Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
So Valve is definitely idealized by people outside (and inside) the game industry, but definitely much less so by people who have worked there. The flat structure is sort of a pipe dream that leaves nobody actually in charge of important decisions, while hiding a de facto power structure that certainly exists despite being non-explicit.
The company has transitioned to being the company that owns Steam as a platform (including and subsuming Vive), and not much else. People that have joined Valve expecting to develop games there end up fired in less than a year, which surely is destructive but also serves a real purpose of perpetuating the Valve culture. A major shakeup is unlikely to happen; Gabe seems to be unable to decide whether he wants to be a super-public figure that is the face and decision body behind the whole company, or if he wants to shrink into a hole and rub shoulders with tech legends hoping to determine the future of everything. The company will make money for a while, but they are open to platform disruption, even in their VR space where they have (more than Oculus) tried to be the open platform. Eventually the market will figure out that they don't need to pay Steam 30% of sales to host files on a server. If this view is right right, Steam is about to find out that the PC world wants to be even more open than they are offering. Of course, the board of investors will certainly find a way to use Valve's intellectual capital regardless of whether they stay on top.
As a Microsoft employee I am so happy that we got rid of stack ranking a few years ago. It encourages a bad behavior and goes against helping your coworkers with whom you are essentially competing for compensation. I am surprised to see that a company like Valve, which seems to be held in high regard by many developers in the industry, still operates with this compensation system. It's system of the 80's if you ask me.
I researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message). Some interesting bits I found:
- The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees or so).
- In spite of the seemingly ideal flat organization, many people find themselves unhappy there. One former employee hints at some reasons here: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c... From other employees, I have heard that the flat organization and bonus structure leads to unnecessary drama/rivalry, poor communication (or even fear of communication), lack of innovation (creating your own project is discouraged, and teams have financial incentive to stick with projects that pay the highest bonus), etc. This is not to say Valve is a "bad" place to work at, I am sure it beats the hell out of many other job environments, even ignoring the excellent pay.
- If you do want to work there, you will probably have had to shipped multiple titles AND be recommended by an existing team member (alternately, writing a popular mod is equally lucrative). Typically, applying through their website will not get you a job - they usually hire by actively looking through a pool of candidates that they already know of. They also look for candidates who are good at producing high amounts of customer value - they care more about this than technical ability.
I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or earning a second degree in something. But playing board games, working out/running or even just watching mindnumbing TV. I feel like the "100 % dedicated 100 % of the time"-thing has become the only way to really make it in tech-life.
This is a wonderful read, thank you for sharing it. I'm genuinely curious about this, if any Valve insiders have insights:
> That’s why Valve is flat...You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.
Is this really the case? On paper this sounds great. I've worked at companies that have a similar motto. Power to the employees, power to the developers. But it usually just means the hierarchy is unspoken and assumed. No structure means no one to go to with disputes about your job, problems with co-workers, etc. It can be worse than a traditional hierarchy because everyone sells the "flat" motto to newcomers, but as soon as you join you learn the hidden politics. The cognitive dissonance can be soul crushing.
So is Valve truly flat? Are there any examples of relatively new employees spinning up teams and shipping unique ideas? If it works, how do you handle inter-personal employee issues?
We value “T-shaped” people. That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline -- the vertical leg of the T).
This is a nice metaphor. I try to be T-shaped, but I wonder how useful I am becoming... My expertise in high-precision mass spectrometry is not something companies are looking for....
From what I heard from ex employee working at Valve it's not what you think it is. i.e: it's very political.
Is there any change here, or is this just the fairly common repost of this?
Yes, it would be really interesting if someone could get a person from Valve to give us an idea of how this all looks as of today.
Can anyone make it happen?
High-res edition [25MB]: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHa...
I think anyone who likes what they see here needs to honestly ask themselves how they believe this applies to their world. Whenever this PDF is posted on HN I am disappointed to see comparisons between how people perceive Valve and their own companies. Does your company have a total equity > 2 billion us dollars? Probably not. Much of this flows from the ability to invest in an incentivize your employees at this level.
As another aside I do not think there is causal evidence that Valve became successful because of these ideals. On the contrary they seem like the result of success.
This is quite old, and paints an overly rosy picture. After this was published a lot of the SteamBox project people got canned and were less impressed with the reality of Valve:
The problem is in almost every group of people lacking a formal hierarchy, an informal un-official hierarchy will start to emerge with a higher likelihood of manipulators, sociopaths or other political climbers on top. I'd rather not be part of one of those.
Let me start by saying that I love reading these kind of handbooks from various companies.
One thing that stuck out to me was multiple mentions about "raising the issue" for the tough topics (compensation issues, feeling uncertain) -- who is the issue "raised" to if there is zero hierarchy and I have no manager/adviser/councilor? Does the flat structure only apply to "individual contributors" and is there a more traditional HR/operations structure that is not shown?
What worries me about this handbook is that it rarely gets updated. For a healthy culture to sustain, rules have to evolve based on all the new employees who join Valve.
Even if it's not accurate to Valve of today, it's a helluva reach goal for most dev-oriented companies.
Keen to know how they are different now.
How is pay handled if there is no hierarchy? Who decides how to spend the company's money? This type of recruiting-marketing is almost as bad as Google's.
Anyone knows what software is good for doing a beautiful styled book like this one?
The "flat structure" at Valve reminds me of the"unlimited vacation" policy at Netflix. It sounds liberating, but also offers the potential for employees to be judged by rules that are no longer clearly spelled out.
I'm going to assume they don't have any remote software dev positions?
I wish my company was this organized
The USA is a cult. You are fine.
Honestly I only skim read this wondering if there was a policy not to talk about Half Life 3! Interesting read, though.