I would think that, no matter how hard a company tries to hire people of the same mindset, temporary hierarchies would develop - not necessarily along the lines of seniority, but along the lines of who had more experience/comfort/knowledge of best practices, etc. regarding a particular domain, technology, etc.

Ideally, the hierarchy would be truly temporary and whatever knowledge/experience/insight caused one person to become the project "shepherd" would be willingly shared amongst the other folks.

IIRC, there's a longer write-up. And a lot of the problems seemed to be partly due to her being a hardware engineer trying to make a next-gen console, embedded in a software company.

Some of the issues were specific to Valve's style. I think she had trouble recruiting staff, because Valve wanted her to hire people who could be team players within Valve, and she couldn't find a technician who could also program first-person shooters (unsurprisingly).

But more generally, she was hamstrung by Valve not having quite the hardware instincts to manage building a console with the time and resources they gave her.