Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones?
Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?
Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?
Actually, as I approach retirement age, I'd love a basic wage job working with clever people and smoothing the edges a little; thinking ahead and setting stuff up.
Note to startups: Your local 50+ and 60+ people may like the involvement. You could get a lot of experience/support for not much money depending on how local pensions work.
I imagine you'd advertise for a support specialist in the traditional sense, but once hired, they wouldn't have a job title. Their skills would be in customer support though so that's what they would naturally do. If they tried to work on development, but had no skills, then the group would remove them from the project. They'd then have to go back to support or find something else they can work on with their skill set.
OK, so who cleans the toilets and empties the garbage? Contractors, presumably -- easier to get non-employees to do this than to incorporate menial staff into your oh-so-flat structure. Reminds me of the way ancient Rome ensured that all citizens were equal by creating a huge subclass of non-citizens.
What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.
Funny enough, we're a small company here (8 employees at this location), and I simply told them we couldn't afford a cleaning crew [a], that if they wanted to live nearly a third of their life in a dirty, disorganized environment, that was their choice. The bathrooms stay clean, the kitchen has the dishes washed every day, and every Friday they spend an hour scrubbing the place. No one is forced to do it, yet everyone takes pride in their workplace and wouldn't stand for a customer or someone else to judge them.
(Mind you, the engineers who are used to having someone clean up after them have taken longer to pitch in - but they all eventually join the party. =)
It's worth noting, that we're not "flat" as far as structure goes, there's an operations manager as a foreman, and there are two of us partners at the top who set clear directives. However, we let anyone do anything they find interesting - the key is that they must -do- and not -talk-. If someone has an idea, they can get it done as long as they meaningfully contribute to it and shepherd the process - produce mechanical designs, circuit design, software, or simply make new jigs to make an assembly process more efficient. If they can show me they tried to make something and failed because tooling was inadequate, I buy a new machine for them.
But, yes, I agree it does only work under certain specialized circumstances: it works best at small companies that don't have a lot of interaction with enterprises. =) Trying to sell or work for an enterprise largely requires you to behave like an enterprise as well.
Smoke and mirrors? At the end of the day, even in the most lauded cases, someone has to write the check or pay the consequences. They always have a veto.
[a] - Originally, I had offered anyone the same rate as a cleaning crew to take on the responsibility. No one bit.
There's no argument here - just sarcasm and unsupported claims. You invoke janitors to imply that non-hierarchical organization can't possibly work. But you don't know that; no one does. People have barely begun to experiment with these forms. How much imagination has gone into figuring out ways to accommodate menial labor so far? It takes time.
If we can figure out how to build software without bosses, I'm confident we can figure out how to clean toilets.
Indeed. One possibility (though I'm sure there are many others) is to divide the work that no one wants to do. There's even a handy word for that: chores.
Not sure I get you. Valve doesn't have to be either of those things.
Work democracy and self-organization are old ideas. They go back at least to late 19th century anarchists. At that time they were so far out that only utopians and revolutionaries took them seriously. That we now plausibly discuss them is already notable in the history of human hierarchies.
there are all sorts of ways that could be done/ For example you could contract with a company to provide janitorial services. You could also have a sub-organization that did things like janitorial services.
The areas I would worry about more would be areas where you have direct customer deliverables at stake, and where you need a team of people to ensure this. What happens when people switch teams? How quickly can you get a replacement? The article said that hiring often takes a while....
Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?
Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?