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Valve Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]
- smoldesu 4y ago> The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have "http://user http://user" —check it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now. Holy shit. I have to know what other groupware voodoo they're running internally, now...
- bink 4y agoThis doc looks pretty old. The timeline ends in 2012. I'd be they were mostly hardwired connections and just mapped network login events, DHCP records, and physical port maps. You could probably do the same now with WiFi records.
- MAGZine 4y agoi bet they still are mostly hardwired. gaming companies don't generally do their primary development on wifi. not the rule, some people will, but most people aren't making halflife alyx on a macbook.
- nijave 4y agoSounds like it's based off wired connections but that functionality is built into some enterprise wifi solutions, too. You can overlay a wireless site survey on top of a floor plan with Cisco and the WAPs can "triangulate" clients and show where they are. It also shows 802.11x auth details and some other neat stats like signal strength, retransmits and interference. The one I'm thinking of is called Cisco Prime and you can see it here https://youtu.be/xrtGXg5ICa4?t=2235 https://youtu.be/xrtGXg5ICa4?t=2235 (when I saw it before, they had 802.11x auth info integrated so it could pull Active Directory/LDAP info, too)
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoThe common criticism of the ultra-flat organization models is that it breeds unwritten rules enforced by cliques.
- tikhonj 4y agoI've seen exactly the same dynamic happen in hierarchical organizations—the hierarchy and bureaucracy might have ameliorated some of the pathologies, but it just as easily magnified others while also bringing in its own. It definitely made the core organization more legible but that isn't healthy in and of itself and has some steep costs both in direct overhead and, worse yet, in decreasing the organization's flexibility and adaptability.
- physicsgraph 4y agoA useful counter-balance perspective is provided by [0] Tyranny of Structurelessness. [0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- klodolph 4y agoI do think legibility is actually very helpful, especially as organizations grow in size. I'm wondering why you are saying that legibility isn't healthy in and of itself. Say, for example, I am working on a task and I need something done which is not normal. For example, I may need to make a change to some service that is running, or get permissions or ownership of some object assigned to my account. Because of the legibility that bureaucracy brings, I can find the relevant team with ability/authority to solve my problem, or I can discover that no such team exists. If the team exists, then that's great. I can talk directly to people with experience with whatever problem I'm solving, who know the relevant policies / risks / recommendations. If the team doesn't exist, I can still just make the change myself. If the team exists but won't help me, I can hand the problem off to my manager. If the relevant people are on vacation, I can find out who has power in their stead. (There are some cases where this doesn't work--my experience is that this usually involves some inflexible legal requirement, or some essential technical expertise, and the relevant person is on vacation.) This legibility brings a sort of "mindlessness" to the bureaucracy. I have high confidence that soon, I will either solve the problem, or the problem will belong to somebody else. I don't have to think too hard about what the right thing to do is when it's outside my domain, except in the exceptional cases.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robertwt7 4y agohuh, wait is this not supposed to be confidential? Thanks for sharing, I guess this won't last long, really interesting to see how they operate though!
- somehnguy 4y agoI remember reading through this 8-10 years ago, I don’t think it’s meant to be internal only. Probably helps attract the type of people that would enjoy that working environment.
- chrononaut 4y agoIf it was supposed to be confidential, it's been discussed on here ever since it was written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463
- pyuser583 4y agoIt was leaked as a PR stunt about 10 years ago.
- easton 4y agoThis is pretty out of date (I remember when they first released it). The org chart stuff is wrong, in the last few years (around the time of Alyx) they moved to a more normal corporate structure so they would actually finish projects instead of people bouncing when the project got hard.
- Jagerbizzle 4y agoIf they actually spent as much time as they claim hiring great people, you'd think a few of them would actually stick around on a project long enough to ship it.
- xahrepap 4y agoThe Steam Deck is quite excellent. And it just shipped. Though I would love to see a game come out of there again sometime. :)
- klodolph 4y agoHL-3 would never make as much revenue as all those hats they made for Team Fortress 2.
- girvo 4y agoI would love to see the Steam Deck release in Australia mind you. Still kind of wild to me that it hasn't been. Conspiratorialy, I always wonder if it's punishment for the ACCC forcing Valve/Steam to handle refunds via Aus consumer law, but I have no evidence of that.
- KerrAvon 4y agoCopyright 2012. I wonder where Valve stands on WFH.
- nagonago 4y ago> WFH—Working From Home. What to do if a single snowflake falls out of the sky. I wonder if that policy has changed much in the past decade.
- zerocrates 4y agoI know you're talking about like, the move toward more work from home everywhere, but that snow policy is definitely a solid rule of thumb for the Seattle area: they get almost no snow and don't deal with it well.
- junon 4y agoYep. Seattle shuts down when a snowflake falls. People are crashing their cars, nobody is outside, businesses close. It was wild when I lived there.
- deelowe 4y agoAll of their positions are still posted in Washington.
- goostavos 4y agoBased on this interview, the preference leans heavily towards in office for collaboration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kO6Dj2XNfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kO6Dj2XNfY
- michaelje 4y agoThis needs a solid [2012] in front of it
- chrononaut 4y agoPrevious discussions over the years since its original release in 2012: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 (April 21, 2012, 168 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 (Dec 31, 2014, 17 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 (March 23, 2015, 14 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 (July 25, 2016, 198 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 (Sept 7, 2018, 31 comments)
- nazka 4y agoWe should also link all the problems this created. For instance: - Ex-Valve employee describes internal politics at 'self-organizing' companies (pcgamer.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563
- Ygg2 4y agoAny flat organization contains a undocumented, unaccountable hierarchy.
- oumua_don17 4y agoAny sufficiently complicated flat organisation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Corporate Hierarchy :). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
- me_me_me 4y agoalso all valve games are turning into money extraction machines Apparently flat structure and bonuses tied to amount of money you bring, combined with apathy towards their software allowed some weasels to takeover and slowly destroy their (few) games in the name of short term gains. And money is not even an issue for valve, its private company. It all looks like whole leadership doesnt give a fuck anymore, not even to pass on maintenance to 3rd party.
- paxys 4y agoSomething I don't understand about Valve – the company has been around since 1996 and essentially controls the PC gaming industry. It has the dominant digital distribution platform (taking a 30% cut of all sales), a catalog of very popular games, several hardware plays (VR headset, console, linux box) and 135+ million active users. It enjoys a cult like standing among fans. Why then is its estimated valuation as little as $7.7B (from https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/...)?
- TillE 4y agoIt's absolutely not 30% for big publishers.
- impalallama 4y agoIt goes down after a certain amount of sales. 25% after 10 mil and 20% after 50. It says a lot about how large valves market share is that they can take such a large cut and publishers will still sell there. Plenty have tried to release alternative clients without mixed success
- junon 4y agoIt's the userbase. Steam works well enough, hasn't changed really at all in years (a feature in and of itself), and has mostly everything a user would ever want or need. Why then install an alternative client? Source: I tried to compete with steam once. Tech was better. Nobody cared.
- lmm 4y agoI wouldn't even say Steam works well. The UI is laggy and clunky, the mobile app is a joke (literally worse than the web version). But it's good enough, it beats learning something new, especially since all game launchers seem to have some flashy custom UI instead of standard widgets.
- tblflpr 4y agoNote to self: Repost valve handbook to harvest hacker karma. Timer set for y-minus 2yrs.
- mechanical_bear 4y agoTimer set for y-minus 1.9yrs…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Bakary 4y agoSo is their internal culture the same as described here, a decade later? For some reason, this manual gave me the same feeling I had when looking over college brochures as a young man. There was a sense of potential and excitement that was hard to put into words. Of course, the reality turned out very differently but I still remember that passing mixture of floating forms. Whether or not the document accurately depicts what it's like working at Valve, I am still taken aback that it managed to reproduce so specific and personal an emotion.
- arduinomancer 4y agoI don’t get it because if you look on the valve careers site they’re hiring for specific teams (like steam for example) What happens if you hire someone and then they say “nah working on steam is boring, I’m gonna go work on something completely different” How do you financially allocate head count if people can just leave the project whenever?
- deelowe 4y agoI've heard there's a hierarchy, it's just not documented.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoSeems like bullshit or else hell if not
- mproud 4y agoRumor has it this was a targeted leak back in the day. As a PR move.
- b20000 4y agoSo, any people here who currently work at Valve and can chime in on the actual working culture day to day and what the hiring process looks like? At some point I applied for some roles and all I got was a bunch of vague messages and ghosting.
- Ethan_Mick 4y agoDoes anyone know if this has been updated since then? Do they still hand something like this out to new employees? I remember reading this years ago and thinking it was just so cool (the contents and structure). But I’m not sure how well it really works in practice. Is it better, or just different?
- roflyear 4y agoMy company is the opposite. It is a totem pole. The CEO is at the head, then there is a single person below them, and one person below them, and one person below them, and so on. This is essentially no hierarchy, and everyone interacts with a few levels below them, and everyone is expected to deliver on product (basically, program). This works because it is actually really hard to get anything done if you're managing more than 1 person.
- milchek 4y agoThe part about how 'cabals' form temporarily to achieve goals and build things is interesting. I was wondering how they go about 'leading' projects if there are no true 'leads', basically, they just form temporary teams/hierarchies that are suited toward a particular goal. This part about why these teams are temporary and they prefer a flat structure makes a lot of sense and resonates with me (and probably many here who've worked in larger organisations): > Valve is not averse to all organizational structure—it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time. We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of Valve’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.
- atoav 4y agoI mean where I worked this worked pretty well. Actual managment told you their rough goals (do more of X, make more like Y, don't forget Z) and "someone" who had a good idea and didn't like wasting time took the lead naturally. Small groups form, on some specific subproblem someone else takes the lead because they have a better idea how to tackle that specific beast etc. Humans are good at organizing, if the goals are clear and everybody has the motivation. And rhis is the actual problem. If I feel like the company is fucking me over in some way or viewing me as a cow they have to milk as much as possible, that motivation will be gone.
- legitster 4y agoI encourage everyone to peruse Valve's Glassdoor page. I think the ideals are noble and clever, but the results may not bear out as well as they did at the peak of success.
- edf13 4y agoProblem with glassdoor it makes it incredibly painful to browse without registering and giving up your own data!
- erulabs 4y agoSigh. 2012 was so hopeful. Tech was still good and half life 3 was still on the way. Valve, with all its freedom and liberty for employees, lagged behind crunch mills this treated employees like cattle. The market said CandyCrush > Half-Life. So be it. God is dead, he remains dead, and we have killed him. I require my engineers in the office and doing what I want them to do. Liberalism must be curtailed by the winds, but my god, it’s no fun.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teajunky 4y agoI would like to see handbooks of other companies. Does anyone know of any other handbooks?
- leethargo 4y agoTwo well-known examples are Basecamp [1] and GitLab [2] [1] https://basecamp.com/handbook https://basecamp.com/handbook [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
- olvy0 4y agoThere's this one from Bright Data (I'm not affiliated with them, just ran into it by chance a while ago): https://brightdata.com/dna https://brightdata.com/dna
- gtsnexp 4y agoThis is a classic text, I wonder if it is still current and how Valve looks like from the inside since a decade has past.
- alonp99 4y agoI miss counter-strike