Pros: Valve can be an amazing place to work, but it requires the right fit. The people who will do well at Valve need to be high performers in their specific area. Beyond that, they also need to excel at thinking about users and products and contributing to product-level decision-making. Additionally, people need to be able to take in a lot of sometimes conflicting opinions and advice from co-workers who are all peers. Then, they must make good decisions on what they should work on and what direction they should take their work independently. People who can demonstrate an ability to do those things well will be afforded a huge amount of freedom, independence, and responsibility at Valve. Most of the people who do those things well are extremely happy at Valve and have trouble imagining leaving. For those people, Valve is a place of huge opportunities, freedom to take big risks, freedom to work on many different projects, and a place filled with smart people who will help you accomplish things you couldn't on your own. In terms of more tangible pros, compensation is competitive at the base level. For high performers, bonuses (cash and sometimes equity) can be extremely generous. The company takes you and your immediate family on a free vacation to a fancy resort every year. You get extremely good medical coverage, life insurance, a very generous 401k matching plan, free food, free personal trainers, etc. Overall, benefits are generally as good as or better than the best companies out there.

Cons: The biggest con is that fit can be difficult to measure up front. The company has a difficult hiring process and works hard to measure not just your competence at your role but also your ability to work without a manager and to make high-level user/product decisions. This process is tuned towards allowing false negatives and trying to avoid false positives, but mistakes in hiring can still be made. For those who end up inside the company and struggle with the environment, it can be very painful. Since you don't have a manager, it can be difficult to get clear guidance on how to improve, and you may get conflicting advice from peers. The company has a yearly ranking/review process that has proven very effective at correctly compensating those who are doing well, but I agree with a prior reviewer who stated that it's never been 100% effective at providing useful feedback to those who need help. If you end up in a situation where you are struggling at Valve, you will get some advice and guidance from peers and from HR, but you will ultimately need to figure out your path to success on your own. For those used to having a more hands-on manager as their advocate, this can be hard. Many of the negative reviews here seem to come clearly from employees who struggled at Valve to varying degrees. My experience is that these employees are a small minority due to the difficult hiring process, but their negative experiences are still real. The best thing you could do for yourself before working at Valve is to try to really understand the work environment and the high expectations. Once you understand those, make sure you are really honest with yourself about whether Valve is likely to be a good fit.

Pros: Full given authority on what you work and how you work.

Cons: There is no manager to guide your career and coach you in identifying the objectives of the company. You are on your own.

Pros: Valve offers extremely generous benefits and perqs, and affords employees high levels of trust to do whatever they need to be productive. It is a privilege to work with the folks at Valve because nearly all are exceptionally accomplished, competent, and eager to build something great. The environment really encourages employees to be positive and to focus on work that will directly impact the customer. Productivity is rewarded in part by peer review, which makes employees accountable to their team. Changing teams/projects is usually easy and is usually each employee's own decision. Employee autonomy is inherent in Valve's process.

Cons: Many of the ways in which Valve seeks to differentiate from other companies are not actually so valid. While it's true that Valve has no official job titles or promotions, compensation varies greatly among employees, and many teams have an obvious pecking order. There is no formal management structure, but it's clear that some people have substantially more control over project direction and the work of others. Even though productivity is said to be the only metric that matters, people who are already connected or are accomplished social engineers will do just fine. Denying that all of these social forces are at work makes the problem intractable and difficult to even discuss. For a company that makes so much money, Valve is surprisingly risk-averse. New projects, internal tools, dev infrastructure, and anything that doesn't contribute to a current product are met with disdain. Because teams are intended to be self-forming, it's rare that enough people will want to assume risk to all collectively embark on a new project. It's too safe and too profitable to just contribute to something that's already successful. Even though failure is supposed to be tolerated and even encouraged so that employees will try new ideas and experiments, there is little evidence of this. After a few rounds of bonuses, folks learn quickly what is rewarded, and what is not. Valve's success has made folks arrogant, and this contributes to the problem of how new ideas are considered and discussed. Dogmatic thinking is actually common because people can always point to a great success in the past and use this to justify why everything should continue as it is. Some folks at Valve do not want the company to grow. Valve already has an incredibly strong profit/employee ratio. Why dilute it? This line of thinking crops up in project discussions as well, and causes many ideas to be dismissed because they seem too niche/unprofitable (at the time).