413 sats \ 4 replies \ @0000 27 Jun 2023 \ parent \ on: Valve Contracts Another Prominent Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Developer tech
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.
Their employee handbook from 2012 (worth giving a look):
https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
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Sweet! If it's anything like facebook's red book, it's definitely worth a look.
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I don't know if the company being this small is a great sign.
I guess it depends on how we define great. If great means high productivity and impact per employee, it's great.
3 people in customer support at that scale? That does not make sense.
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.
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.
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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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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