[gauravk92]

1. How do you handle the logical conclusion of letting your workers do whatever they want, they don't do anything? This may not apply to all employees, but it surely applies to at least one, and I wanted to know specifically how you might handle that situation.

2. What sort of system do you have to address problems with the unconditional hierarchy? For example, if an employee disagrees with Gabe, who wins and how is that handled?

UPDATE: addition to question #1

[strager]

> they don't do anything

I don't know about you, but not doing anything is boring to me. Working is so often much more fun than doing nothing.

[wpietri]

100% this. To herd cats, you open tuna cans.

Real management isn't telling people what to do. It's helping people find the intersection between what they want to do and what customers need, and then supporting them.

That strikes me as especially easy at Valve, where the whole point is to create something that other people enjoy. If you can't find fun somewhere in the vast space of "create something fun," you're dead inside.

[gauravk92]

I understand the parent comments point as well as yours. I realize this won't be an issue for most of the employees, but bad apples sneak through everywhere, it's human nature, and I specifically wanted to understand how they might handle that.

[wpietri]

Ah, got it. I thought you were talking about all workers rather than the occasional bad apple. Great question.

[lifeformed]

Well, "creating something fun" is not an easy thing to do. When you get down to pure game design there can be wildly divergent viewpoints of what to do. Should we make this new game more interesting for hardcore players, or for casuals? Is increasing accessibility of the game worth the decrease in depth?

[gauravk92]

Good point, I made an amendment.

[bdunbar]

Related

1. How do you handle jobs that suck, but must be done.

Like backups ... nobody really likes the job of 'backup guy'.

It's boring. Tedious. A backwater of a role with no meaningful career progression. Also - the software typically sucks, and is expensive. Also - the hardware typically sucks, and is super-expensive.

But someone must pay attention to backups because stuff happens and you might actually need to recover everything from tape to get the company online.

How does Valve get the tedious, boring, nit-picky, utterly necessary stuff done?

[gauravk92]

I would imagine no one at valve is an expert at managing backups for hundreds of machines and keeping an appropriate level of redundancy. Valve is definitely a company that is going to focus on where it can do better then others. They probably use many outside services to handle the things they don't want to have to worry about or specialize in. Other companies will handle it better because that's their focus, Gabe definitely gets that.

[bdunbar]

They probably use many outside services

We experimented with out-sourcing a few years ago. It was a disaster: the out-sourcing company was 'fair-to-excellent' with standard products and services.

But we're a manufacturing company. The majority of our software is specific to our industry. Suddenly the vendor is dealing with dozens of apps they've never even heard of. And - whoops - some of the guys who dealt with that stuff are laid off.

The rest of us got calls from confused techs in Austin plaintively asking what in the heck was the UmptyFratz service and who can restart it?

Long way of saying that - I imagine - some of what Valve does is industry specific and hard to out-source.