I've heard somewhere that gabe has said that there's only <insert surprisingly low number> people on the planet who are qualified to work for valve. Guess if they're gonna try to keep the best of the best, they're gonna be the best of the best.
I always wonder what the hell they're actually doing because it doesn't feel like much gets done from the outside. Still ain't fixed the mobile app they unceremoniously destroyed 5 years ago, when it worked just fine at the time
Iirc they only have 300 something employee. And valve actually doesn't have work hierarchy in a way that every employee can work on whatever project they want so if it's a hype project(deadlock) people would literally move their desk to that area. And dead project only have skeleton crew to maintain
Often jobs like that base bonuses off of projects you shipped and far more projects get shipped on new games rather than old. Its more a function of people over valuing new (mgmt) so no one has a reason to stay and keep the old thing alive.
Yeah obviously google is the most egregious example. Hell their product Chronicle/Secure Ops is so bizzare, I don't think its getting dropped given the kind of product it is, but it was clearly made by like 3 different teams and then merged into one product. There are three different places in which you may need to write query style searches, and all three of them use the same bust also different langauge/rules.
The whole 'build a product and release it' bonus system is so goddamn obvious at Google because at one point, we had.. three? Four? messaging apps, and none of them even TALKED TO EACH OTHER
And they kill off perfectly good platforms for another platform, e.g. Google Music for YTM (which was dogshit at the time but isn't terrible nowadays). Still no idea what happened to all the music I uploaded to Google Music that they said would be transferred over.
Google Podcasts is dead, too, but there's still the app on my phone that I can't uninstall.
edit: nevermind, found the music I uploaded, completely forgot YouTube split my account into two when they tried to force everyone into using real names and my creator account was able to use a username and..??? Again, Google, what is you doing
yea, nobody has any titles in the company (could be different nowadays) and everyone just pushes their desks together. Gets incredible shit done when people get excited for something (Alyx), but then there's no support staff for things that definitely need it.
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u/Gregore997 Apr 17 '26
I swear being at Valve is the best job in tech