The LBJ School
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2013–2017
1:02:53 · 919K views · Jan 31, 2013
Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, gives a talk at the LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses Valve's hiring and pay, its flat structure and an open-office anecdote.
HN cites it for how Valve works: hiring unconventional talent, paying by value, firing as aggressively as hiring, and why open offices fail.
8 comments from Hacker News
If you like this type of content, check out the Reddit subforum [LINK] , which covers behind the scenes footage and 'making of' material for video games. There's an alphabetical listing of all submissions that you can use to search for a particular title. [LINK] Press CTRL-F on that page and try searching for your favorite game. Searching for 'Valve' will lead you to the numerous developer commentaries that Valve has included in their games, similar to cast commentaries on DVDs. Valve founder Gabe Newell gave a talk about productivity, economics and corporations that you might find of interest: this video A good article during the final hours of Half-Life 2 development is this one written by Geoff Keighley: [LINK]
One of my favourite anecdotes about open offices is 22m in to this video[1], where Gabe Newell of Valve talks about his desire to have one office per person and how it didn't work out in practice. Bonus: he mentions Peopleware. [1] this video
> This is corporate bullshit I spent 4 years at the largest business software company in the world and have spent 3 years on and off in very small (3 employee) startups. I would presume my bullshit meter is fairly well tuned. > you've fallen for it. I haven't. I tried finding a technical co-founder that didn't cost me an arm and leg, and it's taken me 6 years to do so. (YMMV) > This is an architect. And this position should be paid significantly more than an engineer. This is laughable. I've seen more architects in my day than most people have seen sales people. Just type in "SAP Architect" on any job search and compare it to the number you get for "Rails Architect". Architects are the bullshit powerpoint pushers I used to see day in and day out in Enterprise IT, who, after 5 years of never coding or implementing, fell short of guiding their dev teams because they couldn't keep up with the ever-changing technology stack. You know who should be paid more than anyone else? The person that can build a small team, make crazy revenue in a very short (relative) amount of time. It doesn't matter what you call those people, but they do exist, are in short supply and should be compensated equal to their productive output. > What I see here is that the bar for the definition of "competent engineer" keeps going higher and higher, without a commensurate increase in salary. Actually this has more to do with time than anything. The Next Big Startup™, can't afford to spend 6 months on softw
There's a subtle theme in this essay which describes the thought process of how YC (well pg specifically) selects teams for YC. Perhaps in a way, bringing clarity to what is generally seen as a non-scientific and highly complex line of reasoning for hiring and selecting talent with very little limited context. However, I still don't feel like I've still fully grokked it. > Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good. Yet, outside the walls of YC, sounding crazy means you don't get in. > But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) How is it possible to discern this in a YC application? This is all reminiscent of the talk Gabe Newell, CEO and founder of Valve, gave on the hiring practices at Valve. this video Here he mentions the following: (paraphrased) "One of the first programmers of the company was the manager of a waffle house. He was one of the most and still one of the most creative people in the industry" So what made them take the risk? What makes Valve turn away every waffle house manager that applies today? What made YC take the risk on Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk?
There was a talk recently Gabe gave a university, where he was sort of talk generically about how Valve compensates, and the figure of half a million was mentioned for a hypothetical hire from Weta. That's the closest to a number from Valve I've heard. Edit: found the talk and the moment, and it wasn't quite as I remember this video Rather he was talking generically about employees getting paid something that reflects the value they bring.