[nate_martin]

"flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time.

[blakeyrat]

Valve's "flagship" software product Steam is full of bugs and terrible usability. (The ability to change font size went away when they switched to HTML rendering, and has never come back. Font size. A desktop application which is extremely likely to run on high DPI monitors where you can't adjust the font size.)

I've had a customer service request in for about 4 days now. I know that if/when it gets replied to, the person who replies won't read what I typed and I'll have to explain it again and wait another 5-6 days to get any action. (Before you ask, it's about a DLC that isn't part of their refund policy, so I can't simply refund it.)

Based on Steam's example, I'm not a fan of this concept. They're popular because they have a lot of network effect, not because Steam's any good.

[figgis]

And this has been going on since it's inception, and I am hoping it finally bites them in the butt.

Every single other marketplace even slightly similar to Valve has support that outshines Valve in every single way possible.

EA with their Origin client launch did a fantastic job with customer service and making sure they are keeping as many people that actually use Origin, happy. (yeah we all love to hate them, but they got this one right.) I thought it would go to crap quickly but from my (admittedly limited) experience and what I have heard it is still great.

I am actually scared that should my steam account get hacked I will lose everything. I've used steam for many many years. I've put more money than I should have into it (400+ games) and now I have to be extremely careful that nothing I do screws my account because there is a very good chance that it will go unresolved and I will be out all of that time/money.

Whenever I look to get a game, I buy them any way I possibly can outside of steam before I turn to their platform.

I believe there is time for Valve to turn it around. There are many things they have certainly done right. They've done a great job pushing for Linux, especially since I moved to linux only gaming over a year and a half ago. They've helped Indie developers and modders bring their creations to a unified platform.

[mahyarm]

So why did steam win compared to other online game stores?

And why do they continue to do well with their game offerings?

[jhanschoo]

This is all from memory, so I may misidentify some factors as important and fail to identify some factors, and my chronology may be wrong.

Steam won because it had first mover advantage. Valve was historically a developer, and it launched Steam with a highly-anticipated game, so I suppose it didn't have pre-existing relationships with its retailers to negotiate. Other traditionally to-retail large publishers didn't get into the online distribution and online DRM game till quite a bit later. Meanwhile, the indie gaming scene exploded, and many of them chose to distribute via Steam.

As for why it continues to be the most popular platform, I presume that they are mostly due to it's reach as a channel as well as its gamification of its platform to encourage loyalty and spending. I think I should let someone who's seen things from the developer side answer this though.

[icehawk219]

In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.

[adekok]

That reminds me of the story of university walkways:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=P...

In short, students walked over the grass, despite the "keep off the grass" signs. The solution proposed by university president Dwight D Eisenhower was "Why not let the students take whichever route works, and then build the walkways over the bare patches?"

The same could apply here. If the rank & file see person X as being necessary / useful, then give that person an official title and responsibilities.

[mwfunk]

This is fascinating, I guess it really did come from Eisenhower but I've heard many variants. The first time I heard it, it was attributed to Bill Gates deciding where the paths on the MS campus should be (this was during peak Microsoft, sometime in the '90s).

I've also heard a version (or two) in which the campus was specifically one of the top tier US schools for CS (MIT/Stanford/CMU/etc.). The common thread was always that it was supposed to illustrate the visionary status of whoever was in charge, and/or the enlightened status of the company or university. The Eisenhower version would be the oldest one though, perhaps it was the original.

[wott]

I didn't know it was attributed to someone (or many ones). I always thought it was a common reflection almost everyone develops after seeing a few of those natural paths compared to the officially built paths.

[eric_h]

Amusingly, I'd heard it attributed to Steve Jobs.

[paulddraper]

It was actually Abraham Lincoln.

[xorblurb]

There might be a problem, though. A person can be a go to for a subject because he filled a hole at one point, and then proceeds to kidnap the subject entirely and even obtains new semi-informal-subordinates to work on the kidnapped subject under their orders. Such maintainers are usually not bad, but they can at the same time make tons of dubious discretionary choices and lack random amount of theoretical or practical knowledge. Depending on the culture, the situation can stay like this during years, even decades. Bonus points if such people suffer from the NIH syndrome...

[dredmorbius]

"Desire paths". Also a form of least-cost, satisficing, problem solving / solution phenomena.

[throwaway274739]

I heard that story but that it was Einstein at the IAS campus.

[jevanish]

This is exactly what Wistia found: https://wistia.com/blog/ditching-flat

"We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.

Every company has a structure. If you don't explicitly define your structure, then you are left with an implicit one, and that can stifle productivity. We had hoped that being flat would let us move faster and be more creative, but as we grew, we ended up with an unspoken hierarchy that actually slowed down our ability to execute."

[sliverstorm]

Also discovered by feminist organizations in decades past. A good read:

There is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. --Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[vintermann]

I was going to recommend that. Whether the accusations of gender discrimination were warranted or not, either way it would be a dead-classic example of power struggles in informal structures.

[cookiecaper]

This organic emergence of an informal structure is what many anti-management advocates use to justify their stance. They say there is no need for formal bureaucracy when people will automatically follow natural leaders and good ideas.

While I appreciate the philosophical sentiment, I think it's both a little naive and a little jaded.

Naive because in practice, there are real disputes, and someone needs to be in a position to resolve those disputes and keep things organized. When the structure is informal, even with great technical people (and often this occurs more often with great technical people), effort will often be spent on duplicate tasks, and the differing implementations will compete for mindshare internally. While that's not always a problem, there are times when the structure needs to be directed so that more important corporate goals can be achieved. If the employees can't operate with unity, they may find the whole company unified with them on the unemployment line in the not-too-distant future.

It's naive because good ideas are not always received well by self-interested actors, especially when you're dealing with people of mixed experienced levels and backgrounds, as any company with more than a few employees is. The manager's role is to make a critical analysis of the proposal and make what is frequently a difficult choice about what will be in the organization's long-term interest.

It's also naive because there needs to be a designated official who represents both you to the company and the company to you. That representation ensures you always have someone to voice your concerns and needs to. It ensures that you understand what the company wants you to be doing instead of having to try to pull it out of the ether, come out with the wrong thing, and find yourself in sudden political turmoil. It ensures that you have an appointee who can advise and represent your cause in sensitive personnel matters, and argue for the value you bring to the company. A good manager serves many very important organizational functions besides just determining technical direction.

Jaded because such a massive majority of managerial structures are so comically broken and useless, that traumatized workers don't understand how they could ever be useful for anything and just want to chuck the whole thing out. Believe me, I beyond sympathize with this, but I don't think it always has to be that way. This is part of why finding a good corporate fit is very important for the job seeker.

Any time you get more than 3-5 people in a room, a political pecking order will naturally arise. That force needs checks and controls to keep everyone safe. Benevolent, mindful leadership from good, fair judges is critical to the success of any group of humans, whether organized into a corporation, nation, tribe, family, or other. We can't discard that principle just because it's hard to find qualified leaders.

[gchadwick]

> Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time

Are they that effective at Valve though? Seems it's not bad enough to cause the company serious damage but are they doing much nowadays? Yes there's the Vive but that's in partnership with HTC who may be providing a lot of the top-level direction.

I get the feeling Valve is coasting along on the Steam cash cow and could be doing a lot more with the people and resources they have available.

[ftlio]

People forget how hard-fought the battle for Steam really was. Half-Life 2's release on Steam nearly broke them. One word for it could be "coasting", but another might be "reaping" the rewards of choosing to fight that battle long before anyone else believed it was winnable.

And they're not really coasting. They're at the forefront of broadcast gaming, competitive gaming, whatever you want to call it. I've watched Riot grow, and Blizzard falter in that industry, but I'm damn near positive that Valve has the better framework for the long-term.

Edit: I also think that Valve's primary product is "not having to deal with industry standard financing and deadline problems so we can make games that are actually good without burning out like everyone else does."

[Negitivefrags]

They are maintaining three of the largest free to play games in the world. Revenues from those three games is said to rival that of Steam itself.

[nitrogen]

An example of a flat structure failure is the complete lack of a new episode of Half Life.

[effie]

I think not doing HL3 was the right move from the business standpoint. The expectations of the HL fans got so high that anything short of another milestone of PC gaming history would damage them. It is hard to beat yourself, when the last success was so big. Much smarter to put the effort into several other directions.

[serge2k]

Doing half life 2, then switching to episodic content so you can get things moving faster, then taking forever to release 2 episodes, then sitting around for a decade with an unresolved cliffhanger is ridiculous.

I don't buy your reasoning either. Right business move because DotA 2 and their Hats! are a cash cow business, sure.

[ftlio]

They're waiting for VR. Half-Life 2 already spans everything cool you could conceivably do with a 'post-quake 2' shooter. Team Fotress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 cover all the neat online matchmaking, micro-transaction, user-created content stuff.

They don't want to make Half-Life 3, the expansion to Half-Life 2. They want to make something new. They created something new with Portal, which required them to hone their ability to introduce players to an entirely new game mechanic, but now they have to wait for VR to put it all together.

[nitrogen]

As a fan of the HL series, I don't need a revolution, I just want to finish the darn story.

[__s]

We can all appreciate Vulkan

[jim-greer]

It is rumored not to work well at Valve either. Once you get past Dunbar's number, subgroups form. It's better to make them explicit. Otherwise you tend to get cliques, which are probably worse than hierarchy:

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

[serge2k]

> I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve

Valve seems like the poster child for upsides and downsides of this system.

They release cool games, make lot of money, Hats!

On the other hand, steam is still really clunky and their customer service has historically been horrible.

[was_boring]

So terrible that I quit using them all together. My account got into a state were I could not buy any games, and after weeks of customer service emails which lead no resolution and only canned responses, I just gave up on the platform enterily.

I've never tried so hard to give a company my money and have them so actively refuse it.

[makomk]

Having heard stuff from people who work there I really don't buy the idea that Valve actually has a flat corporate structure. Maybe it looks that way if your name is Gabe Newell, but it sure sounds pretty hierarchical to me (maybe even toxicly so).

[Pica_soO]

So what is the strategy to go to keep as much flatland as possible? Split it up into several small companys and one that is basically managing as a external entity the coordination of those smaller flatlanders?