It would be interesting to see copies of this from subsequent years (this is the 2012 edition) to understand how Valve's process has evolved over time.
Valve hasn’t released anything of note since this has been published. So I guess we should take these as anti patterns. Valve is more of a hat generation company than a game company so it seems like no one should take any game related advice from them.
"We are the priests who maintain the holy money printer called Steam for our lordship, first of his name Gabe Newell, so that he may purchase fleets of yachts. Don't rock the boat by hiring someone who doesn't get it." They could have said it like this with a lot less bullshit. And Silicon Valley could learn a lot from this company.
Chet Faliszek, writer for games like Half-Life and the lead writer for Portal/Portal 2 has since confirmed that this handbook was never given to employees. It was created and released as part of advertising them as an employer.
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access to. It is a lot easier to pay that kind of fee when you don't feel like your technology partners actively hate the fact that you merely exist.
Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.
It'd rather gaming was where Netflix used to be before the Netflix you are thinking about - physical releases that you can actually own instead of being eternally beholden to a service provider.
> spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.
Well that hits close to home. I wonder why every other mega successful company thinks the opposite.
>Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying
that we don’t have any management
> Team leads
Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project.
This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one.
Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at
once so that people can use them as a resource to check
decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting like
as centers for the teams
I appreciate the out-of-the-box-thinking+creativity foundation theyre trying to lay here, but... this is what management is. I understand management has other emergent properties and misaligned incentives, but those are literally the core (technical) value-adds of managers.
I've been looking for good examples of handbooks and staff materials that do the job well, this one seems a little heavy on the philosophy - I can see why it's been discussed as more of a recruitment tool. Anyone who has favorite examples of handbooks to link, I'd love to check them out.
17 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 16.1 ms ] threadPrevious discussion:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 (21 April 2012 | 16 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 (31 December 2014 | 17 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 (23 March 2015 | 14 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 (25 July 2016 | 197 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 (7 September 2018 | 31 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170988 (12 October 2022 | 165 comments)
Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.
Well that hits close to home. I wonder why every other mega successful company thinks the opposite.
> Team leads Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting like as centers for the teams
I appreciate the out-of-the-box-thinking+creativity foundation theyre trying to lay here, but... this is what management is. I understand management has other emergent properties and misaligned incentives, but those are literally the core (technical) value-adds of managers.