ of the flat structure, and not the existence of the flat structure.
Not that the flat structure causes the symptom, but how it causes the symptom.
Elaborate?
I was curious about it too and there was a paper about it with the following summary:
Uhhh, that sounds really nice! I think that also explain why I personally dont have the feeling that it is completely derailing, like a lot other companies. In the end, while I’m not the biggest fan of Valve, I’m more than willing to recognise the impact they made, especially for Linux gaming. Without them, we would be in a completely different spot now. I’m sure that these kind of decisions, which oftentimes turn out to be industry-changing, are facilitates by this organisational structure.
So yeah, thank you Gabe for not making the company accountable to shareholders and actually not completely driving your user base against the wall. It is highly appreciated.
It’s not all nice unfortunately, but definitely one of the better models.
They have pretty sad problems with being a male dominated cutthroat environment. The workers can fire each other over stupid things and get status from harsh mutual overseeing and that, so it’s not very humane in there
Thanks for sharing that, but I was already aware of their flat structure.
What I was asking specifically was for elaboration on the comment of the analysis of the ‘symptom’ of the flat structure, and not the existence of the flat structure.
Not that the flat structure causes the symptom, but how it causes the symptom.