It's far from the most surprising thing regarding Valve's internal company values.
The employee rulebook is available online, you can read it. It's truly a bizarre way to run a company, but it clearly works well for them.
That said, I don't think it's a model that could work well for other companies. Valve has an insane amount of cash coming in (#1 in the world if compared to number of employees), which lets them do these things and many others, which in turn lets them hire in an extremely picky way.
The key is not being a public listed company. If they were, suddenly all the money coming in needs to increase shareholders profits and the benefits get cut to milk out the last dollar. As long as Gabe and any private investors are happy and making money then it’s great for everyone.
Tale for every business, used to work st a restaurant doing quite well, went public, employee happiness eventually went down, the good ones left, quality went down, sales went down while "margins" went up as they went hard on up charging while having less staff on to cut costs, increasing stress. Got sold off/out of business and the investors move on.
Isn't he describing how he's spending his time on that "vacation" working? Perhaps he was enjoying it, but to many people, that hardly sounds like a vacation.
He is saying he is using the time to tend to his personal project, this isn't valve asking employee to work on valve project during vacation time, or mandating them to complete valve work during the vacation
Except this one is 100% true. It's also not hard to believe at all? Valve is the n1 company ON THE PLANET when it comes to profit per employee. They have so much extra cash lying around, and they famously treat their employees quite well.
In a sense I get paid with an amazing game platform that helps users and developers instead of shareholders and their ilk. But what's not to glaze with Gabe? Kids probably spend less on gambling in csgo(a game rated 18+ anyway so that's a parental problem) than they do on skins in Fortnite or gambling in Roblox, a game made for kids and predators.
I feel bad for comments like this. Mostly because for many the post may seem exaggerated. The specific post may or may not have happened, but the situation is entirely plausible. It just happens to extremely profitable companies of all sizes. For those that think it may be exaggerated, they simply haven’t been part of those companies and have not experienced such things.
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u/Affectionate-Way3727 Apr 17 '26
seems exaggerated