Newell: Contributions more well suited to Valve than hierarchy

Valve boss Gabe Newell has said individual or group contributions inside the company are better suited than a corporate hierarchy typically found at most places.

"A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity," Newell said in a Bloomberg piece.

"It’s a higher stress job and you get interrupted a lot more… [but] some of the highest compensated people at the company are relatively pure individual contributors."

Newell also noted that one particular person within Valve is unlikely to be found leading more than one consecutive project.

"When we started Valve, we thought about what the company needed to be good at. We realised that here, our job was to create things that hadn’t existed before.

"Managers are good at institutionalising procedures, but in our line of work that’s not always good. Sometimes the skills in one generation of product are irrelevant to the skills in another generation.”

Newell's remarks follow the release of the company's new employee handbook. That should be given a read if not done so already, FYI.

There's more at the Bloomberg link. Thanks, PC Gamer.