10 ms·

Valve New Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]

108 points by thecalebf 2y ago

pmzy 2y ago
old school, but good. :) I remember enjoying reading this tremendously when it was released.
- thecalebf 2y ago
  the graphics in it make it so much better
helloplanets 2y ago
I wonder if this is still the same handbook new hires get today. Would be interesting to see the current version, if there is one.
- adamrezich 2y ago
  Back in 2012, did this “employee handbook” actually “leak” to begin with? Or was the whole thing just a calculated corporate PR stunt? Everyone just takes it at face value, but I've always wondered.
  - Shekelphile 2y ago
    The prevailing opinion since then has definitely been that it was an intentional release.
    - adamrezich 2y ago
      That's what I thought, but every time this comes back up, it seems most people discovering it for the first time fail to pick up on this.
- thrwaway1985882 2y ago
  I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was. The section on stack ranking is really fascinating ... seeing how that sausage was made would let you know exactly who is in the secret cabals the handbook says don't exist ;-)
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was I recommend looking at companies hiring pages to get a pulse on their longer term direction and strategy (a major reason for bogus job posts btw). Based on Valve's [0], it's mostly sustaining work for Steam Marketplace, Steamworks, and R&D for VR. [0] - https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/ https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/
  - jsheard 2y ago
    > I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was. The fact that this handbook was deliberately released to the public (rather than posted on the Valve intranet the handbook refers to) does make it feel more like submarine recruitment/marketing material rather than something actually intended for onboarding new hires.
  - ARandumGuy 2y ago
    If you want some more insight into what working at Valve is actually like, People Make Games released a great video last year [1] where they talked to a bunch of current and former employees. While there are people who can thrive at Valve, their structure doesn't set people up for success. Valve has a many pseudo-managers, people who have a lot of influence at the company, but aren't designated as such. Doing well at Valve often requires trying to figure out what sort of things these people want, which they often don't make clear. Getting meaningful feedback is difficult, with employees often having little idea on what they need to do differently to improve things. It really seems like Valve is kind of a mess internally, and they probably wouldn't still be around if it wasn't for the enormous success of Steam. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gumby 2y ago
The reasulting reality of the managerless approach hasn’t been good. As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”. I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.” Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!
- jsheard 2y ago
  For anyone who seeks to emulate Valves internal structure you have to ask yourself one question - do you already have a core product with a near-unimpeachable monopoly which consistently brings in enough money to keep the entire company afloat, with enough left over to bankroll moonshot R&D projects on top? If not, you can't afford to operate like Valve. They cancel 10 projects for every one they ship, if not for Steam bringing in endless billions of dollars they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    So did they have a different structure before Steam existed? And then post-Steam, now there is total freedom to organize however they want? You're saying that this organization doesn't lead to success, but because they accidentally have a successful money maker, now they can run like this? I think there is disconnect here. There are successful companies that can operate like this, because this is a good way to get to success.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Early Valve coasted on the money Gabe Newell personally made as a senior Microsoft executive, so if you want to emulate that Valve then you'll need to find 8 or 9 figures in your bank account without taking any outside investments, in order to keep the company completely untainted by shareholder influence. That's not a template most founders can follow either. There's a timeline where startup Valve went through the standard publisher funding model instead and got pressured into releasing the "finished but not very fun" 1997 cut of Half Life, rather than taking an entire extra year (an eternity in game development cycles of that era) to overhaul the whole game at their leisure. Things could have gone very differently right from the start.
aaarrm 2y ago
This thing has always been a treat to look through; it's made with so much effort and care. I haven't read through it in a bit though and don't plan to read through it again currently so I may be off in some of the rest of my comment. I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else. Unless they still desire to all-in on the strategy of creating products and hoping to land a another billion dollar baby, then sure, this strategy is good for that. However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game. And the bonus structure that I recall also seems dated. iirc it was setup in a way such that delivering new projects would land you a bonus. But this incentivizes creating things, but there is no incentive to continue supporting or updating or iterating on it. In my opinion the bonus structure should be done in such a way so that if you deliver something new, you would land a bonus, and then you'd get larger bonuses at the 1 year mark, 2 year mark, etc, if that thing has been updated and improved. Many things these days are not just a single product that you release and that's that. They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart. I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused. Obviously I don't know how it actually is in there these days, but things like this manual and other hearsay / rumors are the best I have to go off of.
- slumberlust 2y ago
  It depends how you frame success. Game development seems to have slowed in the post-Steam boom world, but it's still there! DotA2, Artifact, Alyx, and currently Deadlock are all examples of relatively recent gaming products. From a purely financial perspective, they SHOULD continue to focus on marketplace dominance via STEAM. Whatever game is made for HL3/TF3 will ultimately fail to meet fan expectations (Duke Nukem anyone?).
  - 2y ago
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
More companies should have that kind of focus.
esaym 2y ago
> step 4. Talk to someone in the bathroom lol wut
- prepend 2y ago
  Surprisingly, this has been a good way to catch up and say hi. It in a “can you spare a square” but in saying hi and starting a conversation in the hall on the way back.
larsiusprime 2y ago
The thing everyone misses about Valve in all the endless back and forth whenever this handbook is listed is that it is, at its core, a lifestyle company. It is optimizing for a certain lifestyle. It has pros and cons and tradeoffs and ways reality is different from imagined utopia, but in general it succeeds very well at this goal. It does not succeed at a number of other goals that people attribute to valve (or imagine that valve should have), but that always strikes me as beside the point. This is all without passing any judgment on whether valve is good or bad - it just seems like the best model the fits the available facts.
- k__ 2y ago
  This. It's nice that companies try different approaches. This way we have a choice and it's not just all the same at a certain company size.
- gaws 2y ago
  > It is optimizing for a certain lifestyle. What kind of lifestyle?
rhelz 2y ago
Reading this is kind of like reading Peracles's Funeral Oration. You wonder if there was ever a place like that. You wonder if there ever could be another place like that. You salute as heros those who had the audacity to even try to make a place like that. After reading it, you are not quite the same person as you were before.
gibibit 2y ago
It would be interesting to compare the Valve organizational approach to that of W.L. Gore, which has a unique and successful approach described in Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" as it discusses the Rule of 150. At Gore, it is a flat structure, but with self-organizing teams that take initiative and responsibility ("commitments") as appropriate for current goals. https://www.gore.com/careers/working-at-gore https://www.gore.com/careers/working-at-gore
gigatexal 2y ago
Does it also say there will ever ever be an end to Gordan Freeman’s story, never a HL3 ever so stop asking? Seriously one of the most tragic things of my very privileged life was getting so into the game and the story and then waiting patiently for HL3 after the cliff hanger ending of HL2 EP 2. Now I have trust issues.
- AISnakeOil 2y ago
  Page 20 has an employee with a HL3 shirt. It really is one of the most tragic tales in gaming history. Half-Life Alyx only being available on VR was the final nail in the coffin. I will never play it.
  - andrewmcwatters 2y ago
    Controversial take, but it’s not that good anyway. I remember someone at Valve, maybe Gabe Newell himself saying something along the lines of, “We are still capable of making a Half-Life game.” I’m butchering the quote. Anyway, it’s just not true. If you compare the length and meaningfulness of Half-Life 2, and the following episodes, Half-Life: Alyx feels more like it belongs in the same category as Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. It’s too short of a game, too few weapons, very little meaningful build up despite your trek in the game. It’s just a disappointment.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Valve is transitioning into a mini-Apple, ie a consumer hardware company with a cash cow marketplace. HL: Alyx was more of a tech demo for Valve's work in VR R&D. I'd be curious what Valve ends up releasing in the next 5 years, given how heavily they've been hiring in the CV, Hardware, and Spatial Computing space for the past few years now. Once Valve "solves" VR Gaming, I wouldn't be surprised that a HL3 would be released shortly.
      - gigatexal 2y ago
        if HL3 was a VR exclusive I'd buy a headset to play it ... I just want the loop closed, and the story finished or continued.
danjl 2y ago
The real answer is to stay small and avoid growth. Politics and management frustrations get worse with more people. Stay small and avoid all the idiocy. Growth is not mandatory. Especially with technology, you can scale profit without more employees. Profit sharing is better than equity.
dwallin 2y ago
Humans have a natural tendency towards social hierarchies. If you don't provide structure people will instinctively create it; so attempting to entirely remove structure from an organization is idealistic and inevitably fails. This usually leads to hidden power structures and counter-productive popularity dynamics. A great classic read about this topic is essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The simplest way to encode a structure is with a basic hierarchal structure where power gets delegated and directions flow down from a single individual at the top, and information gets filtered and flows up to enable decision making. This is one of the most simplest and common structures you see across society. It is a structure great at quick, efficient decision making, but has numerous flaws that make it suboptimal in many cases. Notably, the single-directional flows means it's particularly bad at self-regulating, and therefore it's susceptible to corruption without a significant outside influence. However you can leverage systems and technology to engineer and enable novel and durable alternative structures and power dynamics. On a societal level, democracy is a hugely successful example of a system like this. Elections create a loop from the bottom to enable accountability for the person at the top, helping solve a number of failure states. You also have techniques like creating multiple structures that operate in tension, structures that operate entirely via democratic consensus, etc. Each structure has different strengths and weaknesses, and combining them well can be used to create high-functioning governments. At the level of corporations however, you see minimal exploration of optimal structure. The modern corporation has seen some innovation, but this happened almost entirely at the ownership level, with boards and shareholder elections etc. The actual executive functionality of most companies is almost entirely your standard hierarchy. It beggars belief to think that this would be the optimal operational structure across all industries. The reality is it's the structure that maximizes shareholder control (and therefore shareholder value). Other structures might enable an organization to better serve the market, employees, etc ; but these are not the concerns of the people setting up and funding said corporations.

108 points by thecalebf 2y ago

pmzy 2y ago

old school, but good. :) I remember enjoying reading this tremendously when it was released.

thecalebf 2y ago
the graphics in it make it so much better

helloplanets 2y ago

I wonder if this is still the same handbook new hires get today. Would be interesting to see the current version, if there is one.

adamrezich 2y ago
Back in 2012, did this “employee handbook” actually “leak” to begin with? Or was the whole thing just a calculated corporate PR stunt? Everyone just takes it at face value, but I've always wondered.
- Shekelphile 2y ago
  The prevailing opinion since then has definitely been that it was an intentional release.
  - adamrezich 2y ago
    That's what I thought, but every time this comes back up, it seems most people discovering it for the first time fail to pick up on this.
thrwaway1985882 2y ago
I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was. The section on stack ranking is really fascinating ... seeing how that sausage was made would let you know exactly who is in the secret cabals the handbook says don't exist ;-)
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was I recommend looking at companies hiring pages to get a pulse on their longer term direction and strategy (a major reason for bogus job posts btw). Based on Valve's [0], it's mostly sustaining work for Steam Marketplace, Steamworks, and R&D for VR. [0] - https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/ https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/
- jsheard 2y ago
  > I wonder if Valve is still the same as described in this handbook, or if it ever truly was. The fact that this handbook was deliberately released to the public (rather than posted on the Valve intranet the handbook refers to) does make it feel more like submarine recruitment/marketing material rather than something actually intended for onboarding new hires.
- ARandumGuy 2y ago
  If you want some more insight into what working at Valve is actually like, People Make Games released a great video last year [1] where they talked to a bunch of current and former employees. While there are people who can thrive at Valve, their structure doesn't set people up for success. Valve has a many pseudo-managers, people who have a lot of influence at the company, but aren't designated as such. Doing well at Valve often requires trying to figure out what sort of things these people want, which they often don't make clear. Getting meaningful feedback is difficult, with employees often having little idea on what they need to do differently to improve things. It really seems like Valve is kind of a mess internally, and they probably wouldn't still be around if it wasn't for the enormous success of Steam. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

gumby 2y ago

The reasulting reality of the managerless approach hasn’t been good. As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”. I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.” Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!

jsheard 2y ago
For anyone who seeks to emulate Valves internal structure you have to ask yourself one question - do you already have a core product with a near-unimpeachable monopoly which consistently brings in enough money to keep the entire company afloat, with enough left over to bankroll moonshot R&D projects on top? If not, you can't afford to operate like Valve. They cancel 10 projects for every one they ship, if not for Steam bringing in endless billions of dollars they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  So did they have a different structure before Steam existed? And then post-Steam, now there is total freedom to organize however they want? You're saying that this organization doesn't lead to success, but because they accidentally have a successful money maker, now they can run like this? I think there is disconnect here. There are successful companies that can operate like this, because this is a good way to get to success.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Early Valve coasted on the money Gabe Newell personally made as a senior Microsoft executive, so if you want to emulate that Valve then you'll need to find 8 or 9 figures in your bank account without taking any outside investments, in order to keep the company completely untainted by shareholder influence. That's not a template most founders can follow either. There's a timeline where startup Valve went through the standard publisher funding model instead and got pressured into releasing the "finished but not very fun" 1997 cut of Half Life, rather than taking an entire extra year (an eternity in game development cycles of that era) to overhaul the whole game at their leisure. Things could have gone very differently right from the start.

aaarrm 2y ago

This thing has always been a treat to look through; it's made with so much effort and care. I haven't read through it in a bit though and don't plan to read through it again currently so I may be off in some of the rest of my comment. I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else. Unless they still desire to all-in on the strategy of creating products and hoping to land a another billion dollar baby, then sure, this strategy is good for that. However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game. And the bonus structure that I recall also seems dated. iirc it was setup in a way such that delivering new projects would land you a bonus. But this incentivizes creating things, but there is no incentive to continue supporting or updating or iterating on it. In my opinion the bonus structure should be done in such a way so that if you deliver something new, you would land a bonus, and then you'd get larger bonuses at the 1 year mark, 2 year mark, etc, if that thing has been updated and improved. Many things these days are not just a single product that you release and that's that. They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart. I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused. Obviously I don't know how it actually is in there these days, but things like this manual and other hearsay / rumors are the best I have to go off of.

slumberlust 2y ago
It depends how you frame success. Game development seems to have slowed in the post-Steam boom world, but it's still there! DotA2, Artifact, Alyx, and currently Deadlock are all examples of relatively recent gaming products. From a purely financial perspective, they SHOULD continue to focus on marketplace dominance via STEAM. Whatever game is made for HL3/TF3 will ultimately fail to meet fan expectations (Duke Nukem anyone?).
- 2y ago

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

More companies should have that kind of focus.

esaym 2y ago

> step 4. Talk to someone in the bathroom lol wut

prepend 2y ago
Surprisingly, this has been a good way to catch up and say hi. It in a “can you spare a square” but in saying hi and starting a conversation in the hall on the way back.

larsiusprime 2y ago

The thing everyone misses about Valve in all the endless back and forth whenever this handbook is listed is that it is, at its core, a lifestyle company. It is optimizing for a certain lifestyle. It has pros and cons and tradeoffs and ways reality is different from imagined utopia, but in general it succeeds very well at this goal. It does not succeed at a number of other goals that people attribute to valve (or imagine that valve should have), but that always strikes me as beside the point. This is all without passing any judgment on whether valve is good or bad - it just seems like the best model the fits the available facts.

k__ 2y ago
This. It's nice that companies try different approaches. This way we have a choice and it's not just all the same at a certain company size.
gaws 2y ago
> It is optimizing for a certain lifestyle. What kind of lifestyle?

rhelz 2y ago

Reading this is kind of like reading Peracles's Funeral Oration. You wonder if there was ever a place like that. You wonder if there ever could be another place like that. You salute as heros those who had the audacity to even try to make a place like that. After reading it, you are not quite the same person as you were before.

gibibit 2y ago

It would be interesting to compare the Valve organizational approach to that of W.L. Gore, which has a unique and successful approach described in Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" as it discusses the Rule of 150. At Gore, it is a flat structure, but with self-organizing teams that take initiative and responsibility ("commitments") as appropriate for current goals. https://www.gore.com/careers/working-at-gore https://www.gore.com/careers/working-at-gore

gigatexal 2y ago

Does it also say there will ever ever be an end to Gordan Freeman’s story, never a HL3 ever so stop asking? Seriously one of the most tragic things of my very privileged life was getting so into the game and the story and then waiting patiently for HL3 after the cliff hanger ending of HL2 EP 2. Now I have trust issues.

AISnakeOil 2y ago
Page 20 has an employee with a HL3 shirt. It really is one of the most tragic tales in gaming history. Half-Life Alyx only being available on VR was the final nail in the coffin. I will never play it.
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  Controversial take, but it’s not that good anyway. I remember someone at Valve, maybe Gabe Newell himself saying something along the lines of, “We are still capable of making a Half-Life game.” I’m butchering the quote. Anyway, it’s just not true. If you compare the length and meaningfulness of Half-Life 2, and the following episodes, Half-Life: Alyx feels more like it belongs in the same category as Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. It’s too short of a game, too few weapons, very little meaningful build up despite your trek in the game. It’s just a disappointment.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Valve is transitioning into a mini-Apple, ie a consumer hardware company with a cash cow marketplace. HL: Alyx was more of a tech demo for Valve's work in VR R&D. I'd be curious what Valve ends up releasing in the next 5 years, given how heavily they've been hiring in the CV, Hardware, and Spatial Computing space for the past few years now. Once Valve "solves" VR Gaming, I wouldn't be surprised that a HL3 would be released shortly.
    - gigatexal 2y ago
      if HL3 was a VR exclusive I'd buy a headset to play it ... I just want the loop closed, and the story finished or continued.

danjl 2y ago

The real answer is to stay small and avoid growth. Politics and management frustrations get worse with more people. Stay small and avoid all the idiocy. Growth is not mandatory. Especially with technology, you can scale profit without more employees. Profit sharing is better than equity.

dwallin 2y ago

Humans have a natural tendency towards social hierarchies. If you don't provide structure people will instinctively create it; so attempting to entirely remove structure from an organization is idealistic and inevitably fails. This usually leads to hidden power structures and counter-productive popularity dynamics. A great classic read about this topic is essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The simplest way to encode a structure is with a basic hierarchal structure where power gets delegated and directions flow down from a single individual at the top, and information gets filtered and flows up to enable decision making. This is one of the most simplest and common structures you see across society. It is a structure great at quick, efficient decision making, but has numerous flaws that make it suboptimal in many cases. Notably, the single-directional flows means it's particularly bad at self-regulating, and therefore it's susceptible to corruption without a significant outside influence. However you can leverage systems and technology to engineer and enable novel and durable alternative structures and power dynamics. On a societal level, democracy is a hugely successful example of a system like this. Elections create a loop from the bottom to enable accountability for the person at the top, helping solve a number of failure states. You also have techniques like creating multiple structures that operate in tension, structures that operate entirely via democratic consensus, etc. Each structure has different strengths and weaknesses, and combining them well can be used to create high-functioning governments. At the level of corporations however, you see minimal exploration of optimal structure. The modern corporation has seen some innovation, but this happened almost entirely at the ownership level, with boards and shareholder elections etc. The actual executive functionality of most companies is almost entirely your standard hierarchy. It beggars belief to think that this would be the optimal operational structure across all industries. The reality is it's the structure that maximizes shareholder control (and therefore shareholder value). Other structures might enable an organization to better serve the market, employees, etc ; but these are not the concerns of the people setting up and funding said corporations.