I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.
I think it is closer to:
You get hired to fill a specific role (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They may have moved on from the structure they had ~10 years ago but there was documentation and interviews about that internal structure. yes it worked similar to that, there where tasks to be done but employees could largely choose whatever they want to work on, there where no formal managers but plenty de facto managers, there was base pay scales but most of the pay was bonuses, that where indeed based on the reviews of your coworkers based on how much work/value you appeared to make for the company. Because valve is private is why it had such a unique structure. Alot of former employees spoke about how that pay structure killed alot of projects and deincetivised maintenance tasks. Then because there was no formal management, if you wanted to work on larger projects you had to convince coworkers to work with you there was no assigned teams or bosses, and if your project took longer then the year, it would be likely there would be no fruit of your labor and you would likely be rated lower, i.e. less pay. Of course no formal bosses does not mean there was not cliques employees that had been there longer and/or had more influence with more coworkers had more power to form teams and trusted when working longer projects, also employees would connect with coworkers so that the work they did would be noticed. Who completed your employee review would be basically random, so you had to hope/ensure everyone knew what you where doing.
Obviously there are alot of issues with this, I hope they have since moved on but last I heard there wasn’t much traction to change it. There is no board to appease and Gabe is the one who made the system, change is difficult for valve.