Former Valve Hardware Designer Recounts Management Difficulties 224
DavidGilbert99 writes "Jeri Ellsworth has opened up about her time at games developer Valve and has hit out strongly at the so-called flatpack management structure. She says that despite Valve's claims of a democratic structure, there is a layer of powerful management in place and when she was fired she felt like she had been stabbed in the back. 'If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I am really, really bitter. They promised me the world and then stabbed me in the back.'"
Develop Online has a good transcript. In the end, Gabe Newell at least let her team keep the rights to their augmented reality hardware. She also notes that she still loves Valve, but the management and bonus structure resulted in communication breakdowns at Valve's size. It does seem that a flat structure can work: Andy Wingo has been weblogging about working at Igalia and seems pretty positive about the experience.
Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Interesting)
The standard text is The Tyranny Of Structurelessness [jofreeman.com] by Jo Freeman.
tl;dr: if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't had the time to read the text you post, I'll try to do it later on tonight. So, this may be a bit off, I'm posting this based on your tl;dr.
W. L. Gore and Associates [wikipedia.org] (the company responsible for Gore-Tex) can be used as a counter-example to what you/Jo say. There are no bosses (everyone is an associate) and people work in small teams. No one bites others in the ass. And the company, while not the biggest in the world or whatever, works fine and people in it seem to be happy.
One key element seems to be the size of each of its campuses. They limit them to 150 people. More than that and what you mention starts happening. A de facto hierarchy arises and bickering ensues. But below these numbers (and this seems to be corroborated by other sources) people work as in a small community/village and peer pressure keeps everyone working nicely. Above 150 people clustering of people occurs and, while peer pressure still occurs within these groups, the problems still occur in between groups.
So, perhaps flat structures do happen, but only in small groups because "friends" take care of their friends, but employees don't necessarily take care of other employees (especially when the employee he's supposed to take care of is his nasty boss).
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Interesting)
One key element seems to be the size of each of its campuses. They limit them to 150 people. More than that and what you mention starts happening. A de facto hierarchy arises and bickering ensues. But below these numbers (and this seems to be corroborated by other sources) people work as in a small community/village and peer pressure keeps everyone working nicely.
I'm not so sure that's an accurate description of what happens. Under almost all situations, people will develop a de facto hierarchy. It may be fairly fluid and casual, but even among a group of 5 friends, there will usually be some kind of pecking order. Under 150 people, there's the possibility of that de facto hierarchy being managed well without formalized structures. Over 150 people, the social bonds become thin, and factions will form and compete with each other for power.
I would tend to agree with the analysis, "if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form." It's not certain whether it will bite you in the ass. One of the obvious ways it's likely to bite *someone* in the ass is if that person believes that they're setting themselves up to be "in charge" of this non-hierarchical structure, but that person doesn't have the social power and charisma to maintain their position by informal means. That is to say, if you start a company and create a flat structure without formally putting yourself in the position of being "in charge", then you'd better be popular. Otherwise, someone else might decide to take the reigns, and they might get more support in the ensuing power struggle.
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It can work, but in my experience, two things determine whether it's possible: Group size and what kind of people you deal with.
Group size is WAY smaller than 150. IMO, I'd say closer to 6-10 people. Anything bigger and invariably sub-groups will form. And second you need people who want to work in a team, whose focus is the project and not their own agenda.
Since such people are quite rare, assembling a group of more than 6 to 10 of them is a feat by itself...
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At least until a manager gets wind of it. Then he will want to multiply that team's power by splitting them up and making every single one of them a team leader of a group of people.
Ignoring the fact that these 6-10 people were the ONLY ones that work like this within the 100 miles radius and the fact that people who rely on and thrive in a cooperative environment are crippled when facing teams that go by the German definition of team, i.e. "Toll, Ein Anderer Macht's" (which means "Great, someone else is do
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Insightful)
if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.
...and it will form around the worst, most manipulative personality types... which also happen to be the worst leaders.
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:4, Interesting)
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...and it will form around the worst, most manipulative personality types... which also happen to be the worst leaders.
Actually, that's what makes good leaders. Good leaders are able to get a group to do what they want.
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...and it will form around the worst, most manipulative personality types... which also happen to be the worst leaders.
Actually, that's what makes good leaders. Good leaders are able to get a group to do what they want.
that doesn't define a good leader. that just says that he's good at leading other people to do what he wants, not that he is a good leader for the group.
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Making people do what needs to be done, in the best interests of the people being lead.
Anything else is just charisma, necessary but not sufficient, and on its own, very dangerous.
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Thought that was worth highlighting.
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Why is that relevant?
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:4, Insightful)
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Thanks, I didn't know that. I only played the original Half Life in multiplayer.
Re: Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Funny)
You disgust me.
So you played it twice? (Score:2)
To (two) give yourself a Full Life?
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I agree structurelessness is problematic, but there are structures that work which are less hierarchical than traditional boss-and-subordinates tree-styled management structures. A common feature of Scandinavian workplaces, for example, is a set of committees with precisely specified areas of competence. It is relatively non-hierarchical but very structured and transparent: rather than informal cliques taking on different roles, formal committees with procedures take them on. Overall it works pretty well.
Re:Flat structures never, ever happen (Score:5, Interesting)
tl;dr: if a visible hierarchy isn't allowed, an invisible one will form and bite you in the ass.
Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. Officially, there isn't supposed to be any hierarchy of editors. Administrators are supposed to be "janitors", just doing non-controversial maintenance work, and aren't supposed to have more rights than regular editors on articles. In practice, of course, it doesn't work that way, and there is a very clear hierarchy which usually remains unspoken. What you can get away with on Wikipedia depends a *lot* on whether you're an administrator, how long you've been on the site, whether you are an old friend of Jimbo's, and whether you kiss the right butt on IRC.
Sadly (Score:2, Insightful)
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Doesn't matter.
But where's L4D3?
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If it's any like L4D2, they can keep it. Seriously, a horror shooter was replaced by yet another splatter shooter. What are they supposed for L4D3? Why not make it a rail shooter where all you do is keep that left mouse button pressed and rack up a few thousand kills?
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
Everytime i read "Valve" my thoughts pavlovianly go to HL3. Still not a single word about it?
Lately someone got snooping into Valve's Jira [valvetime.net] and some conclusions made were that HL3 was either inactive or in developmental infancy. L4D3 was advancing nicely and the Source 2 engine had huge development resources behind it.
But who knows.
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I wouldn't hold my breath on HL3 being in Jira meaning anything. There was virtually nothing in the HL3 category, and not even a mailing list for it, where as even the L4D3 category had that much.
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I can imagine a lack of desire to do HL3 right now. Look at how many zombie games, shows and movies are out these days. By the time you finish such a large project whatever you've done will already seem dated. If I had a large zombie project on hold I'd rather wait it out a few years til it's a bit fresh again. I think people are getting a bit bored with the vampire, werewolf and zombie stuff.
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/walking-dead-season-3-finale-ratings-431948 [hollywoodreporter.com]
World War Z has raked in $366 million so far, so I don't think people are tired of zombies yet.
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So now is a great time to start yet another zombie project and in a year or two interest will be even higher?
Maybe.
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HL3 is about zombies? Confirmed!
Or did you mean L4D3?
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Thief 4 will come out. There are some gameplay videos from E3. I'm more than a little scared that they're going to utterly fuck it up to be honest. And Garrett isn't voiced by Stephen Russell any more.
People (Eidos in this instance) always come along and think 'yeah we can tweak the formula with this old franchise, it'll be better, more modern etc' and they're always, always fucking wrong.
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Re: Politics ruins everything (Score:5, Insightful)
When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people, and selfless people attract parasites and tempt honest people in to taking advantage of the situation when their feelings get hurt.
Frosty Piss for everyone.
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When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people...
I kind of agree. I think part of the problem is that people are searching for a magical formula. Bad managers like to think in terms of, "If I just do [x], then every one will work hard, there will be no conflicts, and I will get rich." They just want to know what "x" is. The problem is, "x" actually includes all of the following (plus more):
Sorry
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Not much of a sample size. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not much of a sample size. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't sound that terrible to me. What other company would have paid her and let her do that?
Maybe the sacking bit and run-up to it was done badly. But in most other companies you wouldn't even be able to do that project in the first place, much less keep the rights after you got fired.
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well the run up happens in secret in the shadow good buddy organization.
that's what happens in most hierarchical(on paper) systems as well. it's easier for the buddies because in theory you can't bitch about it through proper channels because there are none!
but heck, if valve is developing games and hardware with no structure on paper at all.. they're not developing anything and just doing reactive fixing of the steam platform and buying random games to their stable. and well.. fuck, valve as a developer. e
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She got paid, got to do what she wanted, didn't get enough resources because the rest didn't believe in it and she couldn't convince them
My observation is that they believed in it enough to hire Michael Abrash, who is working on the very thing that she was working on.
Looks to me like a possible "old boys club" mentality is going on there, with Abrash being accepted into it because Newell had worked with him before (at Microsoft) and had been trying to get him to join Valve since forever. This isnt to knock Abrash because that man knows his shit, but maybe Ellsworth was considered competition to what Abrash was doing and as such "had to go
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Abrash is critical of AR for technical reasons he has shared on his blog. She most likely was fired because they didn't believe in AR as it has significant problems to solve over and above the problems in the way of implementing good VR.
Further VR follows a fairly obvious path from current games whereas AR requires innovation in game design and input to realize its potential.
Re:Not much of a sample size. (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually thought this through... my first reaction was wow, that sucks. Maybe Valve isn't the utopia that people think it is.
Then I stepped back and remembered what I've heard about Valve. You make your own decisions - and you're accountable for them. They said they had a million dollar lab, but couldn't hire anyone to do the machining. But who decided to build that lab? Did they spend a million dollars on equipment then not use it?
A flat organizational structure doesn't mean there's no politics. It means politics are MORE important - it's harder for some team to simply burn cash, because everyone's eyes are on you. It's hugely increased freedom - but all of the responsibility that comes with it. Assuming that anyone in Valve could decide to go build a million dollar lab, what do you think would happen if it failed to get utilized?
This is one side of the story from one person. I'm sure there's more to it than the lab, but the lab example shows a basic misunderstanding of the personal responsibility one has in a flat org structure.
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The difference is the perception being promoted by Valve that it does things differently. It has an employee guide that says how things always work, and this firing process didn't follow that guide. Maybe there's a bit too much naivete in thinking that this guide was law and could never be broken. Valve is using this new paradigm of management to recruit people. But the paradigm doesn't work and isn't being applied.
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[......] then there's no such thing as a workable management structure.
They're certainly very few and far between. There's probably about as much chance of finding one as there is of finding an alien civilization.
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There are workable management structures, taken at instances in time. I don't think there are "workable management philosophies" or an algorithm for creating a management structure that works in on all projects and all conditions with all personalities.
Everyone tries to copy a formula, but it's not a formula.
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Jeri Ellsworth is quite well known in the hardware hacking scene. Check out her Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] for starters. She has quite interesting stuff up in YouTube [youtube.com], too.
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And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". Now it's happened again. It's "their fault! Nothing to do with me at all." Give me a break. She should just grow up and accept that she's not as special as she thinks she is.
Re:Not much of a sample size. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". Now it's happened again. It's "their fault! Nothing to do with me at all." Give me a break. She should just grow up and accept that she's not as special as she thinks she is.
Actually she might be very special, but that is utterly irrelevant when you work as part of a team.
It sounds like she was easily able to drive her own team, and manage those beneath her. But those are the easy part of management, the hard bit is called managing up (In this case it is probably more like managing across).
What she needed to do was go round every different person in the company she could and get their buy in and input into what her project should do and most importantly why it was a good idea. This probably seemed very strange to her as the boss had given her a task and she wanted to do it. She was probably expected to recruit other people from within the company who liked her idea to spend a bit of time on it. This is why they kept her department under resourced. That means long hours learning what everyone else does, forcing yourself into the existing social scene within the company, talking to people to find people who might be able to help you even though they are not strictly part of your team.
It sounds what she actually tried to do was hire a microcosm to work for her and just drop in a hierarchical department within a company that has no hierarchy. That was obviously never going to work and the company was never going to allow it to flourish.
It seems like her biggest problem is that the masses at Valve simply did not get behind her idea, that is why she was allowed to keep her product as they did not hold it in high enough esteem. Maybe they were right, maybe she was, only time will tell.
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But there's a little problem there: she is.
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And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon".
We are talking about a person who was a success well before trying formal education. She clearly wasnt there to get the degree. She was clearly there to learn.
If "questioning the professors" is frowned upon, it is almost certainly because the professors are wrong, and at that point why keep going if you are there to learn instead of get the degree?
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I didn't say that professors should never be questioned; I used to do it all the time -- in fact it should be encouraged. I didn't blame them, though, if they disagreed with my questioning and certainly didn't drop out of because of a perceived belief "that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". And it's the same thing here now with her (previous) employment with Valve: "they didn't listen to me and the culture frowned upon me" (paraphrased).
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To be fair I'm not sure that argument works, I imagine some unis do have a culture of "untouchable" professors such that if you are the questioning type it's not worth even bothering to continue your education there.
I never got on at school or college (that's 16 - 18 college, not university) in the UK in IT/Computing because I was already at a level well ahead of what the teachers could teach me and really it was a waste of time me even bothering with those subjects because yes the teacher in college at lea
Re:Not much of a sample size. (Score:4, Interesting)
> It's not like Valve doesn't have a release cycle that's about 5 times as long as that of other studios and whilst their games are good they're not any better than those of many others to justify the absurdly long development times.
Valve, Blizzard, etc have already explained their thought process ...
* If a good game is shipped late no one will remember it was late.
* If a bad game ships on time no one will remember it was on time.
You gotta love these self proclaimed armchair "experts" complaining about Company X to make Product Y because obviously these "experts" have mastered the process of game development and how hard it is to a) ship something b) good.
--
In ~ 10 years Humans will finally be allowed to know first hand that they are not alone
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No I think we've all seen Valve/Blizzard deliver excellence time and time again, those other metrics are irrelevant to me as a consumer (all of them, especially the bullshit purchased critics) and i'm not going to play armchair investor, because I'm entirely disinterested in if or how any of these companies make profit. I understand they need to, but I don't care if they do, or how they do, that's their problem.
But I'm not sure that the Valve mentality works well on hardware (high degrees of rigor, lots of
Hardware.. in... (Score:2)
a software company. Was always going to be difficult. Seems to me they should perhaps have split into a new division - not kept it under the same roof/structure
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a software company. Was always going to be difficult.
Works for Apple...
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That the Apple that compartmentalised the hardware under Jobs - so members of the team did not know what they were actually building, for whom, and why?
That Apple?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:C64 DTV designer (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume this is the same Jeri Ellisworth that designed the Commodore 64 Direct to TV unit?
Yes, uber-hacker-maker. Has a collection of self-restored electron microscopes.
Much smarter & more creative than your average person.
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Could you explain why you think this? I'm genuinely interested.
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I sort of doubt her social skills are that bad considering she used to own a hardware retail chain which initially started with only one shop.
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No, it's the same Jeri that made a half-working prototype typical of a college project, completed and manufactured by a German dude, who passed things back to her as salesperson. She's spent the next 9 years selling herself as more capable than she is, then whining when people get fed up with her.
Sophie Wilson she ain't.
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You just explained to me something that I was wondering for quite a while. Who'd have thought reading /. would solve a puzzle...
Weblogging (Score:2)
Weblogging??? Did i fall into a timewarp and end up back in the 1990s or something?
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Say what? What's wrong with a good descriptive noun, the original in fact.
Blog? Sounds like something you wipe yourself after.
Common Sense (Score:2)
Regardless, a failure of one within such a proclaimed 'structureless' system is not necessarily a failure of the system, at that or any size.
The yardstick to measure success or failure by is whether "HL2E3" or "HL3" or "Half Life:Eternal Wait" or whatever it is titled now ever is released.
Hippy communes. (Score:2)
I remember an Adam Curtis documentary that basically described those old 60s communes the same way. Communes were set up as completely power free institutions, places were no one would have power over anyone else and all important decisions could be made communally.
But of course power did exist, it was just being hidden. Someone owned the land, someone had some important income maybe someone was just too damn charismatic. And so because the power was hidden, it was never confronted or addressed. There were
Valve's Management System is NOT successful (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at "income", Valve is successful. Very, indeed. But money is not the only metric. It all tells us Valve got lucky developing two games aaages ago and the being the first to set up a working Digital Distribution System. That they combined it with their second (and last!) successful game was a masterstroke, but only pure luck.
Had Half-Life 2 not been such a success (say a title in the 80s/100), Steam would not have been taken off like it did.
If you use the metric "releases successful products" for success, Valve is working mediocre at best.
They shovelled in a lot of cash with Half-Life and Half-Life 2 until Steam was running with full steam ahead... and that digital distribution platform is carrying them since then. After the initial phase it was a self-sustaining thing that you just need to maintain without screwing up too much. That is basically what Vale has been doing since Half-Life 2 and I ask you: What other successful projects do they have to show that we can use as proof for their successful system? You say "not much" and I agree.
Valve seems to me very similar to 3DRealms. Both had a major success which gave them money and on that they kept running. Load words once in a while, punching their own chests how successful they are, both claim(ed) to offer a "free and creative" environment without "administrative overhead!!!1" - but both totally lack in coming up with more or better products than companies with "classical" structures. In fact, those classical structures are much more successful at chewing out successful and often high quality products.
The difference is that Valve has Steam, a product that keeps generating revenue with Other People's Successful Games if you manage to maintain it (which is no problem with the money Valve has, it is not really requireing a lot of insight or creativity), so they can afford to be totally incompetent at creating own games (which they are).
All Valve achieved lies in the past. And with "past" we need are quickly approaching "a decade and since then the existing stuff just has been maintained".
They have as truly notable things
Half Life (1998) + AddOns (1999, 2001)
Half Life 2 (2004) + Nice AddOns that basically are TechDemos for the Engine
Portal 2 (see below)
That is it.
Portal and Left4Dead they bought in (good call, but more a Publisher-Decision than actual a Develeopment-Success). Buying the right stuff requires money and one or three managers who make the right call, it's no sign your Development Hierarchy works.
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There's this game called Team Fortress 2, that has sold more than the Half Life series.
Also, I'd not say that they bought portal and left 4 dead. They mostly bought the talent. Yes, that's how valve works: A whole lot of senior hires, very few entry level hires. Experienced hires tend to bring their game ideas with them. Just look at the hiring of IceFrog: Here, see a tech demo of your warcraft mod, made by our own developers. How about you make the game stand alone, and stop having to muck around with the
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Team Fortress is not a Valve creation, it's just something they bought out, like DOTA and Left 4 Dead.
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Very, very true (Score:3)
These days, Valve,s money comes from Steam. Their profits on that are stupid, like tens of millions per employee. Basically they just get to sit back and sell other people's stuff, and take a nice cut (30ish percent). As anyone who's ever had trouble with something will tell you, they have a minimal support staff, there's no phone number to call or anything, and responses take forever. Also when you really look at Steam it isn't that great. It isn't bad, but it is not some masterpiece of software engineerin
Spent $x million on what? (Score:2)
Add to that the fact that people refuse to wear their 3d tv glasses. Or glasses in general.
Points to this being a smart executive decision to cut losses and move on.
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where did you get that it was millions? at any rate, the frames for it are 3d printed(you can see from the surface of the plastic).
practicality problems might hamper the project. maybe folks at valve weren't really into tabletop ar games. star wars chess gets old pretty quick.
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Add to that material and equipment cost.
Add to that rent, electricity, toilet paper.
This project, per year, $5 million sinkhole, easily.
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Personally I would be more inclined to use AR rather than VR glasses. VR glasses try to replace your entire field of vision and they often lag enough that it causes motion sickness. AR does not have these issues to nearly the same degree. Any prototype is going to look like that since many forms of miniaturization are lousy to use during the experimentation phase and some are indeed only doable on large scale manufacturing plants. One example is surface mounted technology.
Yes any glasses are annoying to use
Bad example (Score:2)
It does seem that a flat structure can work
Uh, it can work at Valve. Because Valve has a LUDICROUS amount of cash. They're getting money for nothing because they have Steam. They managed to seduce the users with easy digital downloads and seduced the content owners with a promise of DRM. It's simply a better way of doing things. This is really bloody obvious, but getting that sweetspot of wooing both sides into letting you be their middleman was tight landing spot. Valve did it. And now they dominate digital distribution of gaming. Making Valve a ga
s/seduce/create a great product for/ (Score:2)
What you call "seduction," I call "good business." The market had a need. Valve met that need and was rewarded.
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And if Steam would let me play my fucking games whenever I left the house or a storm took out our connection, I'd call it good too. As it is, the DRM is just a bit too much for me. Which is why I moved onto good old games [gog.com].
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It has never stopped me from playing games? It just pops up a box and says that my saves won't go into the steamcloud. If the game had DRM on top of it then THAT would stop me.
Explains a few things (Score:2)
Pretty good, if short read.
Kinda explains why "Big Picture" is such an unholy mess. I tried using this as a replacement for my XBox. I really did.
But every single game (including Valve one's) seemed to have a different mechanism for configuring the controller. Sometimes it was in game, sometimes it was by editting .properties files. Sometimes, I couldn't get the controller to work at all, despite steam indicating that the game had controller support.
Even in the Big Picture interface, the menu's were
This is my surprised face (Score:2)
See Twilight of the Elites:
http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-Meritocracy-ebook/dp/B006OI2BMC/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1373382255 [amazon.com]
flat-pack? matrix? (Score:2)
There are plenty of organizations with little heirarchy that work well... they're called co-ops.
I have never heard of flat-pack, and the quick google I did found me (in addition to plenty of flat-pack kitchen stuff, and flat (apartment) management), was pure academic bs. Without some structure, trying to get anything done is like walking through mud, at best.
From Ms. Ellsworth's post, it reminds me very much of what, in the early nineties, was called matrix management - which also sounded good, but meant, i
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm hoping you are a troll but you probably don't even know who Jeri Ellsworth is. It is worth noting SHE is very very smart and quite brilliant and quite well known in the hardware hacker community. Jeri was working on some interesting hardware over at valve but I think with the way that the Oculus Rift was advancing Gabe was most likely looking to head in another direction from her tech. I think it was pretty awesome that he signed off on Jeri taking the hardware she was working on with her when she lef
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this is not news to you but as far as I can recall the overwhelming reaction after the Valve Handbook became public was unreflected admiration for the structure-less utopia described therein, not "Wait, maybe the lack of official structure means that the actual structure does not cease to exist but only becomes less visible to newcomers and maybe that is not a good thing." If you read the interview transcript you will see that she is in retrospect quite harsh with herself for having drunk the cool-aid and being sorely disappointed as a result. Of course she could have known better from the beginning but she didn't, just as the vast majority of slashdot commenters apparently didn't after they read the Valve handbook for the first time.
The actually existing elites may have a strong interest in perpetuating the "structureless" myth as their current informal influence may be much larger than what they could reasonably expect as part of any officially acknowledged social structure. So they take recruits that are already attracted by the company's utopian visions, indoctrinate them further to protect their own influence and when at some point the brighter amongst the employees realize the cognitive dissonance between what everyone says and what actually happens and start to lash out in disappointment they get fired to protect the company cult(ure).
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Ironically your last sentence describes Microsoft over the last decade (ex-emp here). Bureaucratic management nightmare, less-than-zero vision at the top, subpar product execution/innovation, etc. yet constant promises of pink ponies to the grunts, i.e. the way it used it be in the mid-90's. Ironic because they are the exact opposite of the "structureless" environment yet the concept is right on the mark as they continue to slide into the tech heap of oblivion.
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Still, the whole thing just feels like "software company starts hardware division, does not adequately fund or staff it, hardware project fails". Not exactly unheard of.
I think the problem runs a bit deeper as the machinist example shows.
Ellsworth might well be right in saying that a machinist simply doesn't fit into the framework Valve has created for its employees: ...) because he/her might well make significant contributions to the project - machinists often do "simple" engineering work (which can be quite sophisticated in practice, incorporating a wealth of practical experience that mo
you can't just treat the machinist like support staff (cleaners, cooks, accountants,
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I think this is exactly the problem. I work at a small silicon start-up, and we have two major factions (predictably): hardware and software. The software guys only want to hire a certain type of personality, the alpha-geek innovator. However, and it is a good practice in general as the groups work closely together, they sit on interview panels for hardware engineers, and 90% of the time pan otherwise good, highly qualified applicants. "Not an innovator, very narrow focus, he's a doer not a thinker", or vic
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I don't mean to divert attention away from Valve's management structure and handbook, but... well...
[...] assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition.
[...] she moved to Walla Walla, Washington and attended Walla Walla College, studying circuit design for about a year. She dropped out due to a "cultural mismatch"; Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.
Seems like it's always someone else's fault and never hers. The world is persecuting her!
tbh, Walla Walla really sucks as a town. I couldn't imagine the college being any better. I figured all they did was trained people for the Walla Walla State Prison.
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Hmm, this is your second post repeating this viewpoint with the most pathetic of evidence.
Why do you seem so desperate to try and character assassinate her?
Re:She's done this before (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition.
I have notice how you have failed to quote the part about how that separate competing business that she started turned out to be quite successful. So it was her partners fault, after all.
[...] she moved to Walla Walla, Washington and attended Walla Walla College, studying circuit design for about a year. She dropped out due to a "cultural mismatch"; Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.
I have noticed how you have failed to quote the part about her being a success prior to attending this college, or how much bigger of a success she became after leaving college.
This is a girl that forges ahead to success, not a failure like you claim. Starting to think that you are that original business partner. A person that completely missed the boat, and it was your own fault.
Re:Attempted communism, obviously failed. (Score:5, Funny)
Are you and APK /.'s only regular kooks?
/. has a rich and varied collection of kooks, grown organically from the fertile ground of the internet. Your attention is fertilizer.
1992 was TWENTY-ONE YEARS ago (Score:2)
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Yeah, nobody uses an online pseudonym.