cageymaru
Fully [H]
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/03/gabe-newell-on-what-makes-valve-tick/
This is part one of a two part interview.
More information on Valve's employee hierarchical system, project development choice, problem solving based on customer feedback, why successful mod writers can be more important than Yale graduates, how working as a team is more beneficial than having a title. He expounds upon his previous discussions about how an employee with different skill sets would be made to choose in a conventional working environment, but at Valve you can utilize all facets of your expertise in different ways at your own choosing.
He discusses how to keep female employees from dropping out of the workplace when they have a child by not tracking leave or vacation time. He talks about how to deal with family crisis as everyone will go through it at some point. Everyone gets old and dies; how can we give our employees the time to deal with a family crisis. He seems to marvel at employees that bring their parents to company trips and tells them how he envisions their child being working for at least 5 - 10 years at Valve. Gabe seems like a very down to earth family guy.
Lastly he discusses employee time on the job and how allowing them to choose projects brings great inventions such as Steam and multiplayer within Valve's games. Employees are free to choose what they want to waste their time on. Your time at work is your time to spend on what you deem important. No progress reports are generated for Gabe. The customer feedback is your answer to "Am I doing a good job." They let you know if you made bad design choices. If things aren't balanced and need fixing. Best employees can find and fix issues based on customer feedback by weeding through the forum posts to find the problem.
Many employees thought that Steam was a bad idea in the early stages of development. A really bad idea. So employees could choose to work and incorporate ideas on it if they wanted to or they could work on something else. So the people that ended up working on Steam were the employees that had the most dedication to it, believed in it, and wanted to see it succeed. Seems to have worked.
My cliff notes seem to be as long as the article. Sorry.
This is part one of a two part interview.
More information on Valve's employee hierarchical system, project development choice, problem solving based on customer feedback, why successful mod writers can be more important than Yale graduates, how working as a team is more beneficial than having a title. He expounds upon his previous discussions about how an employee with different skill sets would be made to choose in a conventional working environment, but at Valve you can utilize all facets of your expertise in different ways at your own choosing.
He discusses how to keep female employees from dropping out of the workplace when they have a child by not tracking leave or vacation time. He talks about how to deal with family crisis as everyone will go through it at some point. Everyone gets old and dies; how can we give our employees the time to deal with a family crisis. He seems to marvel at employees that bring their parents to company trips and tells them how he envisions their child being working for at least 5 - 10 years at Valve. Gabe seems like a very down to earth family guy.
Lastly he discusses employee time on the job and how allowing them to choose projects brings great inventions such as Steam and multiplayer within Valve's games. Employees are free to choose what they want to waste their time on. Your time at work is your time to spend on what you deem important. No progress reports are generated for Gabe. The customer feedback is your answer to "Am I doing a good job." They let you know if you made bad design choices. If things aren't balanced and need fixing. Best employees can find and fix issues based on customer feedback by weeding through the forum posts to find the problem.
Many employees thought that Steam was a bad idea in the early stages of development. A really bad idea. So employees could choose to work and incorporate ideas on it if they wanted to or they could work on something else. So the people that ended up working on Steam were the employees that had the most dedication to it, believed in it, and wanted to see it succeed. Seems to have worked.
My cliff notes seem to be as long as the article. Sorry.