Any sufficiently complicated flat organisation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Corporate Hierarchy :).
also all valve games are turning into money extraction machines
Apparently flat structure and bonuses tied to amount of money you bring, combined with apathy towards their software allowed some weasels to takeover and slowly destroy their (few) games in the name of short term gains.
And money is not even an issue for valve, its private company. It all looks like whole leadership doesnt give a fuck anymore, not even to pass on maintenance to 3rd party.
Right, even Half-Life: Alyx, which thankfully doesn't have any "micro"-transactions, is still infected with a virtual currency you have to collect to upgrade your weapons.
Gabe's "Actually money is how the community steers work." comment during the paid mods fiasco really shows the mindest that Valve works with.
Didn't know about Alyx, it doesnt sound like a game you could monetize in any way. Given its a single player game with few thousands players who have fancy googles :)
The launch and handling of Artifact is a clear sign of valve's hubris or complete out of touch state. Or more realistically pure greed of people who would benefit of it. By people I dont mean valve as company, they make more money of steam in a day that they could have ever make of artifact in a year.
Launch a paid card game at high of Hearthstone, that requires you to buy cards with competitive decks going over >$100 and micro-transactions to play it. Everyone knew it was crazy. And game died pretty much at the launch.
Why the fuck would you even attempt making it a paid game?? Valve has money to keep a game like that free, develop community and get it to stable state before attempting at monetization of some kind.
This is pretty out of date (I remember when they first released it). The org chart stuff is wrong, in the last few years (around the time of Alyx) they moved to a more normal corporate structure so they would actually finish projects instead of people bouncing when the project got hard.
Hey there, as someone who works at Valve, maybe you can answer this for me (I've asked many times but never gotten an answer).
Who sets the salaries? With a flat structure and no "managers", who picks your salary for next year? Who picks how much a new person gets an offer for? How are raises and equity comp determined?
That all seems to be missing from (at least this version of) the handbook. The word salary appears once and compensation eight times, but it just says "we try to be the best" but never discusses the mechanics of it.
not a valve employee, but when I interviewed there a few years ago, I was told your initial offer is a "reasonable" number you and the hiring team agree on, then is adjusted up/down as your peers estimate your impact over time.
the interview process is also kind of interesting -- you'll know if you got an offer or not before you leave the onsite interview. also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.
> I was told your initial offer is a "reasonable" number you and the hiring team agree on,
That makes sense, having the people who interview attempt to pick a comp that will get you in the door.
> then is adjusted up/down as your peers estimate your impact over time.
It is the mechanics of this that I am most interested in and no one will answer for me. Do people vote on their peer's salary? How does that not become super political? What happens if they all vote for each other to get 1000% raises, who stops them?
> also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.
If I were them the driver would be the beginning and end of the interview process. Were you kind to the driver on the way there? Did you say nasty things on the way back?
Or maybe they just got a good deal with a company that only had a few drivers. :)
Valve is a close approximation of a worker's co-op, if it had 300 (?) members. There are many insights to be gleaned from this type of business, the difference being that Valve for sure has a boss (or many), because it's not a worker's co-op, no matter how much it pretends to be. However a leader is not a boss, and you can tell the difference when you've been a part of worker-owned startups.
That said, true co-ops of all sizes also struggle with compensation. Much like startups, you want to reward early risk acceptance and loyalty while preserving fairness based on skill and contribution (otherwise you won't be able to recruit new members). It's really, really hard.
(I know who you are but I figured it was worth commenting since others may not know as much on the subject).
That's one downside, co-ops tend to remain small, due to the difficulty of scaling horizontal structures. This means it's easier to start one than to join one.
(This is also why I highly suspect Valve is not truly horizontal: you will never get 100 people to agree on anything important.)
The handbook says that employees stack rank each other based on value contribution and salary is adjusted accordingly. Compensation is controlled by the initial offer and then adjusted based on peer review.
I want to know the mechanics of "adjusted accordingly". Who adjusts it? Do your peers just vote on it? If that's the case, how do they avoid that becomes super political or just trading favors?
This seems relevant, although it doesn't explain everything:
> How pay is determined
>"This is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment. "In companies like Microsoft or elsewhere, usually the bonus is something between 8, 15, 20 percent of the basic salary. In Valve, I'm told, there's no upper limit to bonuses. Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage." "Gabe [Newell] had this view from the beginning. He wanted a community of partners, he didn't want to be the boss of anyone or to be bossed around by anyone."
I wouldn't… and don't. I'm interested in the things I do, not wealth numbers to accumulate. I'm the guy behind airwindows.com and have been spinning off code to other open source music projects for some years now, and I've got a number of projects going and even life changes happening.
I'm still more interested in WHAT I'm doing than what the compensation is. The patreon arc of Airwindows is sort of peaking out and subsiding very gradually and I'm looking at what else I can do: if I'm compensated much less than minumum wage it begins to affect what projects I can take on as it'll erode my resources too much. Such is the lot of an open source dev who's used inherited money as capital :)
I'd work at Valve. Sounds fascinating, and a bit like the production work I've done: working with a band and getting the most out of their album, except it's an ad hoc group of devs and the 'album' is a game or software infrastructure. There will be people in such a situation who are maximizing their own wealth. Such people are only minor obstacles to getting the THING you're making, optimized. Basically if you're getting enough money anyway and they will let you have the thing needed on the grounds that they take too much credit, but the thing can be made, then let 'em have the credit as long as they're not screwing up anything important.
It's sufficiently obvious who is contributing and for what reasons. There will always be outside perspectives, including outside of me and whoever is credit-seeking for wealth maximization.
Have you read the final hours of Half-Life Alyx? Because that’s where I got that impression from, and since it’s wrong, do you know what the heck it was talking about with the organizational changes to get Alyx released? Did I completely misunderstand that part of the book?
I think some employees are, to put it nicely, insulated from management changes. Like the ones that came after Gabe Newell realized little “flat” fiefdoms were sabotaging his company’s interests.
At every big tech company, there’s always a few employees who assert nothing has changed and their employer is the same plucky upstart they joined 5 or 10 years ago.
> My guess is no and there is still a hierarchy, however obscure.
This is my suspicion as well, and my experience with "flat" organizations. Hierarchy and power dynamics are phenomena that occur in organizations. If you do not create the power structure on purpose, it will arise spontaneously, as your organization grows. If you try to suppress power structures, the power structures will hide themselves.
This isn't some conspiracy theory stuff. It just means that in any organization, some people will have some authority--because they are liked, maybe because they get things done, maybe because they know things, maybe because they've just been around a long time. These people end up getting kept in the loop for decisions, not because anyone is directed to keep them in the loop, but simply because it's the way things are done. If you try to do something outside this power structure, you may encounter organizational resistance--if for no other reason than because you're doing things differently from everyone else. It is more difficult to navigate these kinds of power structures because there's still someone in charge, more or less--but it's not written down.
Sometimes you encounter a truly flat organization, but they tend to be very small. I don't think it scales well.
About power structures arising spontaneously: indeed, that's the topic of a very insightful and well known essay about supposedly flat organizations (from the perspective of a feminist author), "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" [1]
The gist is that in officially flat organizations, there always exists an unofficial hierarchy that arises organically, and that because it's unofficial it's unaccountable, unlike a formal hierarchy one could theoretically dissent with or challenge.
Yeah, but the obverse is equally important. Hierarchy and dynamics will also decay when there isn't a status quo built to support them at least that's how it works out in my noggin. I think the formalized hierarchy tends to ossify individuals, departments, processes and et cetera. Once that's established, it becomes rigid, and rigidity stops being fun and it stops being interesting.
What is the problem with "not fun" and "not interesting"?
Why would I want an org chart to be fun or interesting? Usually, my goal is for anything "fun" and "interesting" to be either a direct responsibility at work, or something I do outside of work for pleasure.
Don't work somewhere interesting. Walk the maze of the traditional establishment, and enjoy your quiet workday. There are so many opportunities for you to do that.
Myself, I don't want to be driveling stupidly many hours a day over whatever apparati I might be charged with the operation of. I want stimulation and novelty. I want to be curious and satisfy it. I want to be confused and amazed. The many, many hours I'll spend at work, I want them to be edifying. Not some sacrifice to a faceless quorum of buzzards that I might live another day.
This whole wage labor regime is a fairly new thing, and it hasn't been rightly tested in all its degrees of freedom. Something Hobbesian about the direction and shape it has taken, it's sad and cynical and skeptical but without faith.
I have to assume that you realize that this is all subjective.
What you are describing sounds like the subjective experience of what you feel when you work in the traditional establishment. You feel unstimulated, but that's a product of your personality and your immediate environment.
To put it another way... whether an environment is "interesting" depends on whether someone is interested.
Choosing to leave a large organization gives you some freedoms and takes away others. It sounds like you value the freedoms that you get outside large organizations, and you have only harsh words for people who feel otherwise.
Just to put this in concrete terms... let's say you are curious about compilers, or memory allocators, or network flow control algorithms. It tends to be only large organizations that will pay you to work on those things, and in order to my curiosity about those things, I would want to rub elbows with experts in those subjects. Those opportunities exist at the largest tech companies and in academia (and my experience is that academia is no less bureaucratic).
For me, sometimes, navigating broken bureaucracies is a price that I pay to work on some really fascinating problems. The broken bureaucracy itself is a fascinating problem.
It goes beyond human organizations too. Hierarchies are a natural structure and something we share with lobsters. That's how embedded they are and why suppressing them doesn't work. Life finds a way, hierarchies find a way.
Lobster bro has not done well, either, so I wonder whether this is a 'fact' worth taking axiomatically. I suspect the reality is more of a dialectic between lobsterism and the intelligent undermining of hierarchy, because systems work better when the system thrives, not when the system is beholden to the biggest lobster in the pot :) the system's goals must surely be on a different level to the lobsters, and the system has to compete in turn with other systems… in a sense it's lobsters all the way up, but in another sense it's always necessary to balance the lobsterism with intelligence.
They appear to have a peer review policy that adjusts salaries, but probably someone is making the final determination. This is definitely flatter then other companies and about as flat as I can imagine.
The flattest possible would be to have peer review of salary, and peer review of payroll providers and other admin (or some democratic way of electing someone to deal with that).
> The flattest possible would be to have peer review of salary
I've worked in several "flat" companies that tried various democratic things like this.
It always turns into the ultimate game of politics. In this case, it would instantly become "I'll vote to raise your salary if you vote to raise my salary".
Or everyone votes to increase everyone's salary, the payroll department says we don't have enough money, and eventually someone (management, but let's not call them that) has to step in and straighten things out.
If they actually spent as much time as they claim hiring great people, you'd think a few of them would actually stick around on a project long enough to ship it.
I would love to see the Steam Deck release in Australia mind you. Still kind of wild to me that it hasn't been. Conspiratorialy, I always wonder if it's punishment for the ACCC forcing Valve/Steam to handle refunds via Aus consumer law, but I have no evidence of that.
Hence my conspiracy theory! My wild assumption is that they don't want to deal with our consumer law, and/or they want to punish us for the ACCC forcing them to respect it wrt. Steam.
They're more than just a game studio these days, they're a major driving force of the entire industry. Linux gaming is totally viable today, something valve did almost singlehandedly over the last 7ish years (with big help from google, intel, and a few others). I'd say that's a pretty impressive feat.
Then you have their VR and steam deck hardware that is setting the bar for new gaming platforms. The fact that they also found time to ship a game is just icing on top IMO.
Here’s a small list of what Valve invented or developed over years:
Counter - Strike
Steam (and numerous innovations within it)
Dota 2
Portal 1 and 2
The entire VR industry as it exists today comes from Valve showing Oculus their far more advanced prototype and giving them the tech, which later led to FB acquisition
CastAR which was initially developed at valve - so far not successful but I think it has potential.
The best VR game currently available - half life Alyx
Portal 1 was definitely not invented outside of Valve - students had built a game with some similar mechanics. Portal was funded and developed at Valve afaik.
Does wine even compare to what Valve has accomplished with Proton?
I wasn't attempting to troll here, my reply was directly to this claim from the parent comment: "they moved to a more normal corporate structure so they would actually finish projects instead of people bouncing when the project got hard"
And they finished Half Life Alyx and the Steam Deck. I don't get your point. The origin of that quote is from the written documentary they made about the development of Alyx.
My point, in response to this specific quote from the person I was replying to, is that good people don't bounce when a project gets hard, they in fact do the opposite.
If you disagree with the statement I quoted from the person I was replying to that's fine, I have no bone to pick.
The part about how 'cabals' form temporarily to achieve goals and build things is interesting. I was wondering how they go about 'leading' projects if there are no true 'leads', basically, they just form temporary teams/hierarchies that are suited toward a particular goal.
This part about why these teams are temporary and they prefer a flat structure makes a lot of sense and resonates with me (and probably many here who've worked in larger organisations):
> Valve is not averse to all organizational structure—it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time. We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of Valve’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.
I mean where I worked this worked pretty well. Actual managment told you their rough goals (do more of X, make more like Y, don't forget Z) and "someone" who had a good idea and didn't like wasting time took the lead naturally. Small groups form, on some specific subproblem someone else takes the lead because they have a better idea how to tackle that specific beast etc.
Humans are good at organizing, if the goals are clear and everybody has the motivation.
And rhis is the actual problem. If I feel like the company is fucking me over in some way or viewing me as a cow they have to milk as much as possible, that motivation will be gone.
I've seen exactly the same dynamic happen in hierarchical organizations—the hierarchy and bureaucracy might have ameliorated some of the pathologies, but it just as easily magnified others while also bringing in its own. It definitely made the core organization more legible but that isn't healthy in and of itself and has some steep costs both in direct overhead and, worse yet, in decreasing the organization's flexibility and adaptability.
I do think legibility is actually very helpful, especially as organizations grow in size. I'm wondering why you are saying that legibility isn't healthy in and of itself.
Say, for example, I am working on a task and I need something done which is not normal. For example, I may need to make a change to some service that is running, or get permissions or ownership of some object assigned to my account. Because of the legibility that bureaucracy brings, I can find the relevant team with ability/authority to solve my problem, or I can discover that no such team exists.
If the team exists, then that's great. I can talk directly to people with experience with whatever problem I'm solving, who know the relevant policies / risks / recommendations. If the team doesn't exist, I can still just make the change myself. If the team exists but won't help me, I can hand the problem off to my manager. If the relevant people are on vacation, I can find out who has power in their stead. (There are some cases where this doesn't work--my experience is that this usually involves some inflexible legal requirement, or some essential technical expertise, and the relevant person is on vacation.)
This legibility brings a sort of "mindlessness" to the bureaucracy. I have high confidence that soon, I will either solve the problem, or the problem will belong to somebody else. I don't have to think too hard about what the right thing to do is when it's outside my domain, except in the exceptional cases.
Yet it's interesting that despite Valve having what is essentially a monopoly on PC storefronts and the implicit corporate hierarchy with alleged double-crossing, there is little complaint about Steam as a service from most users.
There is always a hierarchy regardless of whether the HR database reflects it or not. The HR database only grants a hierarchy legitimacy, nothing more, nothing less. Regardless even in places where there is a hierarchy you will see getting promoted means nothing unless you have influence with the powers that be.
In many ways these power structures are a feature of any large people operation. You just need to get used to them.
Things will be chaotic, but modern software development does some good ideas to the table to maintain order. Things like Agile, OKRs etc might not be perfect but they do help.
This isn't a criticism if you state "it ad-hoc leaders are empowered to steer quality and take on adaptive situational roles."
And in contrast to, "centrally consolidated power attempts to shift and contort people and cliques to meet external, largely disinterested expectations and save face" -- the appeal is pretty obvious.
> The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have "http://user" —check it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now.
Holy shit. I have to know what other groupware voodoo they're running internally, now...
Sounds like it's based off wired connections but that functionality is built into some enterprise wifi solutions, too. You can overlay a wireless site survey on top of a floor plan with Cisco and the WAPs can "triangulate" clients and show where they are. It also shows 802.11x auth details and some other neat stats like signal strength, retransmits and interference.
The one I'm thinking of is called Cisco Prime and you can see it here https://youtu.be/xrtGXg5ICa4?t=2235 (when I saw it before, they had 802.11x auth info integrated so it could pull Active Directory/LDAP info, too)
This doc looks pretty old. The timeline ends in 2012. I'd be they were mostly hardwired connections and just mapped network login events, DHCP records, and physical port maps. You could probably do the same now with WiFi records.
gaming companies don't generally do their primary development on wifi. not the rule, some people will, but most people aren't making halflife alyx on a macbook.
So is their internal culture the same as described here, a decade later?
For some reason, this manual gave me the same feeling I had when looking over college brochures as a young man. There was a sense of potential and excitement that was hard to put into words. Of course, the reality turned out very differently but I still remember that passing mixture of floating forms. Whether or not the document accurately depicts what it's like working at Valve, I am still taken aback that it managed to reproduce so specific and personal an emotion.
Something I don't understand about Valve – the company has been around since 1996 and essentially controls the PC gaming industry. It has the dominant digital distribution platform (taking a 30% cut of all sales), a catalog of very popular games, several hardware plays (VR headset, console, linux box) and 135+ million active users. It enjoys a cult like standing among fans. Why then is its estimated valuation as little as $7.7B (from https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/...)?
We ought to turn this on its head: why are companies that have never turned a GAAP profit and have no clear route to profitability other than a vague plan at monopolization valued by VCs at (tens of) billions of dollars?
I'm not much of a video game player, but Valve seems to have millions of loyal, paying customers. Given that and their history of direct financial success (i.e., not just popularity with developers), $7.7B really doesn't seem so bad.
Because the vague plan at monopolization IS the value.
That's pretty much the point. It doesn't matter whether it's a GOOD plan. In a sense it matters much more that it's an evil plan, because that would hurt everybody else more and lead to more capital accumulation and return on investment.
Sometimes these things aren't that complicated. Whether the company's beneficial in other ways is a much more difficult question. Valuation isn't: valuation is more or less a gamble on how much the company can crush everybody else.
I'm not sure where Bloomberg is getting that number and I would debate even its ballpark accuracy - especially when Valve is a privately held company and notoriously tight-lipped about things like gross revenue and profits.
My wild guess is that because most of their revenue isn't recurring it's valued lower.
Given the size of the PC gaming market and the ubiquity of Steam you would think they have >>$1B in revenue though, which makes $7.7B a pretty conservative multiple.
I'd aim a little closer to that 1b than 5. Most of the "whale" cash cow games have their own launchers and don't split the revenues. Wow, cod, most MMOs, lol, fortnite, etc all huge franchises with zero steam. Since steam takes 30% or less depending on on agreements, they make good money, but not insane.
There are all kinds of factors at play here, none of which I have any concrete data on.
First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users.
However, a percentage (not a majority, but certainly significant) of those would be kids whose parents buy them one or two games a year.
OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC). Plus, steam sales come up all the time and lots of PC gamers have massive libraries of games they bought cheap and never played.
All of these (sometimes conflicting) factors make it hard to tell who spends more.
A very tiny percentage of PC gamers have the kind of rigs you are envisioning. According to Steam's data (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...), the most common GPU in use is the GTX 1060, which was the entry level Nvidia card released in 2016. Most gamers have a <2.7Ghz processor and are on a 1080p screen.
> A very tiny percentage of PC gamers have the kind of rigs you are envisioning.
I'm not talking about the people buying i7s and 4090s. 100% agree they are a tiny minority. I'm talking about the same modest setups you are.
Even a 1060 (or it's modern equivalent) with an i3 and a 24 inch 1080p panel is more expensive than a PS5/Xbox. And I think it's becoming increasing rare for a family to have a desktop pc unless it's for gaming.
> First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users.
> OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC).
If we're talking about on average it's probably the exact reverse of this. I'd be surprised if more than 25% of Steam users were in North America. Not because Steam isn't huge in NA, but because getting a console and games is way harder in most other countries than running what you can on the family PC.
For example (at least before the sanctions) Russia makes up the largest portion of CS:GO and DOTA2 players. At least for DOTA2 it's more then double the number of American players.
the biggest reason for this is the big games that people spend money on today are free. the 30% platform fee doesn’t matter to fortnite, apex legends, overwatch, dota2/cs would be here if valve didn’t own it. the big cash making games have gone around the market place by being the marketplace themselve: gta online. and that trend will continue.
i bet without cs and dota steams revenue per user has been in decline over the past 5 years as money moves from paid libraries to paid addons in free games
I assume that spend per user is higher than console users, since most steam users spent about $1000 on their computer compared to $300-500 on a console. However, the population of PC gamers is probably a lot smaller than console gamers given the money and knowledge barriers to entry.
Alternatively, after having streteched their budget for a PC, many gamers may have less money for games to play on it. Also, many PC gamers simply play on a family PC, not some dedicated machine.
That link shows Gabe Newell's estimated net worth, but does he have have 100% ownership of Valve? The Valve Wikipedia page shows his ownership as ">50%" [0], but isn't more specific.
> Valve was valued at $7.7 billion in May 2022 based on Bloomberg calculations and discussions with Michael Pachter, a Los Angeles-based analyst at Wedbush Securities. This value has been adjusted for the performance of the Russell 1000 Electronic Entertainment Index since then.
It goes down after a certain amount of sales. 25% after 10 mil and 20% after 50.
It says a lot about how large valves market share is that they can take such a large cut and publishers will still sell there. Plenty have tried to release alternative clients without mixed success
It's the userbase. Steam works well enough, hasn't changed really at all in years (a feature in and of itself), and has mostly everything a user would ever want or need.
Why then install an alternative client?
Source: I tried to compete with steam once. Tech was better. Nobody cared.
I wouldn't even say Steam works well. The UI is laggy and clunky, the mobile app is a joke (literally worse than the web version). But it's good enough, it beats learning something new, especially since all game launchers seem to have some flashy custom UI instead of standard widgets.
I think Steam works very well. I heavily use in-homestreaming and big picture mode on my shield and it offers a nice experience that I've yet to see emulated elsewhere. I usually have a browse in the store and watch trailers on the TV before launching my game.
Remote Play is fun on games that support it.
And it runs on osx, linux and windows.
And then theres Broadcasting, chat. Its a heavily featured launcher, and offers way more than some of the alternatives out there.
I don't know how this could remotely be estimated given both the steam store and marketplace, the various contract tiers based on prior agreements, grandfathered contracts, etc.
It's estimated due to the fact that vast majority of that 7 billion dollar revenue comes from just a small handful of games. Looking over VG Insights, almost half of all video game revenue comes from just 50 games (out of approximately 10,000 games released on Steam per year).
and while steam was the only app store for pc that mattered for 15 years there’s more players in that space. valves only future in game distribution is to lose market share to epic store, microsoft store, battlenet, origin, gog, etc
Does anyone know if this has been updated since then? Do they still hand something like this out to new employees?
I remember reading this years ago and thinking it was just so cool (the contents and structure). But I’m not sure how well it really works in practice. Is it better, or just different?
So, any people here who currently work at Valve and can chime in on the actual working culture day to day and what the hiring process looks like? At some point I applied for some roles and all I got was a bunch of vague messages and ghosting.
My company is the opposite. It is a totem pole. The CEO is at the head, then there is a single person below them, and one person below them, and one person below them, and so on.
This is essentially no hierarchy, and everyone interacts with a few levels below them, and everyone is expected to deliver on product (basically, program).
This works because it is actually really hard to get anything done if you're managing more than 1 person.
I know you're talking about like, the move toward more work from home everywhere, but that snow policy is definitely a solid rule of thumb for the Seattle area: they get almost no snow and don't deal with it well.
Sigh. 2012 was so hopeful. Tech was still good and half life 3 was still on the way.
Valve, with all its freedom and liberty for employees, lagged behind crunch mills this treated employees like cattle. The market said CandyCrush > Half-Life. So be it. God is dead, he remains dead, and we have killed him.
I require my engineers in the office and doing what I want them to do. Liberalism must be curtailed by the winds, but my god, it’s no fun.
I remember reading through this 8-10 years ago, I don’t think it’s meant to be internal only. Probably helps attract the type of people that would enjoy that working environment.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 (April 21, 2012, 168 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 (Dec 31, 2014, 17 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 (March 23, 2015, 14 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 (July 25, 2016, 198 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 (Sept 7, 2018, 31 comments)