

Valve Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf] - Audiophilip
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

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nilkn
Whenever this has come up in the past, on other forums, it's been speculated
that Valve is so profitable that it can get away with more or less any
management structure at all and hence doesn't really serve as strong evidence
that this particular style really works well or not.

~~~
faitswulff
I think talent also plays a role. Profitable companies are capable of hiring
poor talent. Valve hires the best, because they're both profitable and
prestigious. A lot of smart, intrinsically motivated people may be able to
find a way to organize themselves, regardless of management structure, whereas
less talented employees may have different organizational needs.

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winterismute
Where I currently work (< 60 employees), management decided to try to switch
to a flat structure similar to what is described in this handbook. We are
still in the bootstrapping phase. However, I noticed that I could not find a
lot of serious/deep evaluation material, like, companies that really did it
and discussed it in retrospective, nor anything similar in management
literature. Also, I noticed that there are no good sw tools that help you
organizing, the standard SCRUM tools are not enough and instead we would like
to have something that allows to easily keep track of who is working on what
and how, let's say more about the connections between the "teams" than their
progress. Any tips?

~~~
vellum
Github also uses a flat structure. They don't have any official papers, but
some of their employees have described their internal tools and workflows.

[http://zachholman.com/talks](http://zachholman.com/talks)

[http://www.slideshare.net/InfoQ/github-communications-
cultur...](http://www.slideshare.net/InfoQ/github-communications-culture-and-
tools)

[http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-
con...](http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-constraints)

[http://www.fastcolabs.com/3020181/open-company/inside-
github...](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3020181/open-company/inside-githubs-
super-lean-management-strategy-and-how-it-drives-innovation)

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lelf
Big discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463)

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k__
So HL³, for example, doesn't get shipped, because noone wants to work on it?

~~~
city41
I was wondering the same thing. HL3 is possibly the most anticipated game
ever, and so working on it surely involves a lot of pressure. Yet TF2 gets new
updates all the time. I'm curious if Valve's structure helped lead to this.

I admire Valve, and think their approach is interesting, but I can't help but
feel sometimes a little hierarchy is necessary to force the crummy stuff that
needs to get done to get done.

~~~
CamperBob2
No, HL3 should be built by a strong team, led by (and composed of) people who
can't imagine doing anything else. Treating it as "crummy stuff" that someone
needs to be forced to do will just result in a bad game. We can get bad games
from any number of other publishers.

~~~
city41
I didn't mean to correlate HL3 with "crummy", I was commenting on two separate
things.

For example: I understand that Valve's Steam customer service is pretty hit or
miss. Possibly a result of no one at Valve really wanting to own customer
service.

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notduncansmith
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821005)

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Nmachine
cold

