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3 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 27 Jun 2023
From a gamer/programmer friend of mine, I've heard that Valve has a really intense work culture.
It's amazing how much they've accomplished with a team small enough to list everyone on a webpage: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/people
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413 sats \ 4 replies \ @0000 27 Jun 2023
I imagine they do. I don't know if its still true but I heard rumors it used to be about as flat as you can make an Org. People just sort of did whatever they felt like if they got bored. I imagine whatever environment evolved from that takes a specific kind of person. Not for me that is for sure.
I don't know if the company being this small is a great sign. 3 people in customer support at that scale? That does not make sense.
I love the redesign they did of steam recently though. Seems like they are trying to pull it together on a uniform design language.
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1470 sats \ 1 reply \ @clr 27 Jun 2023
Their employee handbook from 2012 (worth giving a look):
https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 27 Jun 2023
Sweet! If it's anything like facebook's red book, it's definitely worth a look.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Jun 2023
I guess it depends on how we define great. If great means high productivity and impact per employee, it's great.
I've heard some small companies have every employee do some number of hours in customer service per week (so people can actually feel the downstream mistakes they're making). I don't know if they do that at valve, but they might have some means of scaling the work of 3 people.
The first and only programming job I've had was structured this way in my dept (R&D). I really enjoyed it, but it was intense and involved lots of learning things the hard way, so I can see why some people wouldn't want that.
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413 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 27 Jun 2023
Sounds like fresh clean water for this fish... There's not much in the way of really good developer training out there compared to how it used to be. The MS Basic manual that came with my TRS-80 CoCo was a pleasure to step through one chapter at a time, by the end I could build my own rudimentary GUI! Age of 9, I should mention also.
I kinda imagine that Valve as a company is a bit like resistance leaders, eli, isaac, alyx, barney, all a bit crazy but allways getting out alive.
People who cultivate inner motivations have the capacity to work harder than artificially imposed. Cultivating that is an epic leadership skill. I can only assume that Gabe Newell was really not a fit in Microsoft...
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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @l0k18 27 Jun 2023
Valve is the best software company in the world. If only we could get them to start accepting LN.
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101 sats \ 0 replies \ @beorange OP 27 Jun 2023
That would be amazing. They already accepted bitcoin in the past, but I think LN would bring the payment UX to the next level.
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