The Nightmare of Valve’s self-organizing “utopia” (2018)

The article briefly touches on the fact that this system worked when the company was small. I also frequently see people talk about the growing pains startups face when they exceed around 3 dozen people. When groups are smaller i think people do have an inherant preference toward more "egalitarian" strategies because its still possible for an individual to grok the social dynamic of the full group. Being in a small flat organization brings the same potential anxieties, but its possible to relieve them because its still possible to have a real relationship with other stakeholders.

One of the purposes of heirarchical structures seem to be to just divide people up into smaller working groups for this same purpose. I wonder if its possible to subdivide a company to get this benefit while keeping it flat. For example, maybe the company consists of 30 fixed groups of people, and those groups coordinate with each other via some type of structured interface without heirarchy... Or maybe having a heirarchy is ok at that level of abstraction.

> Indeed, in July 2018, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban studied two Fortune 500 companies making the switch to open office plans. The results were damning: face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the participating employees, productivity had declined, employees found it harder to concentrate and were overall less satisfied with their job.

I think the worst condemnation came from an ex-Valve friend of mine: "After almost two years I finally learned who my boss was when she fired me."

If there's no overt structure there is politics (ex Valve person told me that).

Still sounds like every other big organization out there (the politicking, the backstabbing, the fiefdoms, the barons, the bullies, the serfs, the hidden true powers, the untouchables, the 'safe' hiring, ...) just lacking the 'formal' hierarchy on the side.

Values are dependent upon hierarchy because values have to and enforced. The attempted removal of hierarchy minimizes and/or obscures the company's values and prevents them from being lauded. In its nature, the flat model is not forthright to its workers. This is why its employees function with suspicion in the dark.

There's an echo of something I remember Marx saying here, about the futility of trying to abolish capitalism, in private, behind its back. Ultimately, the two stress points ruining the whole project are that the workers have to be productive, and non-productive workers must be fired. That drives both the crunch, and the lurking threat of being fired. These both have the same source - whatever organizational structure Valve chooses, it is a for-profit company with a limited hiring budget.

If nobody was being paid, nobody had to be fired, and nobody was worried about money, their system probably wouldn't give rise to any cliques, barons, and so on - simply because there would be no need for this sort of defensive politics.

So... not that much about Valve, but quite a lot of parallels with other structureless entities. Seems like a clickbaity worthless read. Used to not have those on HN.