Thread by @AReviewOrTwo1

Valve’s new employee handbook is a fantastic read. Most companies should aspire to have a document like this which is specific to their own context.

Source: cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Val…

Some ideas that resonated include…

1/ Give people the freedom to innovate: hierarchy helps predictability & control, but when you seek 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.”

2/ The customer is first: “Every company will tell you that “the customer is boss,” but here that statement has weight. There’s no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them.”

3/ Let your talent decide what to work on: “We believe in each other to make these decisions, and this faith has proven to be well-founded over and over again... But rather than simply trusting each other to just be smart, we also constantly test our own decisions.”

4/ Take action in a way which can be measured and analyzed to test accepted wisdom: “Accepted truisms about sales, marketing, regionality, seasonality, the Internet, purchasing behavior, game design, economics, and recruiting, etc., have proven wrong surprisingly often.”

5/ Hiring is the most important thing: “…hiring is the single most important thing you will ever do at Valve… hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing.”

6/ Failure as learning: “Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake... Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company - we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors...”

Ps there are still bad ways to fail

7/ Everyone needs to be customer-centric: “Everyone is responsible for the customer relationship... We are all stewards of our long-term relationship with our customers… because we always have their best interests at heart, there’s faith that we’re going to make things better…”

8/ As part of the review process, people are ranked based on:

- Skill level / technical ability
- Productivity / output
- Group contribution
- Product contribution

9/ The ‘T-shaped’ person: “We value ‘T-shaped’ people. That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things - the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline - the vertical leg of the T.”

10/ Three questions to ask oneself in the hiring process:

- 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.”