It’s seems a bit out of left field to annotate a random company’s employee handbook. I’m not an employee at Valve — never have been, likely never will be — but among engineers, Valve has a somewhat mythic status as a company with an unorthodox approach to management: just… don’t manage.
This annotation relates specifically to Evolutions and Revolutions as Organizations Grow, which pertains to general management structures across companies. The entire field of management research is an investigation into how best to coordinate human efforts and enterprise, and there are many solutions across that spectrum that work well. Take a look at two successful companies, and you’d certainly find differences in the structure of their org charts — sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but differences nonetheless.
However, it’s obvious that Valve’s solution to management (“manage yourselves!”) is novel on the surface, to say the least. I’ve seen it hailed in a few places, now, of the potential for decentralized teams. It’s no secret that tech companies have spent the last few years “flattening” their hierarchies, usually by gutting management roles.
Reading through the handbook, though, you see that Valve’s solution is not the colloquial “no managers!”
Are you hoping you can flatten your organizational hierarchy for efficiency by shitcanning the entire middle management of your company, close your laptop, and come back tomorrow to an efficient paradise?
You’ve got another thing coming.
Source document: media.steampowered.com
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Working with Valves: Understanding the Structure of "Flat" Organizations was first published on Chaotic Good Computing, where you can reply to it on Bluesky or from your own site.
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