not a valve employee, but when I interviewed there a few years ago, I was told your initial offer is a "reasonable" number you and the hiring team agree on, then is adjusted up/down as your peers estimate your impact over time.

the interview process is also kind of interesting -- you'll know if you got an offer or not before you leave the onsite interview. also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.

> I was told your initial offer is a "reasonable" number you and the hiring team agree on,

That makes sense, having the people who interview attempt to pick a comp that will get you in the door.

> then is adjusted up/down as your peers estimate your impact over time.

It is the mechanics of this that I am most interested in and no one will answer for me. Do people vote on their peer's salary? How does that not become super political? What happens if they all vote for each other to get 1000% raises, who stops them?

> also interesting was that they sent a driver to the airport instead of offering the normal taxi/uber reimbursement, then had the same driver pick me up after the interview to head back to the office.

If I were them the driver would be the beginning and end of the interview process. Were you kind to the driver on the way there? Did you say nasty things on the way back?

Or maybe they just got a good deal with a company that only had a few drivers. :)

Valve is a close approximation of a worker's co-op, if it had 300 (?) members. There are many insights to be gleaned from this type of business, the difference being that Valve for sure has a boss (or many), because it's not a worker's co-op, no matter how much it pretends to be. However a leader is not a boss, and you can tell the difference when you've been a part of worker-owned startups.

That said, true co-ops of all sizes also struggle with compensation. Much like startups, you want to reward early risk acceptance and loyalty while preserving fairness based on skill and contribution (otherwise you won't be able to recruit new members). It's really, really hard.

(I know who you are but I figured it was worth commenting since others may not know as much on the subject).

Where's a good place to find interesting worker co-ops to join when you're tired of the corp grind?

That's one downside, co-ops tend to remain small, due to the difficulty of scaling horizontal structures. This means it's easier to start one than to join one.

(This is also why I highly suspect Valve is not truly horizontal: you will never get 100 people to agree on anything important.)

The handbook says that employees stack rank each other based on value contribution and salary is adjusted accordingly. Compensation is controlled by the initial offer and then adjusted based on peer review.

I want to know the mechanics of "adjusted accordingly". Who adjusts it? Do your peers just vote on it? If that's the case, how do they avoid that becomes super political or just trading favors?

This seems relevant, although it doesn't explain everything:

> How pay is determined

>"This is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment. "In companies like Microsoft or elsewhere, usually the bonus is something between 8, 15, 20 percent of the basic salary. In Valve, I'm told, there's no upper limit to bonuses. Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage." "Gabe [Newell] had this view from the beginning. He wanted a community of partners, he didn't want to be the boss of anyone or to be bossed around by anyone."

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-i...

Valve has so much money and not many employees, they can pick their own salaries.

That can't possibly be right. Otherwise they'd all be making seven figures, because who wouldn't give themselves a seven figure salary?

Its based on stack ranking-- there's probably a set pie for the quarter based on business and the voting tells you how to divide it up.

Who determines the size of the pie to divide up? If it’s a formula, who sets the formula and who can change the formula?

I wouldn't… and don't. I'm interested in the things I do, not wealth numbers to accumulate. I'm the guy behind airwindows.com and have been spinning off code to other open source music projects for some years now, and I've got a number of projects going and even life changes happening.

I'm still more interested in WHAT I'm doing than what the compensation is. The patreon arc of Airwindows is sort of peaking out and subsiding very gradually and I'm looking at what else I can do: if I'm compensated much less than minumum wage it begins to affect what projects I can take on as it'll erode my resources too much. Such is the lot of an open source dev who's used inherited money as capital :)

I'd work at Valve. Sounds fascinating, and a bit like the production work I've done: working with a band and getting the most out of their album, except it's an ad hoc group of devs and the 'album' is a game or software infrastructure. There will be people in such a situation who are maximizing their own wealth. Such people are only minor obstacles to getting the THING you're making, optimized. Basically if you're getting enough money anyway and they will let you have the thing needed on the grounds that they take too much credit, but the thing can be made, then let 'em have the credit as long as they're not screwing up anything important.

It's sufficiently obvious who is contributing and for what reasons. There will always be outside perspectives, including outside of me and whoever is credit-seeking for wealth maximization.