

The Valve Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf] - mseo
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

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dammitcoetzee
After some time working in "start-ups" this is one thing I agree with more
than anything.

"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."

~~~
hacknat
You know what's funny though. I know some folks at Valve, they all say that
the work-life balance isn't great (not terrible, but not great). Valve does
peer stack ranking in order to set compensation. From what I hear this means
that, yes, you can technically 9-to-5 it, but good luck getting anywhere in
the company if you do.

I've also heard that the everything-is-flat model isn't all that great either.
Yes you get to work on what you want, but, going back to the stack-ranking, it
can be quite the political place if you want to get on the right projects,
etc.

I'm not trying to say that Valve isn't a great place to work, but I think
people romanticize it a little too much when this handbook gets trotted out on
HN every other month.

~~~
tessierashpool
_I know some folks at Valve, they all say that the work-life balance isn 't
great (not terrible, but not great)._

context matters: the work-life norm for video games is horrendously awful.

I'm not saying this is how Valve thinks, but if you were recruiting for a
video game company, you could totally tell people "work-life balance matters
here, so you'll often be able to go home on weekends," or "work-life balance
matters here, so we rarely work more than ten hours a day."

~~~
hacknat
That's a fair point.

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vitalique
All right, since everybody seems to have read the handbook, here's something
fresh: Gabe Newell's email [0], taken from today's r/Steam, where he shares
his thoughts behind the flat company structure which Valve is so famous for.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2zxcyy/gabe_newell_re...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2zxcyy/gabe_newell_responds_to_email_asking_about/)

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pmr_
This has been discussed here before in 2012 and the linked version is not
different from the one before.

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

~~~
angersock
It was discussed before, it will be discussed again. We've presumably got new
users and new insights in the last 3 years.

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sirwolfgang
Title should be updated to include (2012) when this was originally released to
the public, following a pervious leak.

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tessierashpool
adding my voice to the chorus: please put 2012 in the title.

edit: looked on github for hacker news source, to see if I could automate
this. is it not open-sourced? all I found was docs for the API.

