Points from Lord Gabe on how Valve is setup.

Valve works on an open allocation system. Everyone is on a desk with wheels. If you want to hover over to work with someone else to do pair programming, it only takes you 5-10 minutes to move to that new area.

Management is a skill, it’s NOT a career path at Valve. Everyone at Valve is a project manager in a sense of communicating and planning their work with the team.

Some tasks evolve to be project orientated, so everyone is a mix of individual and group contribution. This applies to marketing and QA too.

This setup was revolutionary 15 years ago, now it’s more common, thankfully.

Gabe takes the fundamental view that your projects must have a quantitative system to track how well they are performing and to test if your approach worked. If it’s not quantitative, you’re doing it wrong.

How well did this work for Valve?

In 2013 Valve’s total users were ~97m. In 2023, the monthly active users, not total users, was ~120m. I hope that provides a useful comparison point.