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I ran into this article about an ex-Valve employee's poor experience with an unnamed "self-organizing company" that everyone believes to be Valve, mostly along the lines that in the absence of much formal management, people and groups competed to accumulate power themselves, and in the end people that were close to the executives ended up with most of the decision-making power. It also accuses this unnamed company of leaking their company handbook as a PR stunt to get more people interested in applying to the company. I recall a few years ago that Chanku posted a link to Valve's company handbook, which I thought at the time was an interesting read.

Flat organizations have been all the rage in the last few years, but these issues that he posts about are only natural...in the end, it's hard to have an organization where everyone has equal power and opportunity, because it's just human nature to seek and accumulate power for ourselves...with our animal brains we equate it with security and freedom. It makes since that in the absence of hard power, people would compete to gain soft power by making the right connections and putting themselves in the right positions.

Always interesting when it turns out the companies people gushed about wanting to work for end up not being that great for everyone after all.

I think that it's a good idea in principle but the way its implemented at Valve means that nothing gets made. I'd imagine the bureaucratic or political hell it must turn into to start or launch a project or publish a game. A game can live and die by the choices of a few people with theoretically no training in management, therefore it results in nothing being made.

Like you said people will want to allocate as much power as they can to themselves, but if there isn't someone unbiased to check it, the environment would easily turn toxic. Also, peer reviews being a thing is just a fucking awful idea, it turns a company into a popularity contest and considering how high the stakes are, it'd mean that it would be worse than high school. Like, there was so much fucking drama in HS, it's not even funny and I've felt the serious and lasting ramifications of that drama in situations which sound eerily similar to the kinds of power distribution in self-organizing companies, allegedly Valve.

When it comes down to it, I think that there needs to be oversight and upper management so that power struggles, popularity contests and favouritism don't run rampant.