Valve firing process echoes studio’s peer-driven structure

For Valve’s employees, working at one of the most secretive development studios around constitutes a once-in-a-respawn experience. The leakage of Valve’s employee handbook earlier this year colorfully outlined a flat management structure culturing a counterintuitive emphasis on peer-driven independence. Speaking to Seattle Interactive Conference attendees yesterday (as reported by GeekWire), Valve Product Designer Greg Coomer said the same free-form philosophy governing the company’s work ethic also factors into firing someone.
“I wish that we had covered firing in the employee handbook,” Coomer said. “It was one of the things that we left out. We tried writing it, but we didn’t feel like we were capturing how Valve thinks about (firing) in a well enough way. It was almost a wording problem. We couldn’t get it done in the time that we wouldn’t to finish the handbook. The short answer of how we handle terminations, really, is the same as we approach all other decisions at the company: It’s a peer-driven process.
“If it turns out that we made a bad hiring decision, or that somebody is just not working out, there’s a method we use to get the people who are involved in the same room and to walk through the decision about what should really happen as a result of this person not functioning very well. Some of the details are kind of boring, but the main answer is that it’s peer-driven, just like we evaluate each other as peers.”
I wonder what a caricaturized “Termination and You” chapter in the handbook would look like—probably the Pyro immolating an office chair or something. Still, Coomer attributed Valve’s higher rate of self-fulfillment to the significant flexibility it bestows upon its workers, saying, “There are attributes that other companies have quoted about themselves that they allow their (employees) to spend some fraction of their time actually deciding on their own what to work on, but at Valve that percentage of your time is 100 percent. Every single person is responsible for deciding what they do every day.”