No idea, but I once heard that at Valve, employees are completely free to choose what they work on, and that various hit games were initiatives from a bunch of developers who had a cool idea and decided to organise to build it. Gabe supposedly just hires smart people and trusts them to be smart enough to decide what needs to be done.
No idea if that's true, but if it is, that attitude strikes me as left-libertarian.
I don't know if they still operate that way, but the Valve Manual For New Employees is actually a fun read. Evidently you just roll your desk over to the project group you want to be a part of and roll with it.
i wrote that from memory, pardon for misquoting. page 55 - "Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying."
Read lots of blogs/posts by ex-Valve employees who portray this libertarian dream as a terrible place to work though. Although that could just be because its the gaming industry and not Valve specifically
In a related article about Newell, he is trying make arrangements to have developers come to NZ for work during the pandemic as Valve, according to Newell, has seen productivity drop by 50-75% since working from home started.
That’s a ton, and worse than most companies. I have to imagine this management/work culture is at least partly to blame.
If work culture revolves strongly around people meeting each other at lunch or in the bathroom and discussing ideas there, then moving their desks together to work on those ideas, then I can imagine working from home hurts that way of working. They need more informal online chat channels, probably. Maybe an algorithm than randomly matches employees to each other to chat about what they're working on at the moment. But I can imagine it's hard to replace the direct contact.
> Gabe supposedly just hires smart people and trusts them to be smart enough to decide what needs to be done.
I mean... that's the dream for everyone responsible for overseeing workers and/or managers in more normally structured organizations, or am I wrong in that assumption?
Also, Valve can afford this "organization" because their money most likely isn't going to run out from a few failed projects over the years.
No idea if that's true, but if it is, that attitude strikes me as left-libertarian.