When the Valve employee handbook leaked, and everyone was busy admiring the fact that Valve didn’t have a traditional management structure, myself and Kotaku designer Ben White were wondering how the hell anything ever got done over there. Then we remembered Half Life 3. But now ex-Valve employee Kim Swift has revealed a terrible, terrible secret. Valve does have a structure — even if it’s a loose one.
“I guess for me, Valve as a company definitely has a lot more freedom for developers working there than a lot of other companies,” said Swift, talking to Eurogamer.
“But I disagree with the suggestion that they have no structure there. They do actually. They have management, there’s the board of directors of the company, there’s Gabe Newell. Those guys at the top of the company definitely have opinions on how things should be run.
“You can choose the project you want to work on but there are definitely people behind the scenes making decisions for the company. To me, that’s normal. If it was a company where there was no structure at all I think things would run completely amok.”
Well, I agree with that. I like the idea of a free form company filled with talented people who are simply trusted to work on the correct thing at the correct time, but I guess there has to be some direction from on top. Otherwise how would anything get finished?
[Awaits obvious Half Life 3 joke]
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