Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I didn't find much of interest in the article, but I realized that we have the concept of "leaderless teams" in the company where I work.

The company produces several distinct but related products. All of the products have a shared set of concerns and resources. They are all built upon the same in-house operating system, they all use the same development and testing lab infrastructure, they all have UIs, automated testing, etc. Migration of CIs between teams (generally voluntary) is relatively common.

To avoid duplication of work and to coordinate work and improvements on these shared resources, "guilds" spontaneously formed. Guild members more or less represent their own team's interests while also contributing to guild efforts as a whole, if they can, and when they have the time. Each guild has semi-regular meetings. There is usually a guild "leader" but this person is more of a secretary in the sense that they only schedule meetings, take notes, and facilitate communication. Guild leaders are just CIs like everyone else in the guild and have no actual authority to direct work.

Company management is aware of guilds and will allocate resources to them if specifically requested but otherwise have no involvement in the guilds and never attend meetings. Guilds (along with non-asshat managers) are one of the things this company has that I wish was more commonplace in tech companies.

I work at a company that at one point attempted to form “guilds” around some unowned, decaying cross-cutting concerns that were still very important.

The guild was great at identifying issues to work on, but most members didn’t have the time to actually contribute on any of the more hairy issues. It was basically group therapy.

I think a solution to this is (and many other problems) to load up engineers timetables only 70% the way.

From what I see and hear in this industry, that's not uncommon to have that much 'free' time anyway.

Ditto. If those concerns aren’t directly tied to profit or costs it’s hard to justify why time is required to work on them.

Also - and perhaps this is just me - but the world “guild” just makes me think of Dwarves and fantasy games. “The dwarvish guild is requesting more iron ore to make hammers”. Hard to get taken seriously.

Guild is not a term in corporate parlance. Perhaps “think tank” resonates a little better? IDK

Thanks for sharing. This sounds like a very sophisticated culture (though it may just seem obvious to those on the inside.) Whatever the structure or norms (e.g. guilds, squads, cells, lattice, project teams, etc) it sounds like leadership has given some guidance and more important empowerment. But, empowerment is an alliance. It must be taken up with given. By everyone in fact, as leadership is an act not a position, if you go by the definition of leadership as the act of driving change (aka doing real work.) Are you able to share the company? I'd be interested in studying it. info@brettmacfarlane.com

What's the name of your company?

I’m not OP but the concept kind of sounds like how Valve (the company who makes Steam) is modeled.

This would explain why we're still waiting for HL3.

I think what has held HL3 back is Valve thinking they need to deliver something _more_ than just a continuation of HL2. HL2 was meant to showcase physics and the source engine, Valve needed something like that for HL3. Alyx I think was supposed to be that "thing": VR, the next frontier.

Unfortunately, I think most folks would have been perfectly fine with HL3 being a continuation of HL2, myself included, so now we have to wait for Valves hubris to subside.

Did I miss the announcement of Half-Life 3? AFAIK, the last game that was ever announced was Half-Life 2: Episode 3.

At this point, HL3 has been so hyped for so long that I imagine it would be Herculean to satisfy expectations.

Sometimes when I think about how anxiety-provoking it must be to even _think_ about making Half-Life 3, I wonder if Valve might not be better off building something that completely defies expectations about what "Half-Life 3" should be instead of trying to meet those existing expectations and then inevitably disappointing a huge number of people even if they produce something pretty damn good.

What could it look like instead? Anything! I think a Divinity-style RPG Half-Life would be heaps of fun. Or a hero-based RTS that still has Gordon Freeman centre stage. I think basically any genre that can tell a story would be fine.

Of course this guarantees disappointing a lot of people, but I feel there's a lot better chance of Valve producing something creatively worthwhile this way than trying to make a "vastly better Half-Life 2", which is what most people seem to be waiting for.

This pretty much exactly describes Alyx. They defied expectations about what Half-Life 3 should be and disappointed a large number of people (who were mad that it was VR exclusive) despite producing something incredible and unprecedented.

"Perfect is the Enemy of Good", as happened with Duke Nukem III.

Duke Nukem 3D was a huge hit. You must be thinking of Duke Nukem Forever, which would have been the fourth game in the main series.

the company that makes Gore-Tex is structured in this way (lattice hierarchy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_%26_Associates

Reply on news.ycombinator.com