Valve new employee manual

This manual has been around for nearly half a year. I didn't care about it when someone recommended me to read it, and it was too busy during that time. This time, I saw gamasutra stick it again, so I rushed to review it again.

The manual has a huge impact on me. Recently, including the Manual, Paul Graham's hacker and painter and visits Beijing yuxue Studio (more recently, 37signals's rework) they all gave me a very profound lesson, and they all stressed the importance of "people.

According to the Manual, in valve, you will find yourself living in an extremely flat environment where no one is your Manager (or even the fat Gabe ), nobody looked up at ctor. You can join any team on your own or freely organize any team. If you insist on providing value for the customers of valve, you are in the right direction. For example, Mike Abrash (also the mentor of bottom-layer optimization and graphics) who wrote quake from scratch with camark in the past 16 months ), currently, valve is also engaged in work that seems completely unrelated to half-life/steam-wearable computing. Some of his blogs also describe his understanding of valve's organizational structure and corporate culture.

 

Whether it is in China or abroad, it will be attacked by countless people-"Can you start a company like this? Don't joke! Tree structure is a scientific structure that conforms to the basic laws of people and nature ". Indeed, it looks too beautiful and too idealistic. People who cannot do it would rather think it is false or curse it as false-out of some kind of psychology. In this regard, the Manual also makes an answer in Q & A: It's really hard. mainly because, from day one, it requires a commitment to hiring in a way that's very different from the way most companies hire.

This leads to valve's distinctive emphasis on "people"-Recruiting "people ".

Let's go back to the bold words given by valve-as long as you insist on providing value to valve's customers, your direction is correct. You can join any team or build a team. You can be the project leader and you have the right to release the product. Think about it carefully. It is no different from what companies with a tree structure and hierarchical structure do. Any company must provide value to customers. But why do companies with TREE STRUCTURESDare notIs it flat? In my opinion, valve thinks (Language-free disease ).Depends on the "person", not the process and organizational structure. The process and organizational structure are just to make up for the problems that "people" cannot provide value to customers spontaneously. Instead, they hope that the top-level executives at the pyramid can issue code to lead level-1 employees to work and become more military and systematic. In fact, Gabe believes that the tree structure was first introduced to human society by military needs. All the companies, companies, and studios I have stayed for. They only look at the strengths of employees (such as the bottom layer of computers, graphics, script capabilities, numerical capabilities, and hand-drawn skills ). I hate him for being world-class in this respect, but he never considers horizontal technical skills (detailed later ), and responsibility, communication skills, initiative and other factors (Frankly speaking, it is difficult to find out from the recruitment process, but once they find that employees are lacking in this aspect, ). So they follow this pattern without exception.

Valve and 37signals are totally different in recruiting "people. According to valve, hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It's more important than breathing.

 

How to Understand? My explanation is as follows: to maintain a flat structure and a free culture like valve, valve employees must beSelf-motivated and self-managed. Otherwise, it is difficult for the company to provide valuable products to its customers in such a productive organization model. Self-motivated and self-managed high-quality talents will naturally decide which way to take, and these employees are in line with valve values (because they are recruited into valve !), Taking that path is the most reasonable decision of the company.

After all, what kind of people can make a company like valve? The manual provides several references. Ask yourself:

• Do I want this person to be my boss?
• Can I learn a lot from him?
• What if this person works for a competitor?

People will subconsciously recruit people who are worse than themselves. Sometimes we also feel that it is better to recruit people who are worse than ourselves than we can't complete the recruitment task. In addition, we sometimes recruit people who are worse than ourselves, because these people can drive us and become the power of office politics. But in valve's view, this is a huge mistake. If some jobs are to be done by adding more people, you can recruit contract workers/temporary workers to do some dirty work. The existence of office politics will definitely seriously damage the culture of valve. The three problems are that valve is used to prevent employees from recruiting people who are worse than the employees themselves. In this case, it is keep the bar high. Many of the companies I 've stayed for, including coconut Island and some independent game industry leaders, fall into this trap: the recruits are not as powerful as the founders, as a result, the boss is working for the employee and bears a very nice name-"responsibility ". In fact, responsibility is nothing except marketing a topic and making sympathy when the game is released. No matter what you do, gaming companies always provide customers with value, rather than asking employees to study. I often talk to my team about "self-management" in coconut island, and we are also using some agile practices to make up for management deficiencies, but the results are average. If it is not done, it is still not done. If it is not done, it is still not done. If it is not done, it will continue to drag the progress. In fact, it is still a problem of "people. It solves the human problem. What agility and engineering can be solved. It's not that the project is actually a ghost, but that they are naturally rooted in the concept of "People" and do not need to be explicitly stated or educated.

In addition, the Manual emphasizes high-bandwidth collaboration ):.. people who are skilled in all the things that are integral to high-bandwidth collaboration-people who can deconstruct problems on the fly, and talk to others as they do so, simultaneously being valid tive, iterative, creative, talkative and reactive... that is, people who are both generalists and also experts.

This introduces another concept of valve recruitment: T-type talent.

 

The vertical representation of T is obvious, and is usually required by all companies: In all the best areas, one must be able to reach the top level. T needs a variety of skills, suchProgramYou can click pixels, and the art will write scripts. The level design is not only a design level, but also a single point for all aspects. This is highly relevant to the high bandwidth collaboration mentioned above. It is impossible for a person who is an expert in his own field and is restricted in other places to work with the team efficiently. In the independent game industry, almost all people are versatile. Otherwise, sporadic profits cannot support a development team composed of a group of experts. An interesting proof is that, when talking about valve, the independent gamer will say that although valve is already a publisher due to the existence of steam, valve is still playing a very independent game, in addition, his steam is also known to support independent games. Looking back at a game company I 've been to, its "planning" role was actually prepared for high bandwidth collaboration. That is to say, due to the lack of horizontal skills of professionals, some people must do a good job of communication. Game planning is exactly the synthesis of all affairs, and naturally takes this position. Therefore, the most basic requirement for planning is communication skills. Even so, they can make the quality of their games a good level in China, and there is no doubt that such employment is inefficient.

Valve has said so much that it is ultimately a "human" problem that they can operate companies in such a "casual" manner. However, one more thing about meta is the self-founded capital, which was also mentioned at the beginning of the manual ). Without the support of funds and the freedom of the founder, most of the utopia would have to be utopia. Coconut island also wants to take the path of its valve operating company, but from the very beginning, it has not met the valve standard. In addition to some luck in the market, it has not been able to improve in the accumulation of funds. If you want to introduce venture capital later and lose the capital independence, this road will definitely not go any further.