Valve employee handbook
A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do.
The subtitle to the Valve employee handbook: "A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do."
Valve has an incredible legacy of game development over multiple decades, releasing generational titles like Half Life, Counterstrike, and building the Steam gaming platform. Whenever I encounter sustained excellence like this, I'm always curious.
It turns out that they also have an extremely unique culture.
There's an incredible amount of opinionated character in here — it's great and makes this handbook tremendously entertaining to read.
Just look at this official diagram in the employee handbook:
That's when you know it's going to be interesting.
"This book isn’t about fringe benefits or how to set up your workstation or where to find source code. Valve works in ways that might seem counterintuitive at first. This handbook is about the choices you’re going to be making and how to think about them. Mainly, it’s about how not to freak out now that you’re here."
Valve is blunt about one thing: this isn't your standard corporate guidebook. You’re not going to find any glossy perks or vague guidelines when reading this. Instead, the handbook dives straight into the how and why of decision-making, offering up principles that will help its employees navigate the ambiguity of a flat, decentralized organization.
The handbook doesn’t spoon-feed you answers — it trusts you to think, adapt, and figure it out. And it preps you to stay (hopefully) calm as you do.
"Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re talented or collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be."
This is a refreshing inversion of the Peter Lynch quote, where he famously says something to the effect of: buy into a business that’s doing so well an idiot could run it, because sooner or later, one will.
Valve points out the positive formulation of this idea.
When you interview someone, you're not just looking for a fit for the current role. You're looking for someone who could potentially run the whole company, because at Valve, there's a distinct possibility that might happen.
The assumption is clear: great people don’t just fit into the structure; they are the structure. The expectation is that each individual holds the potential to influence and lead at the highest levels.
"Why do I need to pick my own projects? We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100."
You’re not being given a slice of freedom to explore a side project once you’ve hit a quota. It's not the Googler's 20% time.
At Valve, everything you do is self-directed. The idea that employees might need permission to choose projects is foreign here. What drives this culture is autonomy, and with autonomy comes the weight of taking full responsibility for your actions. If you want to work on something, you vote with your feet — or in this case, your desk wheels.
Yes, every single Valve desk has wheels.
"Cabals are really just multidisciplinary project teams. We’ve self-organized into these largely temporary groups since the early days of Valve. They exist to get a product or large feature shipped."
Valve’s version of teamwork is doesn’t resemble traditional departments, teams, or committees. These aren’t “teams” as you might think of them. Instead, they’re self-organized cabals, a carefully selected term fitting for the kind of company Valve aims to be.
Teams are temporary, built for specific goals, and disbanded once the job’s done. It’s not a rigid structure — it’s an ever-shifting, organically forming collective effort.
"What if I screw up? Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake."
Mistakes happen. And at Valve, they aren’t seen as career-ending failures. Quite the opposite: they’re viewed as essential learning experiences. The freedom to fail is something deeply embedded in Valve’s DNA. It’s not just about making mistakes; it’s about learning from them and recalibrating your assumptions. The idea that failure could be a step forward rather than a setback might seem counterintuitive, but Valve’s attitude is clear: as long as you’re learning, evolving, and adapting, you're doing it right.
"But what if we ALL screw up? So if every employee is autonomously making his or her own decisions, how is that not chaos?"
Yes, this was my exact question after reading the section about Valve's perspective on mistake-making.
It’s easy to imagine that with total freedom comes complete chaos. But Valve has a counterintuitive take: decentralized decision-making leads to better outcomes. The reason is simple: when everyone is responsible, everyone is invested. This collective responsibility ensures that there’s a constant push toward improvement, because no one is waiting for a manager to step in. Everyone’s an owner.
And as a result, Valve has built a company that’s capable of learning and evolving quickly, with everyone at the wheel.
"Working at Valve provides an opportunity for extremely efficient and, in many cases, very accelerated, career growth."
At Valve, the growth ladder isn’t standardized — it’s personalized. You don’t climb the corporate hierarchy based on tenure or some cookie-cutter career path. Instead, your growth is directly tied to how quickly you can learn and adapt, and whether you can rise to new challenges.
It reflects Valve’s belief in self-direction — if you’re ambitious and capable, you can chart your own course. There’s no formal development plan because Valve trusts high performers to self-improve. If you need support, it’s available, but it’s not going to come in a pre-packaged plan.
Your career is yours to shape and grow.
"Does all this stuff scale?"
Again, another question that I had reading up to this point. And I'm not sure if I believe Valve's answer yet.
This question gets to the heart of Valve’s ambitions as it grows. Can this highly decentralized, autonomous structure really work as the company scales?
So far, Valve's highly decentralized and autonomous structure has worked. And Valve’s conviction is that with the right kind of hiring — bringing in capable, self-directed individuals — makes a lot of sense.
The catch? Hiring well is crucial. As Valve grows, they must continue to recruit exceptional people (more below). If they fail at hiring, the whole structure will likely fall apart faster than a more traditional structure. But if they succeed, this model of self-management and autonomy should continue to scale.
"Why is hiring well so important at Valve? Adding individuals to the organization can influence our success far more than it does at other companies."
Valve is crystal clear: hiring is everything. In a traditional hierarchical organization, an individual’s impact might be confined to their team or department. But in Valve’s flat structure, *every single hire* has the potential to influence the entire company.
A brilliant new person can unlock new value across every project and team. But a bad hire? That can cause real damage, and the lack of a traditional management structure means there are fewer checks and balances to catch it early.
This is why hiring is treated with such maniacal focus at Valve — get it right, and the whole company benefits; get it wrong, and the consequences are disastrous.
"What is Valve not good at?"
I always love seeing this kind of metacognition and reflection from any organization, and the ability to identify the tradeoffs and weaknesses of an approach, process, or culture bodes well:
"The design of the company has some downsides. We usually think they’re worth the cost, but it’s worth noting that there are a number of things we wish we were better at:
Helping new people find their way. We wrote this book to help, but as we said above, a book can only go so far.
Mentoring people. Not just helping new people figure things out, but proactively helping people to grow in areas where they need help is something we’re organizationally not great at. Peer reviews help, but they can only go so far.
Disseminating information internally.
Finding and hiring people in completely new disciplines (e.g., economists! industrial designers!).
Making predictions longer than a few months out.
We miss out on hiring talented people who prefer to work within a more traditional structure. Again, this comes with the territory and isn’t something we should change, but it’s worth recognizing as a self-imposed limitation."
The model Valve T-shaped employee
I actually advocate for organizations to hire M-shaped people, but this specific flavor of T-shaped employee could be pretty interesting too!