Rich Geldreich, a game programmer who worked on Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, was involved in Valve's Linux push, and is currently working at his own startup, recently wrote a massive Twitter storm about his experience with so called self-organizing companies like Valve, starting with this tweet (they're not all in one thread unfortunately, you'll have to scroll through the profile): https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1018235592620965888 Some choice quotes: Remember Yanis Varofakis? This reminds me of the Oculus debacle: There's a lot more tweets that I didn't include here, and it's all very interesting. It's startling to see Valve through such lenses after being their fanboy for a very long time. John Carmack also chimed in with his experience at id Software: Purge me if old.
has there been a non-supernatural horror movie about working in an office? cause this kinda sounds like it
I feel like I've played enough TF2 to have seen the effects of the defensive coding and mucking up of things, purposefully or not. It was interesting to hear Carmack said those mega bonuses during the Doom boom led to some pathological behavior. Is the solution to make fewer bonuses for work done relative to others and focus on people just having their agreed upon salaries instead?
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1018955827770638336 This one about company vacations is incredibly interesting to me. (Valve's Hawaiian vacations are the first thing I thought of.)
lot of it sounds like the standard corporate shtick (at least from my experience) ... nothing really that specific to the "self-organizing firms"
Call me shocked that professionals that are alienated from their work will chose to maximize their individual gain over anything else. No one could have predicted this, especially not in 1867.
I couldn't have said it better. All the more reason to start putting more emphasis on alternative services, like GOG (cue stories about how that place is trash, too).
I dont know much about the insides of game development, so forgive me if im wrong. What this is basiclaly saying is that devs will intentionally try and bring down other projects within the company, so that the project there working on ends up being the best/completed and therefore results in them getting bigger bonuses ? And also that becuase these places dont realy have ‘officially’ bosses, it creates ‘unofficial bosses’ and cliques that basically control the work environment
I have suspected a lot of this about Valve for a long time. Their happy-go-lucky "Be your own boss! Move your desk to whatever team you want to work on!" thing is kind of a crock. There is always someone in charge.
This isn't that surprising to me. The whole self-organizing, people-work-on-whatever-they-want-to-work-on culture always sounded too Utopian to be true.
sounds like a FUCKING NIGHTMARE. I was getting an upset stomach and a flush face just reading those choice quotes. Almost on the levels of the mornings I had chemo therapy. I hope everyone that can and wants to leave, does so and are better off. As much as I think I like Valve, I have to remind myself of this now. Maybe it's time to back off using Steam once and for all. Edit: If this is corporate culture like another poster says, I imagine I'd end up like Peter from Office Space.
Not surprised at all to hear Valve is an awful place to work at. They seem to curate their own company and staff with the same mentality as they handle Steam.
This hostile competitive nature is exactly what tore Microsoft apart for years. Gabe was an early MS employee (and got filthy rich from it) and his biggest mistake when founding Valve was adapting MS' toxic, loathed (and now abandoned) stack ranking system. Every single one of those tweets, at their heart, goes back to stack ranking. All of Valve's dysfunction is related to stack ranking. There's a reason even MS eventually abandoned this shit system. It's awful and notorious to anyone who understands it. Valve didn't succeed because Gabe copied that model, they succeeded despite it (although they're now stuck in the malaise that it created).
I can’t remember the last time I heard anything about Valve that made me think better of it as a conpany.
Shocking that Valve sounds like a Libertarian Lord of the Flies hellscape of an office to work in. Corporate offices do these things as well, but I can't imagine not having any structure and accountability with that level of office politics going on. It creates incentives for everything bad/exploitable about corporate structure without any of the benefits for lower-tier employees (structure, chain of command/accountability to the extent it can be relied upon).
Years ago I commented on a gaf thread about how valve obviously has "bosses" despite claiming to be "self organizing." People thought I was trolling but this is just common sense. Organizations have heirarchies even if they are unofficial.
Considering that the "work on what you want!" thing lead up to more of the same for year I totally believe it.
Well it sounds a bit too cynical to me. But while I'm not sure, everyone sees working there the same way, I'm also sure that complete self organisation at a job is a myth. There's always influencing going on somewhere..
Of course there are bosses, but people are just too blind or too stupid to admit it. Just imagine a working place with no bosses where you can do whatever you want, it would self-implode in no time.
Observing how dumb people act even when there is hierarchy this is not surprising at all Valve is overrated as fuck for so many reasons and this myth about their nonsense is one of them
I don't know about gog specifically, but CDPR is well known these days for not being the best place to work.
This Especially the remark about contractors as I certainly felt 'lower class' at EA as a result of being a contractor
RUN... run away from these places.... they have nothing to do with living a real life. Corporate = living a non human life, that really has no meaning at all..... it's all just empty, fantasy, crazy nonsense.
Very ominous tone in both these tweets (probably in my head). I feel like this is the beginning of a horror/drama movie and we'll see what she's tweeting in a couple years.
I'd believe it. Some of the stuff he mentions definitely lines up with some of the stuff other former Valve employees have said over the years, especially the competitive nature of it.
These three excerpts are especially scathing. Like holy shit... Sounds like an office version of hell
I’ve been working in similar fields for my entire life (easily several decades worth) and I’ve never had to put up with anything like this. Maybe I was just lucky.
Little dramatic there. I don't blame him. There are successful companies that can be a real fuckshop to work at. The grass is always greener on the other side, though. Work is Hell.
I actually felt the same tbh. She sounds kinda dark, as if nothing matters anymore while still trying to wear a happy face.
Like Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate. First couple months are gravy then......... cue dark_music.mp3.
That this kind of defensive coding is necessary doesn't surprise me at all and would also explain (in part) why Valve's output is so slow. Valve really got lucky with Steam and its de-facto monopoly (unfortunately). I expected Valve not to be a fun place to work at but I didn't expect it to be this bad.
I actually appreciate how the guy gives a lot of tips for people who end up working on places like these. This invaluable information people, learn from it. All that rings true to the history that James( the guy called a ass by gaben) told on why he got fired. All work of a guy who didn't liked him and tried to lobby against him.
I never believed Valve's flat structure or whatever you want to call it was any good. Humans need hierarchy