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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

> whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results

Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!

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Actually, this isn’t true. In The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx, Valve talked about how their 10 year dead period where no single player games were released was caused by their nonhierarchial structure. Half-Life 3 alone was started three times since HL2:E2 and people got bored and stopped touching it. They did work on several original titles and ended up cancelling them due to tech issues or boredom.

Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam.

(A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)

Hierarchical or not, keep in mind Valve was making an enormous amount of money the whole time. Steam is, by far, their most profitable business.

They are also extremely selective when it comes to hiring (they are fairly small but get applicants from literally all over). So that some approach worked for Valve won't necessary work for RandomCo Inc where software is viewed as a cost center, simply because they can't attract the same caliber of talent.

I was being ironic, but decided to write the comment in an ambiguous way as was honestly curious which tack HN would take.

The Alyx story you link is probably a great example of the greatest strength being diversity: where diversity often means breaking your own rules when appropriate.

Even the Roman Republic's Senate reserved the power to appoint an omnipotent dictator in times of need.

Are there any more examples like that? I think that possibly Valve is an exception rather than a prediction for the future - they're obviously an incredibly successful company, but I haven't heard about other large companies with similar model.

I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.

There aren't, and as you guessed, they're exceptions for a reason.

Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.

Also, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got.

I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard.

I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)

Valve has a strong hierarchical structure, where informal relationships makes the decisions that would (in other companies) be made by people in formal positions. All groups of people have implicit hierarchies. Some have explicit hierarchies as well.

Do you know if there are any good articles on Valve's non-hierarchical culture?

Not sure if you've seen their handbook? Search for "valve handbook" - it's an internal thing, but someone leaked it a few years ago and now it can be easily found, it explains their culture very well.

The Valve handbook doesn’t reflect the reality at Valve. Not all employees have the power to fire other employees or decide the salary of other employees. The employees that do have all the power and the rest compete with each other to build beneficial buddy relationships with them.

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