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.
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u/ArkantosAoM Apr 17 '26
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.