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 me.
Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
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Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#12High-res edition [25MB]:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHa...
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#13What worries me about this handbook is that it rarely gets updated. For a healthy culture to sustain, rules have to evolve based on all the new employees who join Valve.
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#14Yes, it would be really interesting if someone could get a person from Valve to give us an idea of how this all looks as of today.
Can anyone make it happen?
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#15Honestly I only skim read this wondering if there was a policy not to talk about Half Life 3! Interesting read, though.
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#16From what I heard from ex employee working at Valve it's not what you think it is. i.e: it's very political.
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#17As 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…
I suspect it might work differently in Valve's case. I'm led to believe that Microsoft had a fixed, conventional hierarchy, where every little group and person within the group was backstabbing everybody else to keep their jobs.
If their handbook is to be believed, Valve has a much more flat management structure, where it's basically Gabe at the top, sortof, and everyone else doing whatever they think is best for the company, and there's a fluid system where people can move between groups according to their interests and how they perceive they can add value. So, unlike in Microsoft's case, Valve's people have an easy avenue towards putting 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' into practice.
Valve has a radically different corporate culture from most other companies in it's space. It doesn't come from the 80s, or indeed almost any other time. Perhaps the stack ranking works a lot better because of it.
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#18This is quite old, and paints an overly rosy picture. After this was published a lot of the SteamBox project people got canned and were less impressed with the reality of Valve:
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#19What worries me about this handbook is that it rarely gets updated. For a healthy culture to sustain, rules have to evolve based on all the new employees who join Valve.
Is Valve expanding all that quickly? I suspect it still has well under 1000 employees.
Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]
#20From 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.