[tikhonj]

I mean, it's not like traditional companies—from Google to Comcast—consistently provide great customer support either. So you can't really make strong conclusions about why Valve is having issues there without additional insight; there are too many confounding variables to pin it just on its management structure.

This is a common story with people trying something new. If you do the old-fashioned thing—buy IBM, so to speak—and fail, well, these things happen. A lot of factors could have contributed to the problem. But if you try something new, the new thing must be at fault—even though all those other factors apply just as much now as they did in the IBM case.

[Karunamon]

That's a fair point, but I'm struggling to think of a way in which it isn't at least partially to blame. The handbook (and Valve insiders) say it's pretty much a do-your-own-thing company. Who'd want to deal with angry users all day?

[hodwik]

I work for a software company very much like Valve in structure, who has been operating this way since the 70s.

Support still gets done, because when you hire you specifically hire people who love doing support. Those people exist, and they get tremendously emotionally involved in the quality of their work, just like anyone else.

In every department there are people who struggle with the flat hierarchy and free range to work on what you like, who have a strong emotional need to know who is in charge, and to be told what needs doing. Those people struggle, but they are by no means relegated to any one department -- plenty of them are engineers.

[robbiemitchell]

If they increase the weekly/monthly pay for people who choose to deal with angry customers, it should reach equilibrium eventually.

[Bjartr]

Surely there are some people out there who really do have a passion for, and get satisfaction from, dealing with upset customers. The questions left are how hard are they to find and how expensive are they to employ.