Valve Corporation Reviews

Pros

‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎I get to work on my favorite game

Cons

‎‎‎‎‎‎I am the only developer and work as a janitor

Pros

Good team work , Respectful

Cons

Lot's of Valve's and more Valve's

Pros

I've been at Valve over 13 years and have a lot of fun transitioning from film work to games. I work with people much smarter than me whom I learn from, and seek my opinions on my area of expertise.

Cons

Everyone I work with is a senior level person, so no one does your gritty work, you do it from the ground up and have fun doing it. Prioritizing your time daily can sometimes be hard, but its also really gratifying when its done well.

Pros

- great pay for gaming - great perks for you and your family - fantastic flexibility - wide range of options on what you want to work on.

Cons

- incredibly unprofessional. - screaming matches and high-school-esque cliques are rampant. - defined more by "not being Microsoft" than having an actual identity. - "tall poppies get cut" mentality, unless you're in the right clique.

Pros

Amazing company culture. Insanely good benefits. Yearly trip to Hawaii for full-time employees and their family. Amazing place to really make impact on products/games. Some of the best people I've ever worked with. The smaller size of the company is really great for how they work and succeed.

Cons

Lack of traditional hierarchy can create a "high school" type hierarchy. Or rather the cool kids make the rules and if they don't like how you work, it can make being successful there very difficult. The company is very vague about policy which can be beneficial but also can be used against you very easily. Some teams are a lot more work than others and can easily lead to burn out.

Pros

Valve can be an amazing place to work, but it requires the right fit. The people who will do well at Valve need to be high performers in their specific area, but beyond that they also need to excel at thinking about users and products and contributing to product level decision making. Additionally people need to be able to take in a lot of sometimes conflicting opinions and advice from co-workers who are all peers and then go make good decisions on what they should work on and what direction they should take their work independently. People who can demonstrate an ability to do those things well will be afforded a huge amount of freedom, independence, and responsibility at Valve. Most of the people who do those things well are extremely happy at Valve and have trouble imagining leaving. For those people Valve is a place of huge opportunities, freedom to take big risks, freedom to work on many different projects, and a place filled with smart people who will help you accomplish things you couldn't on your own. In terms of more tangible pros compensation is competitive at the base level, and for high performers bonuses (cash and sometimes equity) can be extremely generous. The company takes you and your immediate family on a free vacation to a fancy resort every year, you get extremely good medical coverage, life insurance, a very generous 401k matching plan, free food, free personal trainers, etc. Overall benefits are generally as good or better than the best companies out there.

Cons

The biggest con is that fit can be difficult to measure up front. The company has a difficult hiring process and works hard to measure not just your competence at your role but also your ability to work without a manager and to make high level user/product decisions. This process is tuned towards allowing false negatives and trying to avoid false positives but mistakes in hiring can still be made. For those who end up inside the company and struggle with the environment it can be very painful. Since you don't have a manager it can be difficult to get clear guidance on how to improve and you may get conflicting advice from peers. The company has a yearly ranking/review process that has proven very effective at correctly compensating those who are doing well but I agree with a prior reviewer who stated that it's never been 100% effective at providing useful feedback to those who need help. If you end up being in a situation where you are struggling at Valve you will get some advice and guidance from peers and from HR but you will ultimately need to figure out your path to success on your own. For those used to having a more hands on manager as their advocate this can be hard. Many of the negative reviews here seem to come clearly from employees who struggled at Valve to varying degrees. My experience is that these employees are a small minority due to the difficult hiring process but their negative experiences are still real. The best thing you could do for yourself before working at Valve is to try to really understand the work environment and the high expectations. Once you understand those make sure you are really honest with yourself about whether Valve is likely to be a good fit.

Pros

The trust each worker has and the crazy fringe benefits.

Cons

The reviews are kind of odd, as it's a "flat structure" that leaves a weird power dynamic while managing reviews. Pretty small con for how amazing it is to work with them.

Pros

Freedom High wage Work with professionals Location Ability to work from home

Cons

Too much freedom leads to internal conflicts

Pros

A lot of percs due to the constant money stream from Steam Great salaries High level of talent among most coworkers Used to make great games.

Cons

The place is run like a school yard without adult supervision. Bullies and loud people get the attention and rewards There's a definite, though unspoken pecking order. Several cliques. If you're not in the right clique, you won't have a good experience You can be fired out of the blue without warning, even if you're worked there successfully for years. They don't make games any more. You could work on developing a project for years and just have it dropped for no good reason other than one of the self appointed leaders decided he wasn't interested anymore. They sell you a real bill of goods coming in, that you'll have all the freedom in the world to do what you want , work on things that interest you and that they just want a lot of highly creative people to make great things. But after a short time there you start to see how the sausage is made and what you were told was an exaggeration at best

Pros

Valve hires very smart people with a shared core set of expectations about communications and problem solving. Individuals and groups at the company act with customer goals identified, and sort tasks and product choices accordingly. The employee handbook and occasional articles about how the place runs are true. There are no bosses. No one, including Gabe, has the authority to tell someone else what to do. Proponents must recruit people to projects by explaining why the task is important and how it is important, and convincing people to share time or prioritize over other competing needs. The lack of hierarchy and titles is a conscious design to minimize bureaucratic resistance to getting work accomplished (and bureaucratic authority to get the wrong work accomplished). It's also a design to keep valuable employees indefinitely. No one has to leave because a peer got a promotion into a job he/she though he/she deserved. No one has to become a manager because it's the way to get paid more. Individuals can get more and more valuable over years and decades of work, get rewarded as such, and have no particular forcing functions to trigger them to leave. Great to individual and company. The scarce resource at Valve is people's time. Capital is available for most any purchase need, if you can make the case for what you're doing and why. Routine purchasing decisions are devolved to employees. This system, hiring great people, giving them resources and great colleagues, and getting out of the way between them and their customers, has produced a lot of value for customers and the company. Last pro: Valve takes good care of employees and their families. Benefits are generous and sometimes astonishing. Most anything that can keep employees happy and productive will be considered.

Cons

To succeed at Valve, you have to be a self-starter. No one will tell you what to do -- if you ask, people may give you an opinion about what they think you should do, but no one hands you a list of your five most important tasks for the next review period. Beyond being a self-starter, you have to come up with ways to judge yourself, or to gather feedback from customers, partners (developers/publishers/vendors), or other employees. I think the comp system works reasonably well, but the feedback system has never functioned well for all employees. When an employee is having trouble, the system (which is really just a group of peers, sometimes guided by HR or more senior colleagues) is more focused and effective at gathering and communicating specific feedback for people. Some people are just driven nuts by the uncertainty of this kind of management and feedback system. Some people thrive and delight in the absence of semi-annual self-evaluation forms. At Valve, it's hard to get a grand project started. It's easy to get a clever, valuable, smaller project started. Turning the latter into the former requires great communication skills or a clever plan of laying out small projects to take the company in the direction you think is smart (and which is confirmed by the outcomes of prior small projects). There are no patrons to make things happen for you. I disagree with a few other (typically former employee- ) reviews that suggest there is secret management structure that controls everything. There are certainly more senior people (who may or may not be more experienced by years of work) who can give great feedback on what is worth doing, or how to do something. But there is incredibly little control, and shadow management is just not true. I think that is often a projection by people who can't believe the uncertainty of radical freedom.