Ex Valve dev describes flat company structures: staff purges, anxiety, fighting - Sensationalist Headlines

I went and read his entire Twitter feed from when he started talking about this to now. It's a lot more believable when you read all the pieces of the ramblings. It's enlightening, but not surprising. Yet also worrying as someone in Uni for CS

I haven't read through his tweets, but after what has been posted and under the context of what people have said how he's writing it. Yeah I've heard that before. Also this would be a good time to ask him this, "how did he and others feel within valve about wanting to use unreal or unity/"

I can only imagine working on anything Half-Life related at this point is practically taboo that will get you ousted from the company after everything I just read.

Looking what makes the sausage usually sucks, this whole essay is no different. I'm honestly surprised people actually line up to work at places like this. Though at the same the the allure of working for one of the world's most renowned development studio is very tempting for those who don't see past the curtains. Just a horrific and stress inducing thread to read, through and through.

Honestly having worked a lot of minwage helljob shitwork with hierarchial structures where everyone is getting shat on, getting drunk/high/doped up at work is 100% believable and 100% true.

As a CompSci graduate whose had a passion for programming since I was 12 years old, I sometimes find myself wondering what kind of life I've passed up in pursuing my non-CompSci working life (so far). Then I find myself doing things like listening to the maelstrom of stress that is my friends' jobs working at Amazon or the aerospace industry are like, or reading threads like this. And suddenly my perspective shifts from "missed opportunities" to "dodged bullets." What a world. What a world...

Valve devs being arrogant about their work is a bit odd to be considered by me,maybe from the VR or artifact teams because they are working on new things,with the VR team might be thinking they are working on the future of videogames but i cant think how a person who works on a game like TF2 which is mostly balancing and maintance can have this opinion for himself.

The press can be leveraged to indirectly influence development. If it's public, it's more real. Media allows the corporate arm to sway customer opinion and expectations, which is an indirect way of telling self organizing arm workers what is more valuable to work on. using your power to manipulate the press into influencing customer opinion to make certain projects more valuable so that your workers will work on it seems a lot more complicated than just telling them to work on it

Well it does make some sense,in valve's context where people cant be ordered to work on a project you have to find indirect ways to sway them to it

Employees will be reshaped and remolded in the company’s image, and to do this you must regress back into childhood and be reborn. Isn't this one of this reverse birth fetishes?

Asking the real questions

A lot of what he says can apply to hierarchical structures as well. The main difference is that such issues may be less obvious when the actual structure isn't reflected by an official hierarchy, and those who actually hold power have to resort to more subtle and under-the-table techniques than the usual brute force shit you see in more traditional companies. This is not by any means evidence that traditional, hierarchical structures are superior, contrary to what some posters in this thread claim. Rich even says as much, they can be just as bad and even worse. "Flat management" is the wrong way to go about building a self-organizing structure. The proper alternative to pyramidal structures isn't to do away with management and call it a day. You need to replace it with an actual structure, comprised of well thought-out processes, that grants the most autonomy and responsibilities to those who require them. The most efficient non-hierarchical structures are those that can be divided into multiple small (mostly) independant cells of ~10 or so people, each (mostly) capable of handling themselves on their own. It's also important to remember that, just like there isn't a single model of hierarchical management, there are multiple models of non-hierarchical structures. For instance, according to this testimony, the way bonus are being distributed is the source of a lot of problems, but many self-organizing companies do no such things. Some even let employees decide their wage and bonuses themselves, which are then publically displayed.

While insightful, this is such a cynical and paranoid look at corporate life. Also, none of this is exclusive to Valve, at all.

This is something that you learn as early as Uni. Hell, I would say that half the purpose of any group programming project assigned at university is to subtly make it apparent to you that about 2/5 of your co-workers are backstabbing assholes that will do as little work as possible, with the minimum knowledge/understanding of the work they can possibly glean, and will cheerily report that said 'work' is done when asked before delivering a barely-functional mess a week before the deadline, leaving it up to you and other competent people to pick up their slack to prevent total fucking meltdown. One group member was assigned the simplest salted hash password database implementation possible. Moreso a proof of understanding of the concept than anything robust but enough to get the necessary kudos from the grader. I made it clear that he could come to me and ask me if he had any questions. I even sent him a step-by-step guideline on how to implement it. Not only did he fuck it up, but he fucked it up in such a way that it should've been obvious that it would never work just by looking at it. It wasn't just "I made a mistake in my code", it was "I didn't even take the time to fundamentally understand the process of what I was doing, and vaguely tried to bullshit that I did".

In case you might be wondering, it's not Rich's first time writing about Valve. Here are some tweets that I screenshot back in Jan 2015: https://78.media.tumblr.com/94a6f30f41714bdc5727808c5df7cb59/tumblr_inline_p8wbz2ry7R1r14s65_400.png https://78.media.tumblr.com/89661a2eaa69a69526e23ba603473b17/tumblr_inline_p8wbz3iF3A1r14s65_400.png https://78.media.tumblr.com/ab002de326ee91183bfea3e9570650b0/tumblr_inline_p8wbz3eYZT1r14s65_400.png https://78.media.tumblr.com/e72d59e1c824902a9b07083c2ef8d527/tumblr_inline_p8wbz5uu091r14s65_400.png https://78.media.tumblr.com/7bbfcefbb9068aa7e1d911588ca62db8/tumblr_inline_p8wbz5Z3ug1r14s65_400.png He also wrote a few interesting paragraphs on his blog, which is set to private right now for various reason. Now at a place like my previous company, pretty much everyone is constantly trying to climb the stack rank ladders to get a good bonus, and everyone is trying to protect their perceived turf. Some particularly nasty devs will do everything they can to lead you down blind alleys, or just give you bad information or bogus feedback, to prevent you from doing something that could make you look good (or make something they claimed previously be perceived by the group as wrong or boneheaded). Jeri Ellsworth—remember her?—also said this after she was suddenly fired in 2013: It is a pseudo-flat structure where, at least in small groups, you’re all peers and make decisions together,” she said. “But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company and it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company, then there’s the trouble makers, and everyone in between. Ultimately I think it's good to remember that all of this might seem weird because a lot of gamers might have had this grand illusion that "Valve is heaven on Earth! They are the Pixar of the video games industry!" but they're a company with good things and bad things, like a lot of them out there. I believe it's a lot more healthy to know all of this and still be a fan of what they do, than to have completely blind praise. Be an informed player, not a mindless fan. I also hope this "un-taints" the discourse, make it possible to rightly criticize them a bit without instantly having a hundred Gamers™ breathing down your neck.

The tweets imply that he didn't just work for Valve. So you shouldn't think that 100% of those million tweets are directed at Valve. And most of the stuff happend up to a decade ago.

This also explains why Valve, despite all the backlash they have gotten over the years, fail to consistently communicate with their clients or even perform basic quality control on Steam. The company structure simply doesn't allow it. With a flat hierarchy based on bonuses, based on how Geldreich describes it, doing maintenance work such as updating games or curating the store/greenlight was essentially wasted effort, as it would not provide the employee with anything to brag about and hence gain purge immunity or company bucks. Employing a workforce dedicated to doing such maintenance work is also a no-go, since you can't really delegate anyone to act as a direct superior, and then there would be even more competition for bonuses. Communication with the communities is risky, because you could end up saying something unpopular and then get dinged for damaging the company's reputation.

Well, the good thing about this is that they're probably too busy one upping each other to notice what their fans are doing with Half-Life fan projects.

You were supposed to destroy EA, not join them.

Well, the way this picture is painted, EA is to hierarchical company structures what Valve is to flat hierarchies.

That sounds about right, Valve games started dropping in quality since then, when they were actually released (loved Portal 2, but it always felt a bit off). I'd guess it partially explains why Left 4 Dead 2 seemed like an unfinished wreck at launch.

Oof. From the looks of this the 'team ethic' has been divided for a while. I guess the premise of just hiring people who 'want to make games' and allowing those guys to form teams doesn't really work anymore when mostly of what valve does isn't games anymore.

Valve was an inspiration for many of us, if Half Life 2 didn't exist I'm not sure I would go down the career path that I did.

For what that's worth, I can't remember when that happened, or who exactly said that to me, but there was a change some time during the past 3 years where the bonus incentive was allegedly reduced enough that it would not cause as many problems as it previously did. So in some way that backs up what Rich said about how this is just an account of his experience from 2009-14 and how there were changes since then. Likewise. Had it not been for the Source SDK, Bay Raitt's Source Filmmaker, and the Steam Workshop initiative, I wouldn't be here.

I know what Valve is like and this is far from the truth

Do tell.

valve suck but valve made Steam

Well with your mountain of evidence I don't see how anyone could disagree with you.

You got a single fact to back that up

The mention of Jeri in the old tweets of his is disconcerting towards him. As I recall she was the head of the AR team, or a big player on it and when AR just became a thing no one was interested in because VR was obviously where interest was going, the project was simply abandoned and eventually the people who had been hired for it let go. She tried to act like a victim though until it was eventually brought out by her own admission that she was causing problems and being hostile within the company.