Valve Handbook

Ref: Valve (Mar, 2012). Handbook for New Employees. Valve Corp.

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Summary­

  • A Valve Corporation Handbook for new employees; considered pioneering document in the tech world.

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Working Hours

  • While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.

  • Working a lot of hours is generally not related to productivity and, after a certain point, indicates inefficiency. It is more valuable if you are able to maintain a sensible work/life balance and use your time in the office efficiently, rather than working around the clock.

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Salary

  • Valve does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create.

  • If you think your compensation isn’t right for the work you do, then you should raise the issue. At Valve, these conversations are surprisingly easy and straightforward. Adjustments to compensation usually occur within the process described here. But talking about it is always the right thing if there’s any issue. Fretting about your level of compensation without any outside information about how it got set is expensive for you and for Valve.

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Performance (Stack Ranking)

  • Skill Level/Technical Ability

    • How difficult and valuable are the kinds of problems you solve?

    • How important/critical of a problem can you be given?

    • Are you uniquely capable (in the company? industry?) of solving a certain class of problem, delivering a certain type of art asset, contributing to design, writing, or music, etc.?

  • Productivity/Output

    • How much shippable (not necessarily shipped to outside customers), valuable, finished work did you get done?

  • Group Contribution

    • How much do you contribute to studio process, hiring, integrating people into the team, improving workflow, amplifying your colleagues, or writing tools used by others?

    • Generally, being a group contributor means that you are making a tradeoff versus an individual contribution. Stepping up and acting in a leadership role can be good for your group contribution score, but being a leader does not impart or guarantee a higher stack rank. It is just a role that people adopt from time to time.

  • Product Contribution

    • How much do you contribute at a larger scope than your core skill?

    • How much of your work matters to the product?

    • How much did you influence correct prioritization of work or resource trade-offs by others?

    • Are you good at predicting how customers are going to react to decisions we’re making?

    • Things like being a good playtester or bug finder during the shipping cycle would fall into this category.

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Hiring

  • Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing. So when you’re working on hiring—participating in an interview loop or innovating in the general area of recruiting—everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!

  • How do we choose the right people to hire? An exhaustive how-to on hiring would be a handbook of its own. Probably one worth writing. It’d be tough for us to capture because we feel like we’re constantly learning really important things about how we hire people. In the meantime, here are some questions we always ask ourselves when evaluating candidates:

    • Would I want this person to be my boss?

    • Would I learn a significant amount from him or her?

    • What if this person went to work for our competition?

  • Across the board, we value highly collaborative people. That means people who are skilled in all the things that are integral to high-bandwidth collaboration—people who can deconstruct problems on the fly, and talk to others as they do so, simultaneously being inventive, iterative, creative, talkative, and reactive. These things actually matter far more than deep domain-specific knowledge or highly developed skills in narrow areas. This is why we’ll often pass on candidates who, narrowly defined, are the “best” at their chosen discipline.

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