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How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays
- webwielder 14y agoEvery time I read about how Valve is composed of only the finest minds in the industry, I wonder how Steam can be a a) slow, kludgy desktop app with inconsistent and at times amateurish UI and visual design, and b) a slow, unreliable, glitchy network service.
- Afforess 14y agoAt Valve, developers work on the projects that interest them. I imagine the actual Steam client is not that interesting of a task compared to HL3 or Portal 3, etc. Seems worthwhile to mention the (leaked?) Valve Handbook. It explains a lot of this stuff: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
- sliverstorm 14y agoBesides, Steam is just a delivery platform. They make money on games, not Steam, so as long as it is good enough...
- cpeterso 14y agoAs a gateway to all their games, is Steam critical to the company?
- intended 14y agoIt's the difference between being a distributor vs being a creator. Steam is the most critical part of the company for their future.
- rieter 14y agoI would imagine Valve making more money from Steam now than from their own games. Remember they sell a lot of third-party stuff there and take their cut on those sales.
- doomlaser 14y agoThey make lots of money on Steam. They take a healthy cut of everything sold on the platform.
- codexon 14y agoThere are no bosses at Valve and they have a stack ranking system deciding how much money you make. This means people there don't do unglamorous things like maintenance and stability fixes.
- damian2000 14y agoShouldn't being involved in an interesting project (e.g. Steam Client) mean you'd actually want to see it through to completion and iron out bugs, etc. - assuming the developers actually care about their work?
- codexon 14y agoIn theory maybe. In practice, makers are different people from polishers, and Valve's system of hiring the "best" (people with impressive CVs) and salaries based on stack ranking means there is a huge bias towards makers (Who brought the company more money? the person who helped roll out dota2 or the person who fixed edge cases in the steam client?). Many of Valve's products are full of bugs that don't get fixed for years. And since they only hire the "best", they don't have any testers. Many times patches are released that cause servers to crash within seconds (tf2 falling damage crash). And sometimes they release them on Friday which means it doesn't get fixed until Monday (Overflow error writing string table baseline crash). These patches were also mandatory.
- jacques_chester 14y agoWhat's missing is negative reinforcement. If not through a management hierarchy, some sort of Customer Pain Index is at least required. Every crash, every slow load, every extra click, every reported bug, every support call would push the index up. Edit: though, to contradict myself, this is still as gameable as all hell if you do something silly like connecting it to reward and punishment.
- svdad 14y ago"See it through to completion" != "iron out bugs"
- pmh 14y agoI've always been amazed at how they managed to cultivate such zealotry in the gaming community despite being one of the first developers to push (what was at the time, onerous and nearly unprecedented) DRM on their current user-base. Not to mention both the Steam client and network were significantly worse than they are now.
- trafficlight 14y agoBecause Steam is easy and it always seems to work as expected. They also have a great catalog. I've spent more money buying games through Steam than I have with any other method. Edit: I forgot the Sales. Those damn Steam Sales get me every time.
- nlawalker 14y agoFrom what I remember, people originally got on Steam because that's how you got Half-Life 2, which the world was clamoring for. They put up with the problems until it got better because Steam was how you played CS and HL. As for the DRM... has it ever really been onerous? The only case I think of is if you don't always have access to an internet connection, and they have workarounds for that, though they admittedly are imperfect. True, the hypothetical/potential failure modes suck - being locked out of your account and losing your games; Valve goes out of business and you lose your games; you're offline and can't switch to offline mode and thus can't play your games until you find an internet connection. That said, I've always been of the impression that most people don't mind Steam's DRM that much because doesn't stop them from doing what they generally expect to be able to do and want to do with their PC games, which is sit down at any PC where they can log in on Steam and play them. This is unlike DRMed music and movie files: sure, DRM prevents you from making unlimited free copies for your friends, which I think most anyone would agree is reasonable, but it also can prevent you from doing things like changing formats or resolutions or storing/viewing from certain devices.
- jasonjei 14y agoThere is precedent for software developers to responsibly shut down activation servers, such as Adobe (gasp!) who made available a serial number and software download for CS2. http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2013/01/get-free-adobe-creative-suite-2-now.html http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2013/01/get-free...
- dataangel 14y agoSteam hasn't been slow or unreliable for me in years. They're one of the biggest consumers of internet bandwidth in the world. Also the UI was completely redone in the last year. Maybe your views are stuck in 2005?
- rdl 14y agoIt's still pretty crashy/unreliable for me, about the same as iTunes, for what should be a fairly simple application.
- temp453463343 14y agoNot to mention it has one of the worst chat clients I've ever come across
- petitmiam 14y agoIt's irritatingly slow starting up for me. Once it's going though, it's rock solid and fast enough.
- webwielder 14y agoI opened Steam three times in the past hour and it updated itself every time. Ask me tomorrow and something else weird/buggy/slow will have happened.
- bentcorner 14y agoIt certainly gets the job done, but so does IE.
- vacri 14y agoA telling analogy - as it's built on IE. Or at least, used to be.
- jiggy2011 14y agoTakes considerable time to load for me on Windows and doesn't work at all for me on Linux.
- ekianjo 14y agoAnd I wonder how they qualify as "makers" since they hardly released any game for years now. And let's not talk about HL Episode 3...
- mwill 14y agoThat's sort of unfair, I think. Off the top of my head, there was the new Counter Strike late last year, Portal 2 the year before, plus the level editor/sharing update last year, DOTA2 in beta at the moment, constant updates to TF2, recent OSX and Linux ports of most Valve games and Steam, the Source engine and related tools, the Steam Box project, the mod workshop for some games, Steam Greenlight, and whatever games they've yet to announce still in development. Considering Valve Corp as a whole supposedly has a total of only about 400 employees and is acting as a developer house, publisher, and 3rd party distribution system rolled into one, I think they've got a pretty fantastic churn rate. EDIT: Just want to say I wasn't the one who downvoted you.
- corin_ 14y agoThey do use outside staff for development, at least in some cases, so perhaps talking about the 400 employees is a little misleading. For example, Hidden Path Entertainment did a lot of work on the new CS title, and Wikipedia tells me they also did some models work on Left 4 Dead 2. I've no idea about the other games, perhaps they are all done 100% in-house.
- ekianjo 14y agoHey, I do not mind being downvoted anyway. I stick to my opinions no matter if they are unpopular. I know what you mean, but apart from Portal 2 the rest does not really qualify from development from scratch (even Portal 2 is dubious on that aspect, since it takes all the mecanisms from the previous games and expands on it). While I love what they do as a distributor and very much appreciate what they do for Linux support, as a pure game developer they fall short of expectations, and they have not done anything very original for a while. For a company with a "flat organization" that is somehow disappointing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- atrus 14y agoLooks like Valve brings in about 1.5 Billion...interesting. (35 min)
- danso 14y agoOK, this is slightly off topic, but I'd be really interested in knowing how employees of totally orthogonal skills coordinate in this kind of hierarchy. For example, I had wondered if much of the great humor and wit was just a side projector some supremely talented employee whose main job was to write 3d renderers. But they do have chief writers, as I guess should be obvious http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132539/valves_writers_and_the_creative_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132539/valves_writers_...
- zobzu 14y agoMeanwhile, no half life 3. :P
- Laremere 14y agoThe employees work on the projects they want to work on. Portal 2 happened because Portal 1 came out, and a lot of people in Valve wanted to do a Portal game. I would've be surprised if there is a small number of people working on the early stages of Half Life 3, or if there is a lot of people working on it without any announcement. It doesn't seem like Dota 2 would take all of Valve's development resources. Granted they're doing steam box stuff, but I imagine that a large portion of the studio is working on something we haven't heard about yet.
- mieubrisse 14y agoThe article didn't actually go into the detail of how much Valve pays.
- nilkn 14y agoFrom the leaked Valve handbook: "Valve pays people very well compared to industry norms. Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee’s pocket." Considering that a ten year veteran at Google can make $200k/year, in salary + bonus + stocks, I'm curious if Valve compensation can reach the same level. The Glassdoor page doesn't suggest it can, but people may not be reporting their bonuses or profit sharing.
- kevinpet 14y agoI'm of the impression that people who contribute data to Glassdoor are the ones who are looking to change jobs or who want to bitch and moan. In other words, severe downward bias.
- enraged_camel 14y agoNot necessarily. At least in the case of my company, both the salaries and people's anonymous reviews are extremely accurate.
- trhtrsh 14y ago$200K? a 10-year veteran at google had $80 IPO shares, $200 share grants, $400 share grants, $600 share grants...
- stephencanon 14y agoYou shouldn't use the appreciated price of stock grants when valuing compensation; you use the price at the time they are granted. (Still, 200k is very low; base salary would be in the ballpark of that figure, but stock/cash bonuses can push well past it).
- Rinum 14y agoI wonder what the "basic wage" is. Salaries being 5, 6, 10 times the basic wage means something totally different if the basic wage were $5k vs $50k.
- loeg 14y agoSo ... are there actual pay numbers? I don't see anything specific in the article. I also can't find Valve on glassdoor.com, although that might be a failure on my part. I've heard that the gaming industry underpays compared with other software industries, but the Valve handbook seems to claim that the pay is better than Google, Microsoft, etc. Anyone have information either way?
- citricsquid 14y agohttp://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Valve-Corporation-Salaries-E24849.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Valve-Corporation-Salaries-E...
- mbell 14y ago'Bi-Lingual Customer Support Rep' makes more than 'Commercial/Industrial Designer'. Doubt this link is remotely accurate.
- mcpherrinm 14y agoThese are unverified self-reported listings. In general, if there are only 1 or 2 reported salaries on Glassdoor, you want to take them with a significant pinch of salt.
- ricardobeat 14y agoThe other numbers (solid bars) seem reasonable.
- paragraft 14y agoThere was a talk recently Gabe gave a university, where he was sort of talk generically about how Valve compensates, and the figure of half a million was mentioned for a hypothetical hire from Weta. That's the closest to a number from Valve I've heard. Edit: found the talk and the moment, and it wasn't quite as I remember http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t8QEOBgLBQU#15m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t... Rather he was talking generically about employees getting paid something that reflects the value they bring.
- paragraft 14y agoI'm curious now in light of the article as to how a whole round of lay-offs occur in an environment like that (particularly across the board, to people of varying tenure like the recent one). Awkwardly, I assume.
- jpittman 14y agoThat was one of the things I was hoping was addressed in the podcast. But I imagine it's something that's not really going to get talked about.
- softbuilder 14y agoDoesn't explain what was up with the random mini-layoff they had recently. Very curious about that.
- j_s 14y agoDid not hear anything about that... can you share more info?
- s_husso 14y agoI think they fired the whole 'steam box' team..
- j_s 14y agoGuess I just don't follow the gaming scene closely enough... http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186592/Several_out_of_work_as_Valve_makes_large_decisions_about_its_future.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186592/Several_out_of_wor...
- wmf 14y agoDidn't Newell explicitly deny that?
- s_husso 14y agoIt seems the HW-lead was fired according to this: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3983348/valve-fires-jeri-ellsworth-who-was-developing-steam-box-game http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3983348/valve-fires-jeri-e...
- rdl 14y agoI'm curious how they fired the most recent group; was it decided collectively?
- niggler 14y agoI assume the same ranking system used for determining compensation (collective) is used to decide who is fired.
- confluence 14y agoFTA's comments: > all is good when the money is flowing. That really struck me. Everything is all good when the money is flowing. It doesn't matter whether you work at a bank, a law firm, a defence contractor or a sales agency - no matter what the structure, or how people are organized, everything works when the money is flowing. Now, what I'm really interested in is catastrophic failure. What goes wrong when the money stops flowing? From what I've seen historically - the same things go wrong no matter what the place (see GFC effect at various companies back in '08). How is Valve going to deal with the "always losing money" proposition?
- jacques_chester 14y agoI've said elsewhere, whenever Valve comes up, that we really have no idea how well it works. It's so fantastically swamped with money that they can pretty much run it any old how and still be "successful". There's a mixup in correlation and causation here. Similar mixed up conclusions are reached by people looking at other fantastically profitable companies. Do you like scenario planning? Shell "proves" it works. Stalinist management? Apple "proves" it works. Velvet sweatshop? Microsoft "proves" it works. Data über alles? Google "proves" it works. Self-directed workplace? Valve "proves" it works.
- enraged_camel 14y agoI think a good way to measure the success of the management methodologies you mentioned is by looking at how happy the employees are. Four of the five companies in your list are full of horror stories describing terrible corporate bureaucracies or abusive/ignorant/incompetent managers. In contrast, everything I've heard coming out of Valve has been overwhelmingly positive.
- jacques_chester 14y agoGoogle has a company-wide index of satisfaction which they try to maximise. Microsoft is the only company I've heard of that has (or had) "Morale Budgets", completely within the control of the programmers. In the 90s, according to McConnell, Microsoft would go to any lengths to protect and improve morale. I can't speak for Shell or Apple. The point is that people are mixing correlation and causation. There's no reason to think that Valve's self-directed model is the cause of their success, just as there's no reason to think Google are successful because of how they manage their people. In all these cases the massive profitability is pretty much exogenous.
- patja 14y agoLinked Gamasutra article just copy/pastes selected content from the Econtalk podcast, adding no additional content or commentary. Nice reporting Frank Cifaldi! Original content: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...
- L0j1k 14y agoNo offense to him (or anyone at Valve), but this sounds like a load of bullshit. There is circular logic and self-contradictory information even within the span of a few sentences. To me, this article is the equivalent of asking a general in the United States Army whether or not a job in the United States Army is great.
- z3phyr 14y agoWhen I went to valve campus, I saw a man with a briefcase, and conservative black dressing. He looked like a boss to me, someone from the Government I think!
- qxf2 14y agoValve's management is an experiment. May be its just me, but this article and few others make it seems like a successful experiment. I look at Valve as a test of certain kind of corporate structure. The test is in progress. The results are still due.
- kayoone 14y agoGabe Newell pushed the vision of steam onto the gaming market with brute force. You couldnt play the highly acclaimed HalfLife2 without Steam. Many people hated it back in the day and were complaining aloud on internet forums. 10 years later it proves to be the right decision and shows that not always is listening to your customers need the best way to build a successfull business. The people back then didnt know they want it, just like Dropbox or the iPhone.
- just2n 14y agoI think what you're saying is a little misleading. The complaints weren't that we didn't want something like what Steam is now, it's that we didn't want something like what Steam was then. It was a small Valve-only HL/mod manager with a server finder and a friend list. It broke all the time, had major features that didn't work for years, and required you to be online because offline mode was one of those features. It was a broken pile of garbage that needed to be thrown away and completely re-built from the ground up. The Steam you use today is to that version of Steam as IE10 is to IE3, approximately. It was lacking major features -- working chat, overlay, store, non-steam game support, offline mode, authentication that didn't fail 70% of the time forcing you to restart Steam then try to play your game again, etc. It's useful and a value add these days, it was just a gigantic nightmare before. But I'm still very disappointed that the best (only? I don't count Origin) tool like Steam is Steam. By that I mean that we're locked into what Valve wants to do, which is sell us limited licenses that are tied to Valve maintaining their service, significant amounts of DRM, and other anti-consumer policies like no refunds. Some of these are deal breakers that leave significant room for a competitor to eat all of Valve's lunch, so I suspect if Valve doesn't buck up and play nice with its customers that eventually someone will.
- JoelMarsh 14y agoIt is tempting, with articles about company models, to go away with a "this is how to be successful" mentality, but I think that is wrong. The design of a company appeals to a certain kind of people, regardless of the model. Do you put a premium on autonomy? Work at Valve! Like structured environments? Try Microsoft. Prefer strong leadership? What about Apple? Or whatever. Success is not the take-away. Employee-model fit is.
- programminggeek 14y agoI work for a company that has a pretty great culture, even if it isn't quite as self-managed as Valve is, and what seems to be the common thing between the two is that both have a very strong sense of what their company culture is about, and both attempt to hire not just the best talent, but as much the best culture fits. To make something like this work, you can't just hire anybody. It won't work for many organizations simply because they have the wrong people with the wrong ideas of how to run a business or organization. It's also a lot of work to maintain such a system and the wrong hires can ruin it fast.
- jere 14y ago>In many occasions people simply don't fit in not because they're not productive or good people, but because they just can't function very well in a boss-less environment. Oh, so you recently realized 25 people didn't function very well in a boss-less environment?
- JabavuAdams 14y agoSuppose I'm working at Valve, and I decided that I want to work on building a robot arm for the rest of the week. Can I do that? What if I keep doing these kinds of projects? Will I eventually lose the popularity contest and be ousted? The amount of money to be made in personal robotics or space robotics probably dwarfs what Valve makes now, but research is risky. The combination of employee selection and social pressure means that it's probably not really true that you can work on whatever innovative ideas you want to. This is what irritates me about companies co-opting hobby time and free time. It's not really free time if it's a popularity contest. You don't have to justify your hobbies to anyone (family, maybe). I work at a company where I have tremendous freedom to organize my own work, and to work on research projects, but there are still areas that are clearly out of scope. I imagine Valve is no different.
- goldmab 14y agoDoes this bother you? I think they are just trying to eliminate management overhead by using peer evaluation to set the company's direction by consensus. This could maybe be chaotic, but I see it as a trade-off. A traditional structure is chaotic in its own way. Like, who gets promoted to upper management? The most deserving people, or lucky people? Arbitrary decisions from an executive may or may not be better than popularity contests. I guess it depends on the executives and the culture.
- JabavuAdams 14y agoNo, it doesn't bother me. Well, no more than the fact that I don't yet have FU money bothers me. I'm just a bit cynical of all the "you can work on whatever you want (that's good for the company -- that others around you agree is good for the company -- that's meant to capture innovation -- but that can't really capture long-term or unpopular innovation)." So yeah, the way I work at my current job, and the way that people supposedly work at Valve seems great. That said, what I really want is to not have to work, but to work anyway. Woe is me.
- crazygringo 14y agoI've only ever heard how the boss-less, collaborative environment over at Valve is good. But I simply can't trust anything until I start hearing about the negative aspects too, which nobody ever seems to report. I mean, not everything can be all roses over there. I'm tremendously interested in the way their workplace actually runs, but you can't really learn any lessons or apply it anywhere else without having a fuller picture of what really goes on, warts and all. I mean, no system is perfect, or even close to it.
- pcote 14y ago>In many occasions people simply don't fit in not because they're not productive or good people, but because they just can't function very well in a boss-less environment. In order to function well in a boss-less environment, it helps to have grown up being educated in one. If your education is authority directed, it's natural to expect your adult work be authority directed. It seems to me that Valve's culture is particularly well matched to people who came from democratic schools. You can probably train yourself to be that kind of self-motivated person as an adult but it isn't easy.
- delambo 14y agoI know this is slightly off-topic, but I've asked this before in comments and at the following submission, but I never get any replies: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182145 Is there any other companies like Valve and Github that are bossless?
- lawnchair_larry 14y agoSome Valve wages according to their Q2 2012 H1-B filings. Salary only, no indication of bonus/stock. Sr Software Engineer - 97,000 (2 listed at this rate) Principal Digital Media Engineer - 62,608 Multi-media artist - 77,000 And for fun, some Google employees: Research Engineer - 206,900 Software Engineer - 105,000 Software Engineer - 214,800 Site Reliability Engineer - 111,600 Site Reliability Engineer - 170,000 Program Manager - 152,000 Information Security Engineer - 150,000
- shawabawa3 14y agoWell from the article: > The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based ... Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage.