>Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management

> Team leads Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting like as centers for the teams

I appreciate the out-of-the-box-thinking+creativity foundation theyre trying to lay here, but... this is what management is. I understand management has other emergent properties and misaligned incentives, but those are literally the core (technical) value-adds of managers.

The main criticism of flat organizational structure is that management will develop as an emergent property anyway, but it will do so poorly. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness is the classic essay on the subject: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

They are rebuilding management from first principles lol