Gabe Newell on the merits of not hiring managers

Valve - Gabe Newell

After the recent leak of Valve's employee handbook to the public, many in the business world have become curious about the ins and outs of the developer's practices. Bloomberg Businessweek sat down with co-founder Gabe Newell to ask him, among other things, why he chose to organize Valve Corporation in such an unorthodox manner.

Newell told the publication that Valve categorizes employees by “individual” and “group” contributors, rather than by the traditional hierarchy of supervisors and subordinates.

“A group contributor's job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity,” he explained. “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 pointed out that a given employee may be managing a group project one day and be contributing as an individual the next. He even went as far as to say that it's “pretty rare” for any one person to take the helm on more than one consecutive project.

When asked what the reasoning behind this structure was, Newell suggested that it was the industry itself that guided the decision.

“When we started Valve, we thought about what the company needed to be good at. We realized that here, our job was to create things that hadn't existed before,” he said. “Managers are good at institutionalizing 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.”

While Valve's practices may make certain traditional businesspeople's heads spin, the continuing success of Steam, which still holds a commanding share of the digital game distribution market, certainly validates Gabe's ideas. Could Valve usher in an age without bosses?

TOPICS
Contributor

Len Hafer is a freelancer and lifelong PC gamer with a specialty in strategy, RPGs, horror, and survival games. A chance encounter with Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness changed her life forever. Today, her favorites include the grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, and thought-provoking, story-rich RPGs like Persona 5 and Disco Elysium. She also loves history, hiking in the mountains of Colorado, and heavy metal music.

Latest in Platforms
A screenshot from game Mudborne of a little humanoid frog in a marsh
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 24, 2025)
midnight murder club
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 17, 2025)
Screenshot of Children of Clay showing a mysterious clay model
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 10, 2025)
discord
Brace yourself for Discord to get worse: Reports swirl that the company is in talks with bankers about opening itself up to shareholders
The Spy from Team Fortress 2 holds up a folder with an accusatory expression.
Steam users react ecstatically to update that lets them access their heaving game notes via the web, also it fixes Monster Hunter Wilds video recording
HasanAbi
Twitch streamer Hasan Piker suspended after saying Republicans would 'kill Rick Scott' if they really cared about Medicare fraud
Latest in News
Story of Seasons - A cahacter in a purple tuxedo stands outside in a town square talking to the player
Story of Seasons is doing another Harvest Moon remake and it might be the best the series has ever looked
Assassin's Creed Shadows change seasons - An upper-body shot of Yasuke looking cheerfully up into the distance.
Assassin's Creed Shadows puts up the 'second highest day-one sales revenue in Assassin's Creed franchise history'
A witch riding a broom sails past a Fish and Chips shop.
Cozy gamers rejoice: Witchbrook finally has a release window, and yes, you can fly around on a broom with your friends
starcraft 2 face
StarCraft fans taunted by the announcement of a new StarCraft... board game
kingdom come: deliverance 2 henry looks confused
'Medieval Batman' completes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 pacifist playthrough with zero kills and 535 knockouts
SUQIAN, CHINA - OCTOBER 6, 2024 - Illustration Tencent's plan to buy Ubisoft, Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, October 6, 2024. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Ubisoft and Tencent are forming a new company that will take control of its most successful franchises: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six