14 DAY TRIAL // Gabe Newell, who is the leader of Valve, has commented on the revelations coming from the company’s new employee handbook, stating that, “A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity. It’s a higher stress job and you get interrupted a lot more… some of the highest compensated people at the company are relatively pure individual contributors.”
He added, “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.”
Valve created and continues to support the Steam digital distribution service and launched some of the biggest franchises in gaming, from Team Fortress and Half-Life to Left 4 Dead and Portal.