A former Valve employee talks about his experience
- Thread starter Soundchaser
- Start date
I feel exactly the same way, in fact, the more I learn about them the more I start to think they are actually one of the worst companies in gaming.
Some of this stuff you will see anywhere. Sounds extra dysfunctional though, at least with a chain of command there is a bit more ownership of work and teams wrt projects and deliverables. Corporate red tape is bad, but this is worse. This is what happens when a company has too much money and no public shareholders to report to. A goddamn mess.
A common thing at toxic work environments. After my contract ended at the Zoo my fucking insane boss tried to stop anyone talking about it.
I have absolutely no insight into the workings of Valve, but some of this dude's Tweets read like a crazy person's.
k
If you look at how Gabe acts publicly - especially during the paid mods fiasco - and Valve's output/disposition after the Steam money started to roll in, it's exactly that and not all that shocking.
Enough people have jumped ship to make this more than just normal office politics.
Valve still uses stack ranking and yet there's supposed to be no formal chain of command. It's a paradox that doesn't work.
I mean, not really. That's basic advice for working in an open-plan office.
Hm, okay, not in my experience.
Another:
This is weird af behavior.
I'd be sceptical of the veracity of some of these claims. I can absolutely believe that Valve has problems, but the picture this guy paints- to a borderline comical extent- is of a complete and utter hell-hole full of backstabbing manipulators and liars. A lot of his stories have a bit of a paranoiac bent. Of course we don't know- I'd just advocate keeping a somewhat open mind. People love to shit on Valve, and I think it's at least in part because they're so powerful and secretive. It makes thinking of them as villains more attractive.
That all said, bonus incentives in that sort of environment sound like a good way to cause problems. And it is impossible to imagine such a structure working flawlessly as advertised.
That all said, bonus incentives in that sort of environment sound like a good way to cause problems. And it is impossible to imagine such a structure working flawlessly as advertised.
Valve's structure was just too good in paper.
You always need some kind of control and proper organization.
That sounds like a good advice.
You always need some kind of control and proper organization.
That sounds like a good advice.
Pretty amazing that they've created some of this industry's greatest works under that environment if it's as bad as these tweets make it seem.
I don't know what places those saying "sounds normal" have worked but that's not my experience anywhere I've ever worked. It sounds like it's full of sociopaths.
yeah i wasn't gonna say anything on page 1 but dude seems borderline schizophrenic
On the other hand you could also say that this environment is why Valve barely qualifies as a game publisher anymore.
'Rich Geldreich @richgel999 Jul 15
So watch where people go during lunchtime. Just walk around and see who's going offsite together. Reverse engineer the office's internal social network and you'll spot the key relationships involved in managing the self-organizing arm.'
Yeah I'm going to take a grain of salt here. I think he's upset.
So watch where people go during lunchtime. Just walk around and see who's going offsite together. Reverse engineer the office's internal social network and you'll spot the key relationships involved in managing the self-organizing arm.'
Yeah I'm going to take a grain of salt here. I think he's upset.
Microsoft doesn't really have a better system right now. They change the mid-level managers every two years to let them see every aspect of the company and find the best suited for a specific task, nothing wrong with that, until bonuses come into play. So I had a new boss (as an outside call-center contractor) every two years, who tried to up-stage his predecessor in quality and profit to get a good bonus and to show their own bosses that they were better.
They are not responsible for anything that happens after those 2 years. So what did this do to us contractors?
- rising level of quality and customer satisfaction demands that were quite unreasonable at the end
- offering less money in the renegotiations every year
- inventing new schemes to let the customer pay for seeking our help.
I imagine something like this:
Also I love the early 90s style trailer for a filn that was actually really dark.
Sounds like an utterly toxic work environment.
Work is stressful as it is. Adding to it the constant anxiety from trying to navigate subliminal social hierarchies just sounds maddening.
Work is stressful as it is. Adding to it the constant anxiety from trying to navigate subliminal social hierarchies just sounds maddening.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Still, I would think Valve would have a much easier time getting out of this mess if they really wanted to. 1.) They're a lot smaller. 2.) They're privately held. If Gabe really wanted to fix the fundamental flaws, I think he could come up with something much better. Of course, you have to admit there's a fundamental problem before anything can actually happen.
There's a pretty clear delineation between pre Dota Valve and post Dota valve, or post lootboxes if you will. It shows in the amount of "old" Valve employees that unceremoniously left, and developers that skipped right off the surface, staying only a short while.
Finding who the leaders of the group are and trying to get in good with them is really normal, it just takes on an added layer of importance at a place with no formal managers and stack ranking. More than one dev has alluded to Valve being a hellhole full of HS level cliques.
Definitely.
It's what makes someone like Joe Ludwig and his small VR team so interesting. Feels like this is their own separate little country that's a throwback to the pre-GaS Valve.
On one hand I have been quite critical of Valve's apparent inability to be productive for any large scale project for a while. It seems quite clear to me at this point that all this anarchy on who's supposed to work on what tends to translate in some sort of fear toward genuine commitment to a single project.
On the other one, I have to say all this blaming on the "anxiety" and "excessive competition for bonuses" as some omnipresent boogeymen in the studio sounds a lot like a pile of excuses.
Let's not forget that Valve is rather know for paying above the industry standard and not forcing crunch on anyone. It's not like "not pleasing the elites that will serve you the bonus" is leaving anyone starving.
On the other one, I have to say all this blaming on the "anxiety" and "excessive competition for bonuses" as some omnipresent boogeymen in the studio sounds a lot like a pile of excuses.
Let's not forget that Valve is rather know for paying above the industry standard and not forcing crunch on anyone. It's not like "not pleasing the elites that will serve you the bonus" is leaving anyone starving.
Ironically enough, for problems that are pretty much the exact opposite of those blamed on Valve (salaries are fixed, below standard and there are no bonuses nor way to increase them, hierarchy is apparently quite rigid with the bosses being rather demanding and allegedly imposing their vision on the team, lots of crunch hours, etc, etc).
Sounds like traditional intracompany rivalries ratcheted up to 11 because there's no one around to say "hey, don't fucking eat each other"
Clearly this kind of competitive environment leads to the best ideas rising above all else. And the best idea right now seems to be *checks notes* a Dota 2 card game.
All cynicism aside, it sounds pretty normal, just lacking real management or constructive goals. There's nothing for the team to unify around.
All cynicism aside, it sounds pretty normal, just lacking real management or constructive goals. There's nothing for the team to unify around.
Not too ironic since both lead to extreme burnout which is really common in tech jobs especially in the video game industry. I think it just goes to show that either extreme rigid structure vs "freedom" really isn't a good solution.
Seeing how many people on forums like this just gobbled that shit up wholesale taught me a lot about how much gamers really understand the industry
Jesus Christ, this is starting to sound like John Grisham's 'The Firm'.
Yep. His point about how the "leaked" handbook was eventually just put on their website is really apt. You see people read that decade-old document and be like "oh look, Valve is so cool and quirky!"
Looks like GabeN should read some books about motivation. Offering bonuses is a terrible idea in a "self-organizing" company. It's entirely detrimental to the point of such a company structure.
I havent heard anything good about working at Valve. They have shit output, and barely produce anything for the number of developers and how supposedly good they are(they pick the best dev's and waste them). I think if Gabe left or something happened Valve would tear itself apart.
I believe this isn't the first time he has talked about this. IIRC he wrote a blog post with many of the same observations. He then got into arguments with other former employees over the accuracy of those.
I do think those observations are true, but they seem filtered though his own personal experience.
And even more ironically, I heard EA is a pretty good company for developers. What a company does externally really is different of how it is internally.
I gotta say, you stop wondering how people "allow these evil companies to exist" once you get a job at one. Stable, corporate employment at a well-organized firm with good benefits is great.
