Only a perfect, idealistic, smooth company can afford flat management, to become real utopia. Google tries to make impression like that.

It does not fit me personaly to work at a company that's run like that. I did work in a small gdev company of the realy realy flat management, where me and boss were actualy thinking what to do with my working power, and since I did not suggest anything, I was assigned to port a kid game about jumping piggies from console to PC.

Maybe I am an empty person unable to inspire or bring something to the table, and all I can do is finish some issued commands, but I realized this is a rather common and serious "problem" of nearly all wannabe-game-developer programmers. Every company should have a game designer with obscene authority.

I don't think Valve's model can scale, and I think we're seeing the effects of that. There hasn't been a significant game release from Valve in seven years. They are just iterating on existing titles and adding hats to everything. On top of that, their customer support is quite possibly the worst in the industry. It feels like the company lacks vision and leadership.