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

111–120 of 205 posts

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

#111

Post by antisthenes »

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.…

> They produce little games like Dota2 more for fun than anything else, they gt rich with steam.

Little games like Dota2? It's the biggest title on Steam in terms of players by a large margin and probably the 2nd most popular game worldwide on PC to ever exist (behind LoL)

It also generates a significant amount of revenue for Valve through the sales of tournament ticket and cosmetics.

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

#112

Post by Keyframe »

AimHere wrote: post #23
Karunamon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me wonders if the Valve management structure isn't almost completely to blame for things like their infamously bad customer service. I could see why - dealing with support tickets from irate people is not a particularly interesting (or judging by Steam's runaway success: particularly value adding) activity. Not that I mean to hijack this to complain about Steam, but you have to admit it's a benefit of a tradi…

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…

Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put out one new game every 5 years or so.

All they did was recreate a city full of assets and added game mechanics to it in five years and made the most expensive (at the time) game product in history with more than 1000 people involved in production and the fastest selling entertainment product in history. A game that broke eight Guinness world records and sold more than 65 million copies and well over $2b in revenue. And that's only GTA 5.

All they did, numerous times so far, was to create vast games full of created digital assets. Games that hold record-breaking sales numbers and hold positions in all best-selling video games charts. That's all they did. Nothing to write home about, really. Bunch of slackers.

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

#113

Post by officemonkey »

Scirra_Tom wrote: post #73
trevyn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also important to intelligently select where your vertical leg is placed.

I feel that to be "among the best in their field within a narrow discipline" (the vertical leg) means you have a natural disposition and interest in that discipline. Not something you can just choose (that would be more about the horizontal).

Then the "where are you willing to work?" becomes an important factor. There aren't a lot of "high-precision mass spectrometry" work in a lot of towns.

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

#114

Post by stevebmark »

This is a wonderful read, thank you for sharing it. I'm genuinely curious about this, if any Valve insiders have insights:

> That’s why Valve is flat...You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.

Is this really the case? On paper this sounds great. I've worked at companies that have a similar motto. Power to the employees, power to the developers. But it usually just means the hierarchy is unspoken and assumed. No structure means no one to go to with disputes about your job, problems with co-workers, etc. It can be worse than a traditional hierarchy because everyone sells the "flat" motto to newcomers, but as soon as you join you learn the hidden politics. The cognitive dissonance can be soul crushing.

So is Valve truly flat? Are there any examples of relatively new employees spinning up teams and shipping unique ideas? If it works, how do you handle inter-personal employee issues?

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

#115

Post by pc86 »

Scirra_Tom wrote: post #73
trevyn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also important to intelligently select where your vertical leg is placed.

I feel that to be "among the best in their field within a narrow discipline" (the vertical leg) means you have a natural disposition and interest in that discipline. Not something you can just choose (that would be more about the horizontal).

Am I the only one that finds it hard to believe all of Valve's ~330 employees are among the best in their respective field?

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

#117

Post by akiselev »

stevebmark wrote: post #114

This is a wonderful read, thank you for sharing it. I'm genuinely curious about this, if any Valve insiders have insights: > That’s why Valve is flat...You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products. Is this really the case? On paper this sounds great. I've worked at companies that have a similar motto. Power to the employees, power to the developers. But it usually just means the hie…

You're absolutely spot on. You have to remember that this is an employee manual and, as such, is more like marketing and recruiting material than a precise description of reality. While Valves heirarchy is officially flat and very different from the norm, the usual office politics muddy the waters.

A few years ago there was a lot of news articles coming out about a shakeup at Valve where a lot of people were fired, allegedly due to internal power struggles. I'm having trouble with finding them on Google due to Valves name but the gist of it is that Valves culture resembles that of a high school with distinct social "elites" and their cliques [1][2]. There is also a wealth of HN comments that provide some insight [3][4][5].

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/valve-management-jeri-ellswor...

[2] http://kotaku.com/weird-paranoia-at-valve-says-former-employ...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6036385

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215891

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015182

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

#118

Post by Bjartr »

xigency wrote: post #52
ebbv wrote: post #18

This 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: http://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

"We were having a difficult time recruiting folks. We would interview very talented people but they would be rejected by the old timers at Valve as not fitting the culture." This sounds like a terrible environment to develop in.

If done "right" it could also maintain an environment that is excellent to develop in iif you do fit in the culture.

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

#120

Post by __abc »

trequartista wrote: post #56
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…

George Carlin summed this up pretty well - "When does a kid get to sit in a yard with a stick anymore? You know, just sit there with a fucking stick. Do today's kids even know what a stick is?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA

My wife and I were just texting about this.

We try to make sure we carve out time for them to strategically be bored. Forced to explore, use their imaginations, build a fort, stomp on bugs, make shit up.

Post reply on HN