Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

valvesoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#31

Post by oblio »

gens wrote: post #30
oblio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any group of more than 2 people is always "political" :) There's a reason all Olympic sports where you can interact with your opponents only have 2 teams/opponents facing off at the same time.

I'm good with olimpic gold medalists in rowing and i think there isn't much politics there. Especially between teams. It wouldn't even make sense to involve politics in sports (yes i know football, basketball and such..) as the competition is to find out who is the best and not who is the best connected.

How are you interacting with opponents in rowing? Can you hit them over the head with an oar?

By politics I mean that you can cooperate with a part of your opponents to side line some of the other opponents.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#32

Post by robbiemitchell »

Karunamon wrote: post #28
tikhonj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's not like traditional companies—from Google to Comcast—consistently provide great customer support either. So you can't really make strong conclusions about why Valve is having issues there without additional insight; there are too many confounding variables to pin it just on its management structure. This is a common story with people trying something new. If you do the old-fashioned thing—buy IBM, so to…

That's a fair point, but I'm struggling to think of a way in which it isn't at least partially to blame. The handbook (and Valve insiders) say it's pretty much a do-your-own-thing company. Who'd want to deal with angry users all day?

If they increase the weekly/monthly pay for people who choose to deal with angry customers, it should reach equilibrium eventually.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#33

Post by ck425 »

dpweb wrote: post #21
sebastianbk wrote: post #11

As a Microsoft employee I am so happy that we got rid of stack ranking a few years ago. It encourages a bad behavior and goes against helping your coworkers with whom you are essentially competing for compensation. I am surprised to see that a company like Valve, which seems to be held in high regard by many developers in the industry, still operates with this compensation system. It's system of the 80's if you ask m…

Wouldn't it make sense to just pay everyone (in the same type of role) essentially the same amount and then bonus people from time to time on particular outstanding achievements. Nothing is a more powerful inducement than financial incentives and a bonus gives an impact that the ongoing salary doesn't. People don't give a crap about annual reviews unless they think its low enough to get them fired. My sense is perfor…

'Nothing is a more powerful inducement than financial incentives'

Actually there's a lot of research that contradicts this. Essentially as long as people have enough money that they don't worry about money ie a comfortable middle class lifestyle for country/area, and they don't think they earn significantly less that their peers, money is very inefficient and occasionally negative incentive for tasks that require a decent level cognitive ability.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#34

Post by hodwik »

Karunamon wrote: post #28
tikhonj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's not like traditional companies—from Google to Comcast—consistently provide great customer support either. So you can't really make strong conclusions about why Valve is having issues there without additional insight; there are too many confounding variables to pin it just on its management structure. This is a common story with people trying something new. If you do the old-fashioned thing—buy IBM, so to…

That's a fair point, but I'm struggling to think of a way in which it isn't at least partially to blame. The handbook (and Valve insiders) say it's pretty much a do-your-own-thing company. Who'd want to deal with angry users all day?

I work for a software company very much like Valve in structure, who has been operating this way since the 70s.

Support still gets done, because when you hire you specifically hire people who love doing support. Those people exist, and they get tremendously emotionally involved in the quality of their work, just like anyone else.

In every department there are people who struggle with the flat hierarchy and free range to work on what you like, who have a strong emotional need to know who is in charge, and to be told what needs doing. Those people struggle, but they are by no means relegated to any one department -- plenty of them are engineers.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#35

Post by JumpCrisscross »

oblio wrote: post #20
Thaxll wrote: post #16

From what I heard from ex employee working at Valve it's not what you think it is. i.e: it's very political.

Any group of more than 2 people is always "political" :) There's a reason all Olympic sports where you can interact with your opponents only have 2 teams/opponents facing off at the same time.

> Any group of more than 2 people is always "political"

Agree with your statement on its own. In this context, "political" likely means loyalty is valued over competence.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#36

Post by ck425 »

Thaxll wrote: post #16

From what I heard from ex employee working at Valve it's not what you think it is. i.e: it's very political.

I'm not surprised by that. In every company power/influence come from a mixture of politics and formal hierarchy, so it makes sense that if you remove the latter the former would take over. That said, with the right culture office politics might be a more effective meritocracy than a formal hierarchy.

I wonder if they have any internal initiatives to remove cognitive biases that causes many of the negative parts of office politics.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#37

Post by MIKarlsen »

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or earning a second degree in something. But playing board games, working out/running or even just watching mindnumbing TV. I feel like the "100 % dedicated 100 % of the time"-thing has become the only way to really make it in tech-life.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#38

Post by gens »

oblio wrote: post #31
gens wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm good with olimpic gold medalists in rowing and i think there isn't much politics there. Especially between teams. It wouldn't even make sense to involve politics in sports (yes i know football, basketball and such..) as the competition is to find out who is the best and not who is the best connected.

How are you interacting with opponents in rowing? Can you hit them over the head with an oar? By politics I mean that you can cooperate with a part of your opponents to side line some of the other opponents.

>How are you interacting with opponents in rowing? Can you hit them over the head with an oar?

Words can hurt more then an oar. :) Either way you'd have to hit them really hard for them to care (they train insanely hard).

>By politics I mean that you can cooperate with a part of your opponents to side line some of the other opponents.

I feel i can safely say that that doesn't happen in rowing. At least for the team i know i am sure that they wouldn't "take a dive" (or even think about it; same for their trainer).

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#39

Post by eddieroger »

MIKarlsen wrote: post #37

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or…

I am American, but I don't interpret that section to mean that I am working 100% of the time. Actually, I think it means the opposite - as long as core hours are met, I have flexibility to work when the inspiration hits me. I know in my current role, sometimes I get a good idea at 8pm, and I am glad I could sit for an hour or two and knock that out rather than have to save it for 9am the next day. Likewise, if it's 3:30~4:00pm and I'm clearly hitting a rut, I can stop and pick back up a little earlier the next day. Me being the best person I can become means that I have the flexibility to do those other activities as I see fit, because I am not 100% work.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#40

Post by DasIch »

MIKarlsen wrote: post #37

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or…

If you genuinely want to be "100% dedicated 100% of the time" for any significant amount of time, you'll have to go home and relax when you're not working.

Anything else would just be setting yourself up for burnout and surely that's not the path to be on when your goal is to be "100% dedicated 100% of the time".

The problem is that people want to appear to be dedicated but don't actually care about being dedicated. Combine this with lack of education and you have people trying to appear dedicated while being dedicated only to the destruction of their mental health.

Post reply on HN