Valve software hiring process

As a member of the Steam development team, you will engage in end-to-end development work to introduce features and components to our best-of-breed computer games and pioneering e-commerce platform.

By regularly shipping a variety of products, from small internal tools to large-scale web applications, you will directly and meaningfully impact the experience of millions of people. With an engaged community of users, you'll then have opportunities to improve your work based on the feedback and data you've collected to help measure your success.

As an experienced engineer seeking an opportunity to help shape the future of one of the world's largest digital distribution and ecommerce platforms, we hope you'll consider joining Valve. Your application will be reviewed by a member of the team, who will follow up with you soon. What We Offer. Valve strives to improve the diversity of our teams to better serve our diverse global audience.

We welcome and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. Candidates will be considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, family status, veteran status or disability status. Valve is committed to creating an inclusive work environment and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment in the workplace. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

Please contact us to request accommodation. Email address. Psychologists at Valve contribute to a wide variety of initiatives across the company and are trusted to prioritize their work in collaboration with their peers. Here are a few ways you could utilize your knowledge of experimental design, research methods, statistics, and human behavior to help us:.

Your application will be reviewed by a member of the team, who will follow up with you soon. What We Offer. Valve strives to improve the diversity of our teams to better serve our diverse global audience. We welcome and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. Candidates will be considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, family status, veteran status or disability status.

Valve is committed to creating an inclusive work environment and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment in the workplace. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

Please contact us to request accommodation. However, their in-house economist discussed the topic in an interview , and recent news about layoffs confirms that they do occasionally fire employees.

Exploring these sources and others helps us build up a picture of why Valve is so careful when hiring new employees, and so evasive about how it fires underperforming ones — firing is extremely long and painful. As a company with a flat structure, a critical consensus has to build before an individual is let go. This usually requires offering multiple opportunities for turning things around, including meetings and evaluations so that the employee in question can improve.

Once the decision is made to terminate, there is no protocol or managerial authority to hide behind — the employee has been kicked out of the company by his peers, which even in the best case is likely to result in social tension. So Valve institutes a rigorous system of vetting potential employees to avoid the pain of firing them, their own model of employee management forcing them to ensure that every employee hired is also an effective manager of themselves and the company as a whole.

Despite these limitations, Valve is an enormously successful company with tremendous market dominance and a strong future. Their flat model clearly works, even if it requires an owner willing to allow employee management and a strong company culture. While exporting the entire model might be difficult, anyone interested in software management should look to Valve for an alternative model of management and organization. Skip to content Introduction The Valve Corporation is a Bellevue, Washington based company known for its award winning Half Life , Portal, and Team Fortress games, as well as the extremely popular digital distribution service and multiplayer framework known as Steam.

Exploring the Valve Employee Handbook In , Valve deliberately made its handbook for new employees public by uploading it to the Web. Peer Evaluation, Ownership, and Funding Valve uses a stack ranking system inherited from Microsoft, in which employees periodically give performance evaluations for their teammates and adjusts compensation accordingly.