Valve Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]

https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf

by Something1234 • 4 years ago

248 163 4 years ago

cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com

smoldesu• 4 years ago

The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have "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• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

i 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• 4 years ago

Sounds 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 (when I saw it before, they had 802.11x auth info integrated so it could pull Active Directory/LDAP info, too)

JacobThreeThree• 4 years ago

The common criticism of the ultra-flat organization models is that it breeds unwritten rules enforced by cliques.

tikhonj• 4 years ago

I'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• 4 years ago

A useful counter-balance perspective is provided by [0] Tyranny of Structurelessness.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

klodolph5• 4 years ago

I 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.

nonbirithm• 4 years ago

This anecdotal review from a former Valve employee seems to indicate as much.

https://youtu.be/41XgkLKYuic

Yet it's interesting that despite Valve having what is essentially a monopoly on PC storefronts and the implicit corporate hierarchy with alleged double-crossing, there is little complaint about Steam as a service from most users.

dilyevsky• 4 years ago

Which is true for all hierarchical orgs I’ve ever seen as well

marcus_holmes• 4 years ago

this. All human organisations have unwritten rules enforced by cliques.

In hierarchical organisations you have to deal with the whims of the sociopath above you as well.

kamaal• 4 years ago

There is always a hierarchy regardless of whether the HR database reflects it or not. The HR database only grants a hierarchy legitimacy, nothing more, nothing less. Regardless even in places where there is a hierarchy you will see getting promoted means nothing unless you have influence with the powers that be.

In many ways these power structures are a feature of any large people operation. You just need to get used to them.

Things will be chaotic, but modern software development does some good ideas to the table to maintain order. Things like Agile, OKRs etc might not be perfect but they do help.

meltyness• 4 years ago

This isn't a criticism if you state "it ad-hoc leaders are empowered to steer quality and take on adaptive situational roles."

And in contrast to, "centrally consolidated power attempts to shift and contort people and cliques to meet external, largely disinterested expectations and save face" -- the appeal is pretty obvious.

robertwt7• 4 years ago

huh, 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• 4 years ago

I 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.

chrononaut2• 4 years ago

If it was supposed to be confidential, it's been discussed on here ever since it was written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463

pyuser583• 4 years ago

It was leaked as a PR stunt about 10 years ago.

easton2• 4 years ago

This 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.

Jagerbizzle3• 4 years ago

If 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• 4 years ago

The Steam Deck is quite excellent. And it just shipped.

Though I would love to see a game come out of there again sometime. :)

paxys5• 4 years ago

Valve's only real product is the digital store. The 30% Steam tax is what drives the company. Everything else is a hobby.

Entinel• 4 years ago

Half-Life Alyx in 2020 and the Steam Deck this year?

teawrecks• 4 years ago

They're more than just a game studio these days, they're a major driving force of the entire industry. Linux gaming is totally viable today, something valve did almost singlehandedly over the last 7ish years (with big help from google, intel, and a few others). I'd say that's a pretty impressive feat.

Then you have their VR and steam deck hardware that is setting the bar for new gaming platforms. The fact that they also found time to ship a game is just icing on top IMO.

dag11• 4 years ago

That's not correct, nothing about our org structure changed before, during, or after Alyx. We're still totally flat, desks on wheels.

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

If it's totally flat then do folks write their own paychecks?

My guess is no and there is still a hierarchy, however obscure.

easton2• 4 years ago

Have you read the final hours of Half-Life Alyx? Because that’s where I got that impression from, and since it’s wrong, do you know what the heck it was talking about with the organizational changes to get Alyx released? Did I completely misunderstand that part of the book?

jedberg5• 4 years ago

Hey there, as someone who works at Valve, maybe you can answer this for me (I've asked many times but never gotten an answer).

Who sets the salaries? With a flat structure and no "managers", who picks your salary for next year? Who picks how much a new person gets an offer for? How are raises and equity comp determined?

That all seems to be missing from (at least this version of) the handbook. The word salary appears once and compensation eight times, but it just says "we try to be the best" but never discusses the mechanics of it.

Thanks!

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

Seeing as Valve is a private company, is the compensation you receive at Valve all-cash or do you get stock or stock equivalent?

kabdib• 4 years ago

This is completely untrue.

Aardwolf• 4 years ago

And despite that there still is no Half Life 3 :(

KerrAvon• 4 years ago

I wonder where Valve stands on WFH.

nagonago• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I 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.

deelowe2• 4 years ago

All of their positions are still posted in Washington.

goostavos• 4 years ago

Based on this interview, the preference leans heavily towards in office for collaboration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kO6Dj2XNfY

michaelje• 4 years ago

This needs a solid [2012] in front of it

chrononaut2• 4 years ago

Previous discussions over the years since its original release in 2012:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 (April 21, 2012, 168 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 (Dec 31, 2014, 17 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 (March 23, 2015, 14 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 (July 25, 2016, 198 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 (Sept 7, 2018, 31 comments)

nazka• 4 years ago

We 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

Ygg2• 4 years ago

Any flat organization contains a undocumented, unaccountable hierarchy.

me_me_me2• 4 years ago

also 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.

paxys5• 4 years ago

Something 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/...)?

TillE• 4 years ago

It's absolutely not 30% for big publishers.

impalallama• 4 years ago

It 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

anonym29• 4 years ago

Curious as to what the average total spend per active user is. I suspect it's considerably lower than that of active console users.

cgrealy2• 4 years ago

Hard to say.

There are all kinds of factors at play here, none of which I have any concrete data on.

First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users. However, a percentage (not a majority, but certainly significant) of those would be kids whose parents buy them one or two games a year.

OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC). Plus, steam sales come up all the time and lots of PC gamers have massive libraries of games they bought cheap and never played.

All of these (sometimes conflicting) factors make it hard to tell who spends more.

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

I assume that spend per user is higher than console users, since most steam users spent about $1000 on their computer compared to $300-500 on a console. However, the population of PC gamers is probably a lot smaller than console gamers given the money and knowledge barriers to entry.

foolfoolz4• 4 years ago

the biggest reason for this is the big games that people spend money on today are free. the 30% platform fee doesn’t matter to fortnite, apex legends, overwatch, dota2/cs would be here if valve didn’t own it. the big cash making games have gone around the market place by being the marketplace themselve: gta online. and that trend will continue.

i bet without cs and dota steams revenue per user has been in decline over the past 5 years as money moves from paid libraries to paid addons in free games

_manifold• 4 years ago

I'm not sure where Bloomberg is getting that number and I would debate even its ballpark accuracy - especially when Valve is a privately held company and notoriously tight-lipped about things like gross revenue and profits.

Khalos2• 4 years ago

That link shows Gabe Newell's estimated net worth, but does he have have 100% ownership of Valve? The Valve Wikipedia page shows his ownership as ">50%" [0], but isn't more specific.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

paxys5• 4 years ago

Valve was valued at $7.7 billion in May 2022 based on Bloomberg calculations and discussions with Michael Pachter, a Los Angeles-based analyst at Wedbush Securities. This value has been adjusted for the performance of the Russell 1000 Electronic Entertainment Index since then.

From the link I posted above.

KaoruAoiShiho3• 4 years ago

Because 1 game like fortnite makes more money than all of steam.

junon5• 4 years ago

There's absolutely no way this is true.

foolfoolz4• 4 years ago

and while steam was the only app store for pc that mattered for 15 years there’s more players in that space. valves only future in game distribution is to lose market share to epic store, microsoft store, battlenet, origin, gog, etc

brainfish• 4 years ago

taking a 30% cut of all sales

So four games like Fortnite make more. There are a lot of games on Steam.

imron• 4 years ago

Why then is its estimated valuation as little as $7.7B

Because investors/VC can't buy in on it, so no trying to inflate the valuation.

rib3ye• 4 years ago

Valuations are set by whatever the last found of funding was. But when was the last time Value took money?

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

Because valve dgaf about VCs. VCs inflate prices because the whole game is a house of cards.

cma• 4 years ago

They no longer take 30% of the bigger games like GTA V, but announced a more modest 20% after a certain amount of revenue.

ZephyrBlu• 4 years ago

My wild guess is that because most of their revenue isn't recurring it's valued lower.

Given the size of the PC gaming market and the ubiquity of Steam you would think they have >>$1B in revenue though, which makes $7.7B a pretty conservative multiple.

This source says PC gaming is ~$30B, so $1-5B in revenue seems reasonable for Steam: https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/05/23/244...

adra• 4 years ago

I'd aim a little closer to that 1b than 5. Most of the "whale" cash cow games have their own launchers and don't split the revenues. Wow, cod, most MMOs, lol, fortnite, etc all huge franchises with zero steam. Since steam takes 30% or less depending on on agreements, they make good money, but not insane.

RockingGoodNite• 4 years ago

With 8 billion people on the planet and many people with Internet access these days I'm surprised there aren't like a billion people on Steam.

foolfoolz4• 4 years ago

most of the biggest games in the world aren’t on steam

p1necone• 4 years ago

Is this just because estimated valuations of private companies are much more grounded in reality than speculation on public tech stocks has been?

woodruffw• 4 years ago

We ought to turn this on its head: why are companies that have never turned a GAAP profit and have no clear route to profitability other than a vague plan at monopolization valued by VCs at (tens of) billions of dollars?

I'm not much of a video game player, but Valve seems to have millions of loyal, paying customers. Given that and their history of direct financial success (i.e., not just popularity with developers), $7.7B really doesn't seem so bad.

Applejinx3• 4 years ago

Because the vague plan at monopolization IS the value.

That's pretty much the point. It doesn't matter whether it's a GOOD plan. In a sense it matters much more that it's an evil plan, because that would hurt everybody else more and lead to more capital accumulation and return on investment.

Sometimes these things aren't that complicated. Whether the company's beneficial in other ways is a much more difficult question. Valuation isn't: valuation is more or less a gamble on how much the company can crush everybody else.

IncRnd• 4 years ago

It takes money to run a business and pay 300-400 people every week. There is no obvious reason to value it at 300x earnings.

robswc• 4 years ago

I feel like that number should be much, much higher.

Activision was just bought for nearly 10x as much, IIRC.

tblflpr2• 4 years ago

Note to self: Repost valve handbook to harvest hacker karma.

Timer set for y-minus 2yrs.

mechanical_bear• 4 years ago

Timer set for y-minus 1.9yrs…

mkaic• 4 years ago

Powering up my Slow-Down-Other-People's-Timers-Inator...

tblflpr2• 4 years ago

Nooo the typos!

Bakary• 4 years ago

So 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• 4 years ago

I 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?

deelowe2• 4 years ago

I've heard there's a hierarchy, it's just not documented.

wly_cdgr• 4 years ago

Seems like bullshit or else hell if not

mproud• 4 years ago

Rumor has it this was a targeted leak back in the day. As a PR move.

b20000• 4 years ago

So, 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• 4 years ago

Does 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?

roflyear2• 4 years ago

My 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.

huimang• 4 years ago

That is strictly still a hierarchy.

roflyear2• 4 years ago

Yeah but the effect is that there really isn't one.

milchek• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Problem with glassdoor it makes it incredibly painful to browse without registering and giving up your own data!

erulabs• 4 years ago

Sigh. 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.

teajunky• 4 years ago

I would like to see handbooks of other companies. Does anyone know of any other handbooks?

leethargo• 4 years ago

Two well-known examples are Basecamp [1] and GitLab [2]

[1] https://basecamp.com/handbook

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

olvy0• 4 years ago

There'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

gtsnexp• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

I miss counter-strike

Valve Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]

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