This is amazing. I love the fact that there are no hierarchies and organizational induced inefficiencies, and I especially love the culture of experimentation. This leaves a LOT of responsibility up to the employees - they must be very creative and very driven for an ecosystem like this to work. I imagine one of the biggest challenges for Valve is finding employees that fit this description. There are loads of smart developers/engineers/designers out there, but not many who can be productive with little or no direction.
The author stresses that he was pushed to work on the most valuable thing he could possibly work on. For many programmers, just working on anything is okay, as long as they're staying busy and committing code. If Valve is filled with employees who are constantly assessing value and thinking about things other than lines of code, it sounds like quite an amazing place to be.
Comments
This is amazing. I love the fact that there are no hierarchies and organizational induced inefficiencies, and I especially love the culture of experimentation. This leaves a LOT of responsibility up to the employees - they must be very creative and very driven for an ecosystem like this to work. I imagine one of the biggest challenges for Valve is finding employees that fit this description. There are loads of smart developers/engineers/designers out there, but not many who can be productive with little or no direction.
The author stresses that he was pushed to work on the most valuable thing he could possibly work on. For many programmers, just working on anything is okay, as long as they're staying busy and committing code. If Valve is filled with employees who are constantly assessing value and thinking about things other than lines of code, it sounds like quite an amazing place to be.