Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by Johan-bjareholt » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #74

AimHere wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's much more that Valve is an insanely lightweight company for it's customer base. It has something like 330 employees servicing 100 million customers on the go-to PC gaming platform, and a lot of those employees are working on shiny tech and new games. As a comparison, Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put o…

> shiny tech and new games You mean Half Life with it's last full iteration from 10 years ago, and the second episode with a cliffhanger from 2009? Or the Source engine (HL2) which evolved from GoldSource (HL1) which was based on Quake 1 engine (with some parts from Quake 2 engine) - even the Call of Duty engine which aged well too is based on the more modern Quake 3 engine, and I wouldn't consider it shiny in 2016.…

Source 2 is in DOTA 2, but that game doesn't show its full potential. Let's just wait for their next game until we say that they are "years behind".

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

#82

Post by kbenson » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

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'm not sure exactly the wording that conveyed that to you, but there's generally a lot of leeway in what "the best you" means. Generally, that means the happiest you, and people take different paths to what they think will give them that happiness. For some, that's a very ambitious work schedule, or work related hobbies. For others it may be plenty of time for family or fun. It can be any combination of this, but in the US, "success" is very malleable (or or less so depending on your social circle and geography, but still on the malleable side). When someone drops out of a high stress job to do something like open a small business or change their lifestyle, I don't think the consensus is that people think they failed, but that they are happy that the person found something they presumably enjoy. I know that's how I feel when I hear about it.

But that's the important thing to consider on the other side, some people enjoy their jobs, or the fields they work in even if their job is currently annoying, and they may choose to spend their own time in ways related to their day job. This doesn't have to ambition or someone driving themselves to improve (but it can be). It can just as easily be someone that got a job doing something they love, so they do similar things in their free time.

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

#83

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

chucksmash wrote: post #60

whatever_dude wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right - it's very much an American thing. Maybe not exclusive to the US, and it may vary by state or background, but still very common there from my experience with family and friends. In American culture, unless you're financially constrained, you grow up with someone hammering down the idea that you have to be doing something productive and getting better 100% of the time. If you're a kid, you have to be inv…

I think you're overgeneralizing a bit when you say it's an American thing. Maybe you and your peer group were out in the hard-charging long tail of the distribution and you assume life looked the same everywhere else? As someone who dropped down from honors courses sophomore year of high school to "college prep" and earned a thoroughly mediocre GPA in an easy major at a state school, I'll just say that there are alll…

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by AimHere » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #74

AimHere wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's much more that Valve is an insanely lightweight company for it's customer base. It has something like 330 employees servicing 100 million customers on the go-to PC gaming platform, and a lot of those employees are working on shiny tech and new games. As a comparison, Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put o…

> shiny tech and new games You mean Half Life with it's last full iteration from 10 years ago, and the second episode with a cliffhanger from 2009? Or the Source engine (HL2) which evolved from GoldSource (HL1) which was based on Quake 1 engine (with some parts from Quake 2 engine) - even the Call of Duty engine which aged well too is based on the more modern Quake 3 engine, and I wouldn't consider it shiny in 2016.…

It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems).

Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by any metric you care to choose). At least three of those games involve regular ongoing content infusions. Add in the development of the Source 2 engine, and the Steam Controller, and the work on the SteamOS platform and whatever else on Steam Machines.

This is out of the 330 employees that also support those >100 million customers using the service on a regular, possibly daily, basis. As I pointed out, Rockstar uses more manpower than Valve just to create essentially one game every few years. The last GTA game I bought (San Andreas) did have graphics well behind the state of the art too.

Even if we assume that those 330 employees are doing nothing but working on Steam, it's still a tiny number compared to the customer base. AirBnB, for instance, has had 2 million listings in it's lifetime, and it has about 2300 employees. Uber has over 6000 employees on about 8 million customers, and both those cases are ones where people aren't typically regular users.

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

#85

Post by Joof » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

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 don't relax, workout and enjoy the life part of life, then you probably aren't at 100% when you need to be. It isn't explicitly stated, but a lot of people I know agree with me. Some of those people are PhDs, doctors and other traditionally 'successful' people.

Valve has some of that written in, massages and whatnot. I think the key is that you have to be internally motivated to work at valve. They have to lay the social groundwork for people to be motivated without direct managers.

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

#86

Post by AimHere » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

swsieber wrote: post #53

AimHere wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Valve expanding all that quickly? I suspect it still has well under 1000 employees.

Somebody cited roughly 330 elsewhere on this page.

Cough, that was me. Between posting this, and posting that, I went to Wikipedia :)

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

#87

Post by bloaf » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

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'd recommend the book "Leisure the Basis of Culture" which covers this sentiment in great detail.

https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp...

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

#88

Post by Corence » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

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…

Yes, when I began studying CS I got hit with this pressure really hard. It definitely gave me the feeling that I didn't belong in the field. It is like a cousin to Impostor Syndrome. Instead of feeling like I'm incompetent (though that still happens sometimes), I feel like I shouldn't be in the field since I don't care enough about it to work on it more than 40-45 hours a week.

Three years into my job, I'm mostly over it. I still have to deal with coworkers laughing that I use Windows on my personal computer, but at least I can eat the cake I made this weekend.

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

#89

Post by drchickensalad » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

ahel wrote: post #72

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…

Slightly off-topic but: why is 9-17? Here I've always seen people working 9-18 with one hour off for lunch. Is this an Italian peculiarity?

Personally I say "9-5" a lot because it's a saying even though I'm 9-6.

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

#90

Post by talmand » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

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…

>> But playing board games, working out/running or even just watching mindnumbing TV.

Maybe not the TV part, I suppose depending on what it is exactly, but the others I would count towards bettering yourself.