My guess is no and there is still a hierarchy, however obscure.
This is my suspicion as well, and my experience with "flat" organizations. Hierarchy and power dynamics are phenomena that occur in organizations. If you do not create the power structure on purpose, it will arise spontaneously, as your organization grows. If you try to suppress power structures, the power structures will hide themselves.
This isn't some conspiracy theory stuff. It just means that in any organization, some people will have some authority--because they are liked, maybe because they get things done, maybe because they know things, maybe because they've just been around a long time. These people end up getting kept in the loop for decisions, not because anyone is directed to keep them in the loop, but simply because it's the way things are done. If you try to do something outside this power structure, you may encounter organizational resistance--if for no other reason than because you're doing things differently from everyone else. It is more difficult to navigate these kinds of power structures because there's still someone in charge, more or less--but it's not written down.
Sometimes you encounter a truly flat organization, but they tend to be very small. I don't think it scales well.
The gist is that in officially flat organizations, there always exists an unofficial hierarchy that arises organically, and that because it's unofficial it's unaccountable, unlike a formal hierarchy one could theoretically dissent with or challenge.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structureless...
Why would I want an org chart to be fun or interesting? Usually, my goal is for anything "fun" and "interesting" to be either a direct responsibility at work, or something I do outside of work for pleasure.
Don't work somewhere interesting. Walk the maze of the traditional establishment, and enjoy your quiet workday. There are so many opportunities for you to do that.
Myself, I don't want to be driveling stupidly many hours a day over whatever apparati I might be charged with the operation of. I want stimulation and novelty. I want to be curious and satisfy it. I want to be confused and amazed. The many, many hours I'll spend at work, I want them to be edifying. Not some sacrifice to a faceless quorum of buzzards that I might live another day.
This whole wage labor regime is a fairly new thing, and it hasn't been rightly tested in all its degrees of freedom. Something Hobbesian about the direction and shape it has taken, it's sad and cynical and skeptical but without faith.
What you are describing sounds like the subjective experience of what you feel when you work in the traditional establishment. You feel unstimulated, but that's a product of your personality and your immediate environment.
To put it another way... whether an environment is "interesting" depends on whether someone is interested.
Choosing to leave a large organization gives you some freedoms and takes away others. It sounds like you value the freedoms that you get outside large organizations, and you have only harsh words for people who feel otherwise.
Just to put this in concrete terms... let's say you are curious about compilers, or memory allocators, or network flow control algorithms. It tends to be only large organizations that will pay you to work on those things, and in order to my curiosity about those things, I would want to rub elbows with experts in those subjects. Those opportunities exist at the largest tech companies and in academia (and my experience is that academia is no less bureaucratic).
For me, sometimes, navigating broken bureaucracies is a price that I pay to work on some really fascinating problems. The broken bureaucracy itself is a fascinating problem.
I've worked in several "flat" companies that tried various democratic things like this.
It always turns into the ultimate game of politics. In this case, it would instantly become "I'll vote to raise your salary if you vote to raise my salary".
https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless...
At every big tech company, there’s always a few employees who assert nothing has changed and their employer is the same plucky upstart they joined 5 or 10 years ago.
Who sets the salaries? With a flat structure and no "managers", who picks your salary for next year? Who picks how much a new person gets an offer for? How are raises and equity comp determined?
That all seems to be missing from (at least this version of) the handbook. The word salary appears once and compensation eight times, but it just says "we try to be the best" but never discusses the mechanics of it.
Thanks!
the interview process is also kind of interesting -- you'll know if you got an offer or not before you leave the onsite interview. also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.
That makes sense, having the people who interview attempt to pick a comp that will get you in the door.
> then is adjusted up/down as your peers estimate your impact over time.
It is the mechanics of this that I am most interested in and no one will answer for me. Do people vote on their peer's salary? How does that not become super political? What happens if they all vote for each other to get 1000% raises, who stops them?
> also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.
If I were them the driver would be the beginning and end of the interview process. Were you kind to the driver on the way there? Did you say nasty things on the way back?
Or maybe they just got a good deal with a company that only had a few drivers. :)
That said, true co-ops of all sizes also struggle with compensation. Much like startups, you want to reward early risk acceptance and loyalty while preserving fairness based on skill and contribution (otherwise you won't be able to recruit new members). It's really, really hard.
(I know who you are but I figured it was worth commenting since others may not know as much on the subject).
(This is also why I highly suspect Valve is not truly horizontal: you will never get 100 people to agree on anything important.)
I'm still more interested in WHAT I'm doing than what the compensation is. The patreon arc of Airwindows is sort of peaking out and subsiding very gradually and I'm looking at what else I can do: if I'm compensated much less than minumum wage it begins to affect what projects I can take on as it'll erode my resources too much. Such is the lot of an open source dev who's used inherited money as capital :)
I'd work at Valve. Sounds fascinating, and a bit like the production work I've done: working with a band and getting the most out of their album, except it's an ad hoc group of devs and the 'album' is a game or software infrastructure. There will be people in such a situation who are maximizing their own wealth. Such people are only minor obstacles to getting the THING you're making, optimized. Basically if you're getting enough money anyway and they will let you have the thing needed on the grounds that they take too much credit, but the thing can be made, then let 'em have the credit as long as they're not screwing up anything important.
It's sufficiently obvious who is contributing and for what reasons. There will always be outside perspectives, including outside of me and whoever is credit-seeking for wealth maximization.
> How pay is determined
>"This is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment. "In companies like Microsoft or elsewhere, usually the bonus is something between 8, 15, 20 percent of the basic salary. In Valve, I'm told, there's no upper limit to bonuses. Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage." "Gabe [Newell] had this view from the beginning. He wanted a community of partners, he didn't want to be the boss of anyone or to be bossed around by anyone."
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-i...
Though I would love to see a game come out of there again sometime. :)
Australia — A place that’s either very near or is New Zealand where more than half of Valve’s employees were born.
My point, in response to this specific quote from the person I was replying to, is that good people don't bounce when a project gets hard, they in fact do the opposite.
If you disagree with the statement I quoted from the person I was replying to that's fine, I have no bone to pick.
Then you have their VR and steam deck hardware that is setting the bar for new gaming platforms. The fact that they also found time to ship a game is just icing on top IMO.
Counter - Strike
Steam (and numerous innovations within it)
Dota 2
Portal 1 and 2
The entire VR industry as it exists today comes from Valve showing Oculus their far more advanced prototype and giving them the tech, which later led to FB acquisition
CastAR which was initially developed at valve - so far not successful but I think it has potential.
The best VR game currently available - half life Alyx
Gaming on Linux through Proton
Steam Deck
> Dota
> Portal 1
> Gaming on Linux through Wine
These were all invented outside of Valve.
Does wine even compare to what Valve has accomplished with Proton?