After the recent leak of Valve’s employee handbook
to the public, many in the business world have become curious about the
ins and outs of the developer’s practices. Bloomberg Businessweek sat down
with co-founder Gabe Newell to ask him, among other things, why he
chose to organize Valve Corporation in such an unorthodox manner.
Newell told the publication that Valve categorizes employees by
“individual” and “group” contributors, rather than by the traditional
hierarchy of supervisors and subordinates.
“A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more
productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own
productivity,” he explained. “It’s a higher stress job and you get
interrupted a lot more… [but] some of the highest compensated people at
the company are relatively pure individual contributors.”
Newell also pointed out that a given employee may be managing a group
project one day and be contributing as an individual the next. He even
went as far as to say that it’s “pretty rare” for any one person to take
the helm on more than one consecutive project.
When asked what the reasoning behind this structure was, Newell
suggested that it was the industry itself that guided the decision.
“When we started Valve, we thought about what the company needed to
be good at. We realized that here, our job was to create things that
hadn’t existed before,” he said. “Managers are good at
institutionalizing procedures, but in our line of work that’s not always
good. Sometimes the skills in one generation of product are irrelevant
to the skills in another generation.”
While Valve’s practices may make certain traditional businesspeople’s
heads spin, the continuing success of Steam, which still holds a
commanding share of the digital game distribution market, certainly
validates Gabe’s ideas. Could Valve usher in an age without bosses?
No comments:
Post a Comment