9 ms·

Valve Employee Handbook

569 points by v21 14y ago

xpose2000 14y ago
This is one of the coolest looks behind the scene's of one of the world's most successful companies. I have read every page. As they mentioned in the handbook, Value's revenue per employee is the highest in the world. Source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newell-videogames-valve-online-mayhem.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newel...
fromhet 14y ago
This kind of company coulture seems to run thru the most succesful software companies, such as Google is prominent is their areas, Valve are huge in games, Facebook seems to work in the same way. AFAIK Apple is hierarchical and is run in a very "traditional" fashion, but are still very successful. Is there a pattern about theese things, and what way of managing a software company works best? EDIT: Also, Half-Life is the best game ever.
- vladd 14y ago
  Unless you've worked at those companies, I'd suggest you refrain from stating that Google&co compares in openness with Valve in the way they let new-hires pick their own starter teams and similar things.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Google hasn't been that way for a long time. You can move around as you wish if you're a Real Googler. The Real Googler Line used to be Senior SWE; now it's somewhere between Senior and Staff. Staff are Real Googlers, and Seniors who are likely to make Staff are Real Googlers, but Seniors who are perceived as having plateaued are not. If you're not a Real Googler, 20%T will be perceived as slacking off, and you're going to have a hard fight to get a transfer. Generally, it's hard to transfer unless you've had a recent promotion, so if you're not going to get promoted based on your current project, you might as well leave.
    - paulhauggis 14y ago
      This sounds like a mess. It's why I don't like working for anyone. Unless you play politics and please the right people, your livelihood will be limited.
    - kabdib 14y ago
      Ouch. Yeah, a friend of mine at G seems to be in this position. Why do tech companies think that hitting a plateau is a bad thing? Someone who's not going to further advance and who is productive and happy should be allowed to remain happily churning stuff out, with no pressure to hit the next ranking, or be ousted, or be unable to move. (I've seen some demotions at my company, which was basically recognition that "Okay, we want to keep you, and in the past we had to promote you to do that because of the fucked-up stuff that HR was forcing us to do. Here, have a lower position, and you get to keep your salary.")
      - jrockway 14y ago
        My experience at Google is the opposite. I am friends with many Senior SWEs who have no interest in the next promotion and they do fine. They get paid well, get good bonuses, get to lead new projects, and so on. I'm also friends with people who are relatively new to Google that have made big (and small) moves inside the company. In a company with 30,000 employees, some people are going to be unhappy. But the vast majority of people I interact with at Google are very happy. The biggest problem I face is the five minute wait for someone to make me a latte.
    - mikeytemple 14y ago
      Wow, that's unfortunate too. Combined with your previous comments I have to assume that you were a long time googler. Can you tell us what it was like back in the day? I'm really curious how big companies change / devolve over time.
      - deleted 14y ago
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      - deleted 14y ago
zaptheimpaler 14y ago
This is incredible. Valve is possibly the only company EVER that truly operates with a completely flat hierarchy and does so well!
kghose 14y ago
This is awesome. The part about picking your project is just like picking a research program as an independent researcher in the sciences!
danso 14y ago
Inspiring reading. I wish they had chosen a better example of the archtypal "T" employee than the Heavy class...many of those attributes he has are just things that are obvious consequences/contributing factors to his main skill "hugeness, killing people".
- nkohari 14y ago
  True. Pyro would have been a better choice. :)
- neilk 14y ago
  I wonder how much of Valve's internal culture is reflected in their games, like TF2. Portal seems to be the dystopic mirror image.
  - jrockway 14y ago
    I wonder how many employees bring their daughter to work on "bring your daughter to work" day.
rheide 14y ago
This has the single best description of a team lead I have ever seen: "[Team leads are] keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against"
- gruseom 14y ago
  I agree. The whole paragraph, in fact, is the best description of that thing I've ever read. There are more than a few things in here which, if true, turn common ideas about management on their head (or rather just shoot them in the head). What's exciting is that they reflect how work actually gets done. Shouldn't that be our organizing principle? I think what makes startups so effective is that they naturally work this way at first. But then, typically, bad ideas about how one is supposed to "manage" and "scale" kick in and stifle the thing. This document is interesting as a conscious strategy for not being stifled. Valve's success lends it credibility, and the fact that Valve is not a startup makes it more interesting, not less, because it's so unusual.
djhworld 14y ago
I wish all companies were like this.
- garethsprice 14y ago
  This model seems limited to companies that are staffed with highly motivated, highly skilled people. I don't think you'd want, say, a branch of McDonalds or a nuclear power station to be run on this model.
  - neilk 14y ago
    I'm not sure about that. Maybe a nuclear power station, as we currently design them, requires very rigid procedures. But that probably also reduces internal information flow, punishes people for noticing problems, and so on. So perhaps that's really an argument against nuclear power as we know it. McDonald's isn't designed the way it is because people are stupid. It's designed to maximize returns on capital investment. Workers are made to be interchangeable, and the product is uniform and predictable. For 300,000 years, humans self-organized to take down caribou or whatever to make our own dinner. Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made?
    - lifeformed 14y ago
      100% yes you do need a system like that to get a specific kind of hamburger made for you in a short amount of time as you drive through their store during very busy hours while fulfilling various quality standards. It's not about getting any burger made, it's about getting a McDonald's burger made.
      - deleted 14y ago
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    - bdunbar 14y ago
      Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made? I make a pretty fine burger, myself. And my own bread, for the buns. But if you want to deliver a consistent product across thousands of stores for a reasonable price, you need standards, managers, guys behind the counter performing to task and standard. So you can walk into a restaurant in Bangor or in Spokane and know what you're getting. Yet .... I can't deliver a home-cooked burger without the same structure McDonald's uses. I get my meat from a butcher who gets it from some other guy and so on on back to Bossie in the pasture. That's one thing out of hundreds of bits that make up daily life. We all of us depend on millions of others doing things to task and standard just to exist - it's baked into the bones of our society. I don't think you can just get rid of it without building a system to take it's place.
michaelochurch 14y ago
There are a lot of good ideas in here, but stack-ranking is a terrible one. First, it makes people hate each other. Anyone who comes up in the bottom half is going to be looking immediately to move to another group simply because he ended up in the bottom half. And if someone ends up near the bottom and ends up with no bonus or on a PIP, he's going to be spending the next few months trying to figure out who screwed him, which creates this whole side game that has nothing to do with actual work. Second, it encourages people to work on the projects that are most visible, which are not always the most valuable. Third, it creates a general atmosphere of distrust. People are constantly watching their back for others who might screw them in the peer review process. This is an outsider's view and a microgripe, and I think a lot of the ideas in that book are good ones. I just saw the words "stack ranking" and knew I had to speak up. It's seriously not a good idea. If someone's going to get whacked, it should happen for a real reason, and not because that person ended up in the bottom 15% because only a couple people knew what he was working on. Maybe he was working on something important but unglamorous. I've seen that kind of shit happen all the time with stack-ranking systems.
- v21 14y ago
  They do mention it's only used for deciding salary adjustments. But generally, good points. What would you do instead?
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Well, I don't think hierarchy is prima facie evil. Conceptual hierarchy is how people think. The problem with human organizations (and "managers" and the bad rap they get) is that hierarchies are easy to corrupt by aiming at the top, and that they usually promote the wrong people-- social climbers instead of leaders. Managers get a bad rap, but good managers (possibly 10-20%) are worth their weight in gold. Bad managers are disastrous. No managers is rarely an option. "Flat" organizations tend to devolve into young-wolf conflicts and evolve their own unofficial hierarchies. In fact, young wolves are more dangerous than managers; because young wolves' positions of influence are unofficial and therefore unsafe, those around them are direct competitors and they have more incentive to attack. Managers rarely sabotage their own reports, because they have the safety of being a level or two higher. Young wolves frequently do this to people who are technically same-level but haven't been around as long or had as much of an opportunity to establish themselves, but whom they perceive as long-term threats. If nothing else, you need good managers in place to prevent young-wolf conflicts. The problem with traditional management, though, is that people promotions are pull-based (i.e. people get promoted by conning the top guys) rather than push-driven from below. The result is that people get promoted based on social climbing rather than real leadership, and managerial incompetence sets in very quickly. I'd get rid of "performance" reviews. The word is loaded, and most workplace conflicts have nothing to do with performance. I've worked in elite companies, so this observation may be unusual, but I've seen maybe 20 people get fired in my career, and only one was for performance. The others were personality conflicts or other reasons. Dressing these issues up as "performance" issues just makes everyone angry. Instead of reviewing "performance", which is code for "dressing up how I like you as something more objective", there should be a review along two axes: Skill and Impact, which are much more objective. I came up with a half-decent (IMO) scale for assessing software engineering skill here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... . The difference between 1.5 and 1.6 may be hard to assess, but that between a 1.5 and 1.8 is pretty much objectively visible. Here's the kicker: these numbers are public. It shouldn't be "sensitive". Management ought to have the balls to say, "we think this person has Skill 1.7 and Impact 1.8 and here's why." What is kept private are reviews more than 12 months old, so that peoples' trends aren't visible for everyone to see. The other thing that deserves to be private (because it is somewhat sensitive) is assessment of a person's potential, but that's not what formal reviews are for. That should be handled informally, in any case. Ok, now as for how the reviews occur... as I said, the problem with traditional management is that selection occurs on a "pull" rather than "push" basis. So instead of people having "managers", they choose sponsors who are typically more senior (although at the very top levels where "more senior" is hard to find, peers will do). Sponsors keep track of their reports' growth and advocate for them during the review process. The difference is that a sponsor relationship can be terminated at any time, by either side, without requiring anyone to exit the company, and that an employee can (and should) have 2-3 sponsors. This system allows people to "vote with their feet". If someone's not a good sponsor, people move away from him. What happens if someone has no sponsor? If you have no sponsor, you go before upper management yourself during review time. You advocate for yourself. If you can effectively communicate what you have done and what you will do, then you may advance. If you can't, you'll stagnate. (The purpose of the sponsor is to be an intermediate advocate with a better understanding of what the company and its management value, but there's no reason a person can't be allowed to advocate for himself.) Of course, if someone can't get a sponsor for a period of months, that's a sign that this person might need to leave.
v21 14y ago
For me the most impressive part is where they list things that Valve sucks at. How many companies have a list like that?
molf 14y ago
This sounds a lot like a "lattice" organisation. It was invented by Bill Gore, founder of W.L. Gore & Associates (famous for their Gore-Tex fabric). At Gore, apparently everyone is an associate with no specific job title. There are no chains of command or hierarchy. People choose to work on projects based on their own judgement. As Gore grew, it was apparent that this structure did not work with more than a couple of hundred people. So now, teams are limited to about 200 people (approximately Dunbar's number). I imagine Valve will run into this social limit as well once they grow well beyond their current 260 employees. Given that Gore still exists, has 9000 employees and is profitable after 60 years is testament that such a structure can work for small as well as larger organisations over a longer period of time. I first learned about this organisational structure in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. There are multiple descriptions online, here's one that seems interesting: http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=619020093024125107124111019099119123070005063047062066086085064045007008026071062033009127053113030117126090013072022059045025126101104000112025068069094&EXT=pdf http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=61902009302412510712411...
- dhx 14y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy
- arkitaip 14y ago
  I've spent the last hour reading about W. L. Gore and Associates and the lattice organization and it's been very inspiring. Thank you for this.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Universities also follow this model, and Google popularized it in the tech industry (inspired by the grad school structure)
- CubicleNinjas 14y ago
  I was literally thinking about Valve's organizational structure this week, wondering if it had a classification. Nearly bugged Gabe. Thank you for sharing this.
codesuela 14y ago
I wonder if this only applies to the game developers or other Valve staff (say web developers) as well. Is there anyone here working at Valve to could clear this up?
- bdunbar 14y ago
  I wonder if this only applies to the game developers or other Valve staff ... as well. Darn good question. I'm having a hard time picturing how this would work for accounting or systems administration.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    But it wasn't so long ago that it was felt to be impossible for software companies. Actually, it mostly still is. People tend to lower themselves to the preconceptions others have of them. It can be very convincing.
    - bdunbar 14y ago
      It can be very convincing. Point taken. So .. I thought about it. If Valve were to hire me [1] I can see myself attaching to the systems admin role and liking it a great deal. It's what I do, what I like. I do wonder how they make it happen for back office jobs that are not glamorous or especially fun but absolutely must happen. [1] Hey, Valve. I'm not currently in the market, but I am a damn fine systems administrator. Drop me a line if you're interested.
      - rdl 14y ago
        Valve is on the list of companies I'd work for if I weren't doing a startup (along with Apple, Palantir, Square, Sig Arms, and anything Elon Musk is attached to in any way).
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Why would they apply it differently to non-game developers? "Whatever group you’re in, whether you’re building Steam servers, translating support articles, or making the tenthousandth hat for Team Fortress 2, this applies to you."
ben0x539 14y ago
This doesn't make my quest to find the guy who's responsible for only shipping no-gore versions of Team Fortress 2 to Germany any easier!
- icco 14y ago
  Sure it does, just join Valve and do it yourself.
- CamperBob 14y ago
  That would be your own government.
keyle 14y ago
Does this remind anyone of the dharma initiative type videos?
- bvdbijl 14y ago
  Haha yes! I think their art style (60s) is very similar to that of the Dharma initiative as well
kator 14y ago
Funny but true I interviewed and was given an offer but the pay was so far off what I was earning "at market" that I ended up not going to work for them. The interview process was amazing, took 6 hours at a white board, multiple teams drilled me on all the various languages I claimed to know and then some business teams grilled me on my thoughts about the industry. The passionate side of me really wanted to work for them but the pragmatic side of me made it clear I would have to work for considerably less than I was making open market. To make things worse my next position literally was almost double the salary Valve offered me. I was just last night joking with my wife that when I want to settle down maybe I should try and go back through the process with the understanding it will most likely be 1/3 of my current salary. I love working in my passion but as I always tell people the people at the grocery store still want me to pay for my food. I try to balance passion and pragmatism and if I need some crazy passionate project I take on a side project on the weekends for some open source project etc.
- matwood 14y ago
  I think you made the right choice unless taking 1/2 the salary for a couple years would have been a stepping stone to your own game company. I hate the 'passion' term because it's often the term thrown around by owners looking for employees. Of course the owners are passionate since they stand to gain a lot of money from the companies success. I will passionately bust my ass for 12 hour days if I'm paid properly.
  - rgraham 14y ago
    Money isn't a great motivator. It takes an ever increasing reward to get people interested. Read 'Drive' by Dan Pink.
    - girlvinyl 14y ago
      Money isn't the greatest motivator, true. But under paying is a huge demotivator.
    - lawnchair_larry 14y ago
teamonkey 14y ago
Where does this come from? Has Valve officially released this, is it a leak, or is it a fan-made construction?
eumenides1 14y ago
Page 55, Josh Weier, 14 year old boy. Google him. This manual is from this year and it says he is 57. He really does look like he's been bathing in stem cells
- citricsquid 14y ago
  You're right, he looks late twenties at most! Here's a video of him: http://www.destructoid.com/pax-east-valve-s-josh-weier-talks-portal-2-196903.phtml http://www.destructoid.com/pax-east-valve-s-josh-weier-talks...
  - trafficlight 14y ago
    I watched the whole thing and I just can't believe that.
    - jewbacca 14y ago
      I'm almost completely certain this is a joke. He's probably in his late 20s.
- jonmb 14y ago
  He's 57?! Whoa.
- MDCore 14y ago
  This must be an in-joke. Best thing to do is respond the same way you do when you hear an in-joke at the new job: laugh along and then hope you overhear a conversation where someone explains it.
masenghi 14y ago
Half-Life 3 t-shirt. Page 22.
sgentle 14y ago
Hm. So is this a leak or a "not strictly public but if it fell into the hands of a bunch of people we want to hire then I guess we'll just have to deal with it" sort of thing? With this and the recent Michael Abrash blog post, I get the feeling that Valve is putting a bit more attention into making themselves attractive to developers. Frankly, I think it's working.
icco 14y ago
This is a cool handbook. I wonder what the frustrations are that come with this? As the book says, Valve sucks at disseminating information. It'd be interesting to see if there is some sort of pervasive feeling of "why didn't I know about that project? I wanted to work on that."
gruseom 14y ago
This document is revolutionary. How well does it reflect what actually goes on at Valve?
benaston 14y ago
"Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying." Most egregious example of double-speak ever?
- drawkbox 14y ago
  If there is no boss, everyone is your boss, or your client. Not a bad way to go about things. You end up overall working better with people around you. Also, being evaluated by what you deliver and by your peers isn't too bad, considering the alternative is possibly a non technical boss that may never understand what you do. I try to work with co-workers as if they were friendly clients. I think this leads to good product launches and results.
- X-Istence 14y ago
  How exactly is this double speak? I am parsing this as saying that "nobody" is my boss (if I were at Valve), ESPECIALLY Gabe. If I am working on a team and there is a team lead and he asks me to do something I am most likely inclined to do it with little pushback/skepticism, what the handbook is saying that if Gabe tells me to do something I better damn well run it by 1 or more other people (the team I am on most likely) and discuss it before I even think of doing what he suggests.
  - getsat 14y ago
    I thought it was a not-so-subtle tongue-in-cheek reference to Gabe's weight/size. He's a big guy. shrug
  - benaston 14y ago
    "Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying." This is double speak because it is saying one thing explicitly and exactly the opposite meaning is implied. In other words - we are all equal (there is no hierarchy), but some are more equal than others (there is a hierarchy) - if you get what I'm saying.
10098 14y ago
Somehow I tend to think that this leak is intentional... and it may be that the document has been specifically written for that purpose. Anyway, if what's written is true, Valve must be an amazing place to work at.
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
It works really well because Valve hires only highly experienced Senior people. Which is why they're able to manage themselves. They liked my game ideas in my blog (I even predicted Steam's Big Picture mode) and I got a call from Greg Coomer, but ultimately I never got an interview because I didn't have the experience and hadn't shipped any real profitable products. It was a really nice reality check though. It made me realize where I am in life and where I need to go. So thank you Greg. Also, they play the "Portal - Still Alive" song when you're on hold.
tayl0r 14y ago
To everyone wondering if it was leaked on purpose or whatever, it clearly says right at the top: Originally uploaded to http://cdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://cdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf Handbook courtesy of Valve So, they shared it on purpose and are not trying to disguise it as a "leak".
codeonfire 14y ago
If Valve's organization is simply to let employees fight it out thunderdome style to see who controls projects, culture, and direction, the organization should be grown by spinning off completely new and independent businesses, not by hiring people. Then the economics of free enterprise provides a true risk/reward system. With salaried employees rewards are capped. Employees will only stick around until they discover that the real economy pays much better for hard work and good ideas and that the risks are basically the same: no income. The "we have no structure" culture is disingenuous. I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere. You can't simply say 'we don't have managers' as obviously only certain people are going to have power of budget and final hiring decision. Only certain people can sign documents. Only when employees can expense anything they want and hire anyone they feel should be hired would a "no managers" description be appropriate. You might say that this would never work, but it does work if each employee is given assistance or investment to spin off a new organization at any time, hire anyone, and spend money.
- angersock 14y ago
  "With salaried employees rewards are capped." Now, this might surprise you, but working on cool projects can be its own reward. Your utility metric is flawed. "I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere." Did you perchance get your worldview from anime? Really? This might also surprise you, but a lot of well-functioning folks don't care about petty politics as much as doing cool stuff.
  - codeonfire 14y ago
    "working on cool projects can be its own reward. Your utility metric is flawed." Everyone is entitled to their opinions. My opinion is people that say they don't care about monetary rewards are bullshitters. After all, if you have enough money you can work on any project you want. "a lot of well-functioning folks don't care about petty politics as much as doing cool stuff." A lot of people SAY all they care about is doing cool stuff. People employed at a company to earn money are not these people (but they see if people will buy it anyways). Denying that you're playing politics is politics 101.
markmsmith 14y ago
This is really a great example of how to do things right. I wish more companies were like this.
shykes 14y ago
I really like that they highlight and discuss possible downsides of their approach. It makes it a more credible source of inspiration and discussion for other companies. In my experience it's really difficult to use material from Github or 37signals, for example, to start a constructive conversation on work practicess at your own company. Half of the team might dismiss it as a self-promotional, patronizing PR fluff piece, while the other half might gobble it up and fail to rationally weigh the pros and cons. And everyone gets this vague unpleasant feeling of being told that they're inadequate - like a 15-year old girl watching a weight watcher commercial.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
charlesju 14y ago
What a great read. Do you guys know if there are other companies that have handbooks available for the public?
tubbo 14y ago
Now I know why they made Half-Life the way they did. Gordon Freeman feels exactly the way you would feel when you start working at Valve.
DanielRibeiro 14y ago
I can see why they would not want this leaked: Fishbowl— The conference room by the lunchroom. The one with a bigglass wall. Don’t let the name throw you—we don’t actually use it as a fishbowl! Except, of course, on Fishbowl Fridays, where we fill it up with tenthousand gallons of putrid saltwater so that all the manta rays and sharks will have something to breathe while they fight to the death. You won’t seeit in your list of benefits, not because it isn’t fun, but because it is illegal.
balloot 14y ago
I just can't believe that this works as seamlessly as the handbook would have you believe. It seems it would create a very Lord Of The Flies/cliquey atmosphere. In a group of people, there always exists some kind of hierarchy, whether it's explicit or implied. In this case, there is zero attempt to create an explicit power structure, so it's 100% implied, but I don't see why that's fundamentally better. In general this sounds like the natural structure for pack animals, where you join a pack and no one anoints a power structure, but it becomes clear very quickly who is "alpha", "beta", etc. IMHO it sounds like it possibly could be a very stressful situation.
- Tloewald 14y ago
  Having an org chart hierarchy doesn't prevent natural hierarchies that don't match it from forming, and now you have two problems. I suspect it doesn't work perfectly, but what does?
Novex 14y ago
In case anyone wants to read this on their e-reader, here is a single page version - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2177514/Valve_Handbook_LowRes_singlepage.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2177514/Valve_Handbook_LowRes_single...
Ahadiel 14y ago
A
joss82 14y ago
Best part so far: "Accepted truisms about sales, marketing, regionality, seasonality, the Internet, purchasing behavior, game design, economics, and recruiting, etc., have proven wrong surprisingly often. So we have learned that when we take nearly any action, it’s best to do so in a way that we can measure, predict outcomes, and analyze results."
justnearme 14y ago
I wonder how a Japanese company would react to such a radical perspective on company management!

569 points by v21 14y ago

xpose2000 14y ago

This is one of the coolest looks behind the scene's of one of the world's most successful companies. I have read every page. As they mentioned in the handbook, Value's revenue per employee is the highest in the world. Source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newell-videogames-valve-online-mayhem.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newel...

fromhet 14y ago

This kind of company coulture seems to run thru the most succesful software companies, such as Google is prominent is their areas, Valve are huge in games, Facebook seems to work in the same way. AFAIK Apple is hierarchical and is run in a very "traditional" fashion, but are still very successful. Is there a pattern about theese things, and what way of managing a software company works best? EDIT: Also, Half-Life is the best game ever.

vladd 14y ago
Unless you've worked at those companies, I'd suggest you refrain from stating that Google&co compares in openness with Valve in the way they let new-hires pick their own starter teams and similar things.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Google hasn't been that way for a long time. You can move around as you wish if you're a Real Googler. The Real Googler Line used to be Senior SWE; now it's somewhere between Senior and Staff. Staff are Real Googlers, and Seniors who are likely to make Staff are Real Googlers, but Seniors who are perceived as having plateaued are not. If you're not a Real Googler, 20%T will be perceived as slacking off, and you're going to have a hard fight to get a transfer. Generally, it's hard to transfer unless you've had a recent promotion, so if you're not going to get promoted based on your current project, you might as well leave.
  - paulhauggis 14y ago
    This sounds like a mess. It's why I don't like working for anyone. Unless you play politics and please the right people, your livelihood will be limited.
  - kabdib 14y ago
    Ouch. Yeah, a friend of mine at G seems to be in this position. Why do tech companies think that hitting a plateau is a bad thing? Someone who's not going to further advance and who is productive and happy should be allowed to remain happily churning stuff out, with no pressure to hit the next ranking, or be ousted, or be unable to move. (I've seen some demotions at my company, which was basically recognition that "Okay, we want to keep you, and in the past we had to promote you to do that because of the fucked-up stuff that HR was forcing us to do. Here, have a lower position, and you get to keep your salary.")
    - jrockway 14y ago
      My experience at Google is the opposite. I am friends with many Senior SWEs who have no interest in the next promotion and they do fine. They get paid well, get good bonuses, get to lead new projects, and so on. I'm also friends with people who are relatively new to Google that have made big (and small) moves inside the company. In a company with 30,000 employees, some people are going to be unhappy. But the vast majority of people I interact with at Google are very happy. The biggest problem I face is the five minute wait for someone to make me a latte.
  - mikeytemple 14y ago
    Wow, that's unfortunate too. Combined with your previous comments I have to assume that you were a long time googler. Can you tell us what it was like back in the day? I'm really curious how big companies change / devolve over time.
    - deleted 14y ago
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zaptheimpaler 14y ago

This is incredible. Valve is possibly the only company EVER that truly operates with a completely flat hierarchy and does so well!

kghose 14y ago

This is awesome. The part about picking your project is just like picking a research program as an independent researcher in the sciences!

danso 14y ago

Inspiring reading. I wish they had chosen a better example of the archtypal "T" employee than the Heavy class...many of those attributes he has are just things that are obvious consequences/contributing factors to his main skill "hugeness, killing people".

nkohari 14y ago
True. Pyro would have been a better choice. :)
neilk 14y ago
I wonder how much of Valve's internal culture is reflected in their games, like TF2. Portal seems to be the dystopic mirror image.
- jrockway 14y ago
  I wonder how many employees bring their daughter to work on "bring your daughter to work" day.

rheide 14y ago

This has the single best description of a team lead I have ever seen: "[Team leads are] keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against"

gruseom 14y ago
I agree. The whole paragraph, in fact, is the best description of that thing I've ever read. There are more than a few things in here which, if true, turn common ideas about management on their head (or rather just shoot them in the head). What's exciting is that they reflect how work actually gets done. Shouldn't that be our organizing principle? I think what makes startups so effective is that they naturally work this way at first. But then, typically, bad ideas about how one is supposed to "manage" and "scale" kick in and stifle the thing. This document is interesting as a conscious strategy for not being stifled. Valve's success lends it credibility, and the fact that Valve is not a startup makes it more interesting, not less, because it's so unusual.

djhworld 14y ago

I wish all companies were like this.

garethsprice 14y ago
This model seems limited to companies that are staffed with highly motivated, highly skilled people. I don't think you'd want, say, a branch of McDonalds or a nuclear power station to be run on this model.
- neilk 14y ago
  I'm not sure about that. Maybe a nuclear power station, as we currently design them, requires very rigid procedures. But that probably also reduces internal information flow, punishes people for noticing problems, and so on. So perhaps that's really an argument against nuclear power as we know it. McDonald's isn't designed the way it is because people are stupid. It's designed to maximize returns on capital investment. Workers are made to be interchangeable, and the product is uniform and predictable. For 300,000 years, humans self-organized to take down caribou or whatever to make our own dinner. Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made?
  - lifeformed 14y ago
    100% yes you do need a system like that to get a specific kind of hamburger made for you in a short amount of time as you drive through their store during very busy hours while fulfilling various quality standards. It's not about getting any burger made, it's about getting a McDonald's burger made.
    - deleted 14y ago
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  - bdunbar 14y ago
    Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made? I make a pretty fine burger, myself. And my own bread, for the buns. But if you want to deliver a consistent product across thousands of stores for a reasonable price, you need standards, managers, guys behind the counter performing to task and standard. So you can walk into a restaurant in Bangor or in Spokane and know what you're getting. Yet .... I can't deliver a home-cooked burger without the same structure McDonald's uses. I get my meat from a butcher who gets it from some other guy and so on on back to Bossie in the pasture. That's one thing out of hundreds of bits that make up daily life. We all of us depend on millions of others doing things to task and standard just to exist - it's baked into the bones of our society. I don't think you can just get rid of it without building a system to take it's place.

michaelochurch 14y ago

There are a lot of good ideas in here, but stack-ranking is a terrible one. First, it makes people hate each other. Anyone who comes up in the bottom half is going to be looking immediately to move to another group simply because he ended up in the bottom half. And if someone ends up near the bottom and ends up with no bonus or on a PIP, he's going to be spending the next few months trying to figure out who screwed him, which creates this whole side game that has nothing to do with actual work. Second, it encourages people to work on the projects that are most visible, which are not always the most valuable. Third, it creates a general atmosphere of distrust. People are constantly watching their back for others who might screw them in the peer review process. This is an outsider's view and a microgripe, and I think a lot of the ideas in that book are good ones. I just saw the words "stack ranking" and knew I had to speak up. It's seriously not a good idea. If someone's going to get whacked, it should happen for a real reason, and not because that person ended up in the bottom 15% because only a couple people knew what he was working on. Maybe he was working on something important but unglamorous. I've seen that kind of shit happen all the time with stack-ranking systems.

v21 14y ago
They do mention it's only used for deciding salary adjustments. But generally, good points. What would you do instead?
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Well, I don't think hierarchy is prima facie evil. Conceptual hierarchy is how people think. The problem with human organizations (and "managers" and the bad rap they get) is that hierarchies are easy to corrupt by aiming at the top, and that they usually promote the wrong people-- social climbers instead of leaders. Managers get a bad rap, but good managers (possibly 10-20%) are worth their weight in gold. Bad managers are disastrous. No managers is rarely an option. "Flat" organizations tend to devolve into young-wolf conflicts and evolve their own unofficial hierarchies. In fact, young wolves are more dangerous than managers; because young wolves' positions of influence are unofficial and therefore unsafe, those around them are direct competitors and they have more incentive to attack. Managers rarely sabotage their own reports, because they have the safety of being a level or two higher. Young wolves frequently do this to people who are technically same-level but haven't been around as long or had as much of an opportunity to establish themselves, but whom they perceive as long-term threats. If nothing else, you need good managers in place to prevent young-wolf conflicts. The problem with traditional management, though, is that people promotions are pull-based (i.e. people get promoted by conning the top guys) rather than push-driven from below. The result is that people get promoted based on social climbing rather than real leadership, and managerial incompetence sets in very quickly. I'd get rid of "performance" reviews. The word is loaded, and most workplace conflicts have nothing to do with performance. I've worked in elite companies, so this observation may be unusual, but I've seen maybe 20 people get fired in my career, and only one was for performance. The others were personality conflicts or other reasons. Dressing these issues up as "performance" issues just makes everyone angry. Instead of reviewing "performance", which is code for "dressing up how I like you as something more objective", there should be a review along two axes: Skill and Impact, which are much more objective. I came up with a half-decent (IMO) scale for assessing software engineering skill here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... . The difference between 1.5 and 1.6 may be hard to assess, but that between a 1.5 and 1.8 is pretty much objectively visible. Here's the kicker: these numbers are public. It shouldn't be "sensitive". Management ought to have the balls to say, "we think this person has Skill 1.7 and Impact 1.8 and here's why." What is kept private are reviews more than 12 months old, so that peoples' trends aren't visible for everyone to see. The other thing that deserves to be private (because it is somewhat sensitive) is assessment of a person's potential, but that's not what formal reviews are for. That should be handled informally, in any case. Ok, now as for how the reviews occur... as I said, the problem with traditional management is that selection occurs on a "pull" rather than "push" basis. So instead of people having "managers", they choose sponsors who are typically more senior (although at the very top levels where "more senior" is hard to find, peers will do). Sponsors keep track of their reports' growth and advocate for them during the review process. The difference is that a sponsor relationship can be terminated at any time, by either side, without requiring anyone to exit the company, and that an employee can (and should) have 2-3 sponsors. This system allows people to "vote with their feet". If someone's not a good sponsor, people move away from him. What happens if someone has no sponsor? If you have no sponsor, you go before upper management yourself during review time. You advocate for yourself. If you can effectively communicate what you have done and what you will do, then you may advance. If you can't, you'll stagnate. (The purpose of the sponsor is to be an intermediate advocate with a better understanding of what the company and its management value, but there's no reason a person can't be allowed to advocate for himself.) Of course, if someone can't get a sponsor for a period of months, that's a sign that this person might need to leave.

v21 14y ago

For me the most impressive part is where they list things that Valve sucks at. How many companies have a list like that?

molf 14y ago

This sounds a lot like a "lattice" organisation. It was invented by Bill Gore, founder of W.L. Gore & Associates (famous for their Gore-Tex fabric). At Gore, apparently everyone is an associate with no specific job title. There are no chains of command or hierarchy. People choose to work on projects based on their own judgement. As Gore grew, it was apparent that this structure did not work with more than a couple of hundred people. So now, teams are limited to about 200 people (approximately Dunbar's number). I imagine Valve will run into this social limit as well once they grow well beyond their current 260 employees. Given that Gore still exists, has 9000 employees and is profitable after 60 years is testament that such a structure can work for small as well as larger organisations over a longer period of time. I first learned about this organisational structure in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. There are multiple descriptions online, here's one that seems interesting: http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=619020093024125107124111019099119123070005063047062066086085064045007008026071062033009127053113030117126090013072022059045025126101104000112025068069094&EXT=pdf http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=61902009302412510712411...

dhx 14y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy
arkitaip 14y ago
I've spent the last hour reading about W. L. Gore and Associates and the lattice organization and it's been very inspiring. Thank you for this.
Drbble 14y ago
Universities also follow this model, and Google popularized it in the tech industry (inspired by the grad school structure)
CubicleNinjas 14y ago
I was literally thinking about Valve's organizational structure this week, wondering if it had a classification. Nearly bugged Gabe. Thank you for sharing this.

codesuela 14y ago

I wonder if this only applies to the game developers or other Valve staff (say web developers) as well. Is there anyone here working at Valve to could clear this up?

bdunbar 14y ago
I wonder if this only applies to the game developers or other Valve staff ... as well. Darn good question. I'm having a hard time picturing how this would work for accounting or systems administration.
- gruseom 14y ago
  But it wasn't so long ago that it was felt to be impossible for software companies. Actually, it mostly still is. People tend to lower themselves to the preconceptions others have of them. It can be very convincing.
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    It can be very convincing. Point taken. So .. I thought about it. If Valve were to hire me [1] I can see myself attaching to the systems admin role and liking it a great deal. It's what I do, what I like. I do wonder how they make it happen for back office jobs that are not glamorous or especially fun but absolutely must happen. [1] Hey, Valve. I'm not currently in the market, but I am a damn fine systems administrator. Drop me a line if you're interested.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Valve is on the list of companies I'd work for if I weren't doing a startup (along with Apple, Palantir, Square, Sig Arms, and anything Elon Musk is attached to in any way).
brown9-2 14y ago
Why would they apply it differently to non-game developers? "Whatever group you’re in, whether you’re building Steam servers, translating support articles, or making the tenthousandth hat for Team Fortress 2, this applies to you."

ben0x539 14y ago

This doesn't make my quest to find the guy who's responsible for only shipping no-gore versions of Team Fortress 2 to Germany any easier!

icco 14y ago
Sure it does, just join Valve and do it yourself.
CamperBob 14y ago
That would be your own government.

keyle 14y ago

Does this remind anyone of the dharma initiative type videos?

bvdbijl 14y ago
Haha yes! I think their art style (60s) is very similar to that of the Dharma initiative as well

kator 14y ago

Funny but true I interviewed and was given an offer but the pay was so far off what I was earning "at market" that I ended up not going to work for them. The interview process was amazing, took 6 hours at a white board, multiple teams drilled me on all the various languages I claimed to know and then some business teams grilled me on my thoughts about the industry. The passionate side of me really wanted to work for them but the pragmatic side of me made it clear I would have to work for considerably less than I was making open market. To make things worse my next position literally was almost double the salary Valve offered me. I was just last night joking with my wife that when I want to settle down maybe I should try and go back through the process with the understanding it will most likely be 1/3 of my current salary. I love working in my passion but as I always tell people the people at the grocery store still want me to pay for my food. I try to balance passion and pragmatism and if I need some crazy passionate project I take on a side project on the weekends for some open source project etc.

matwood 14y ago
I think you made the right choice unless taking 1/2 the salary for a couple years would have been a stepping stone to your own game company. I hate the 'passion' term because it's often the term thrown around by owners looking for employees. Of course the owners are passionate since they stand to gain a lot of money from the companies success. I will passionately bust my ass for 12 hour days if I'm paid properly.
- rgraham 14y ago
  Money isn't a great motivator. It takes an ever increasing reward to get people interested. Read 'Drive' by Dan Pink.
  - girlvinyl 14y ago
    Money isn't the greatest motivator, true. But under paying is a huge demotivator.
  - lawnchair_larry 14y ago

teamonkey 14y ago

Where does this come from? Has Valve officially released this, is it a leak, or is it a fan-made construction?

eumenides1 14y ago

Page 55, Josh Weier, 14 year old boy. Google him. This manual is from this year and it says he is 57. He really does look like he's been bathing in stem cells

citricsquid 14y ago
You're right, he looks late twenties at most! Here's a video of him: http://www.destructoid.com/pax-east-valve-s-josh-weier-talks-portal-2-196903.phtml http://www.destructoid.com/pax-east-valve-s-josh-weier-talks...
- trafficlight 14y ago
  I watched the whole thing and I just can't believe that.
  - jewbacca 14y ago
    I'm almost completely certain this is a joke. He's probably in his late 20s.
jonmb 14y ago
He's 57?! Whoa.
MDCore 14y ago
This must be an in-joke. Best thing to do is respond the same way you do when you hear an in-joke at the new job: laugh along and then hope you overhear a conversation where someone explains it.

masenghi 14y ago

Half-Life 3 t-shirt. Page 22.

sgentle 14y ago

Hm. So is this a leak or a "not strictly public but if it fell into the hands of a bunch of people we want to hire then I guess we'll just have to deal with it" sort of thing? With this and the recent Michael Abrash blog post, I get the feeling that Valve is putting a bit more attention into making themselves attractive to developers. Frankly, I think it's working.

icco 14y ago

This is a cool handbook. I wonder what the frustrations are that come with this? As the book says, Valve sucks at disseminating information. It'd be interesting to see if there is some sort of pervasive feeling of "why didn't I know about that project? I wanted to work on that."

gruseom 14y ago

This document is revolutionary. How well does it reflect what actually goes on at Valve?

benaston 14y ago

"Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying." Most egregious example of double-speak ever?

drawkbox 14y ago
If there is no boss, everyone is your boss, or your client. Not a bad way to go about things. You end up overall working better with people around you. Also, being evaluated by what you deliver and by your peers isn't too bad, considering the alternative is possibly a non technical boss that may never understand what you do. I try to work with co-workers as if they were friendly clients. I think this leads to good product launches and results.
X-Istence 14y ago
How exactly is this double speak? I am parsing this as saying that "nobody" is my boss (if I were at Valve), ESPECIALLY Gabe. If I am working on a team and there is a team lead and he asks me to do something I am most likely inclined to do it with little pushback/skepticism, what the handbook is saying that if Gabe tells me to do something I better damn well run it by 1 or more other people (the team I am on most likely) and discuss it before I even think of doing what he suggests.
- getsat 14y ago
  I thought it was a not-so-subtle tongue-in-cheek reference to Gabe's weight/size. He's a big guy. shrug
- benaston 14y ago
  "Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying." This is double speak because it is saying one thing explicitly and exactly the opposite meaning is implied. In other words - we are all equal (there is no hierarchy), but some are more equal than others (there is a hierarchy) - if you get what I'm saying.

10098 14y ago

Somehow I tend to think that this leak is intentional... and it may be that the document has been specifically written for that purpose. Anyway, if what's written is true, Valve must be an amazing place to work at.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

It works really well because Valve hires only highly experienced Senior people. Which is why they're able to manage themselves. They liked my game ideas in my blog (I even predicted Steam's Big Picture mode) and I got a call from Greg Coomer, but ultimately I never got an interview because I didn't have the experience and hadn't shipped any real profitable products. It was a really nice reality check though. It made me realize where I am in life and where I need to go. So thank you Greg. Also, they play the "Portal - Still Alive" song when you're on hold.

tayl0r 14y ago

To everyone wondering if it was leaked on purpose or whatever, it clearly says right at the top: Originally uploaded to http://cdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://cdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf Handbook courtesy of Valve So, they shared it on purpose and are not trying to disguise it as a "leak".

codeonfire 14y ago

If Valve's organization is simply to let employees fight it out thunderdome style to see who controls projects, culture, and direction, the organization should be grown by spinning off completely new and independent businesses, not by hiring people. Then the economics of free enterprise provides a true risk/reward system. With salaried employees rewards are capped. Employees will only stick around until they discover that the real economy pays much better for hard work and good ideas and that the risks are basically the same: no income. The "we have no structure" culture is disingenuous. I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere. You can't simply say 'we don't have managers' as obviously only certain people are going to have power of budget and final hiring decision. Only certain people can sign documents. Only when employees can expense anything they want and hire anyone they feel should be hired would a "no managers" description be appropriate. You might say that this would never work, but it does work if each employee is given assistance or investment to spin off a new organization at any time, hire anyone, and spend money.

angersock 14y ago
"With salaried employees rewards are capped." Now, this might surprise you, but working on cool projects can be its own reward. Your utility metric is flawed. "I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere." Did you perchance get your worldview from anime? Really? This might also surprise you, but a lot of well-functioning folks don't care about petty politics as much as doing cool stuff.
- codeonfire 14y ago
  "working on cool projects can be its own reward. Your utility metric is flawed." Everyone is entitled to their opinions. My opinion is people that say they don't care about monetary rewards are bullshitters. After all, if you have enough money you can work on any project you want. "a lot of well-functioning folks don't care about petty politics as much as doing cool stuff." A lot of people SAY all they care about is doing cool stuff. People employed at a company to earn money are not these people (but they see if people will buy it anyways). Denying that you're playing politics is politics 101.

markmsmith 14y ago

This is really a great example of how to do things right. I wish more companies were like this.

shykes 14y ago

I really like that they highlight and discuss possible downsides of their approach. It makes it a more credible source of inspiration and discussion for other companies. In my experience it's really difficult to use material from Github or 37signals, for example, to start a constructive conversation on work practicess at your own company. Half of the team might dismiss it as a self-promotional, patronizing PR fluff piece, while the other half might gobble it up and fail to rationally weigh the pros and cons. And everyone gets this vague unpleasant feeling of being told that they're inadequate - like a 15-year old girl watching a weight watcher commercial.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

charlesju 14y ago

What a great read. Do you guys know if there are other companies that have handbooks available for the public?

tubbo 14y ago

Now I know why they made Half-Life the way they did. Gordon Freeman feels exactly the way you would feel when you start working at Valve.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

I can see why they would not want this leaked: Fishbowl— The conference room by the lunchroom. The one with a bigglass wall. Don’t let the name throw you—we don’t actually use it as a fishbowl! Except, of course, on Fishbowl Fridays, where we fill it up with tenthousand gallons of putrid saltwater so that all the manta rays and sharks will have something to breathe while they fight to the death. You won’t seeit in your list of benefits, not because it isn’t fun, but because it is illegal.

balloot 14y ago

I just can't believe that this works as seamlessly as the handbook would have you believe. It seems it would create a very Lord Of The Flies/cliquey atmosphere. In a group of people, there always exists some kind of hierarchy, whether it's explicit or implied. In this case, there is zero attempt to create an explicit power structure, so it's 100% implied, but I don't see why that's fundamentally better. In general this sounds like the natural structure for pack animals, where you join a pack and no one anoints a power structure, but it becomes clear very quickly who is "alpha", "beta", etc. IMHO it sounds like it possibly could be a very stressful situation.

Tloewald 14y ago
Having an org chart hierarchy doesn't prevent natural hierarchies that don't match it from forming, and now you have two problems. I suspect it doesn't work perfectly, but what does?

Novex 14y ago

In case anyone wants to read this on their e-reader, here is a single page version - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2177514/Valve_Handbook_LowRes_singlepage.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2177514/Valve_Handbook_LowRes_single...

Ahadiel 14y ago

joss82 14y ago

Best part so far: "Accepted truisms about sales, marketing, regionality, seasonality, the Internet, purchasing behavior, game design, economics, and recruiting, etc., have proven wrong surprisingly often. So we have learned that when we take nearly any action, it’s best to do so in a way that we can measure, predict outcomes, and analyze results."

justnearme 14y ago

I wonder how a Japanese company would react to such a radical perspective on company management!