Ex Valve dev describes flat company structures: staff purges, anxiety, fighting - Sensationalist Headlines

Maybe hes a valve employee doing damage control by psy manipulating us

There's something odd about the repetitiveness and language in these tweets. I can't say anything is untrue or whatever but this guy isn't coming across as a stable person and is using the same speech patterns as Alex Jones.

Not necessarily. Like Doom64hunter said, EA is hierarchical to Valve's flat organization. In EA, your a peasant pleading to the king "but what if this game idea?" and then only response back is "yes, but how much money can it make?" Meanwhile, Valve is just Lord of the Flies.

Then is Marc Laidlaw leaving like when Piggy gets hit on the head with a rock?

I think the rival firm across the street from Valve was Bungie, at least for a while.

Nice try Gabe.

I'm still waiting for the day that Valve finds out VR was a meme this whole time.

I mean it's not really a boycott thing. It's more just stuff to be aware of if you're looking in to working for them or working on a project with them.

a lot of the old guard have left in the past couple years, maybe they were part of the problem

I am absolutely not ok with a company that supports a workplace environment such as the one described. Many companies have growing pains when they become incredibly successful, but Valve has done nothing to mitigate them. It's not surprising that there's trouble brewing at their headquarters. I'm sure that plenty of the employees who are empowered by their current system didn't want to change and have done everything in their power to keep the same structure. It's disappointing.

As of four or five years ago* The guy left in 2014 and has directly said things have improved since then. https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1018611672137621504

I would say its pretty optimsitic to think that such stuff only happens at Valve People use their irreplaceability, gained respect, power and support to fuck over people they don't like pretty often

I bet that even mentioning Half-Life during an interview would get you blacklisted.

I want to rate you funny but honestly you're probably not wrong. If you're only joining Valve because you're a Half-Life fan, they probably would assume hiring you would be a waste of time for everybody involved.

So he refused to sign an NDA before leaving, but doesn't refer to Valve by name. Smart. He knows who he's dealing with.

How very honourable of you to adapt so well to people with disabilities and social attitudes that aren't yours. You are a true hero, thank you for your service. It must have been so hard for you!

Well you'll probably find that it will come much later than the date where you find out that you have a substandard amount of grey matter to be able to reach this conclusion

You got his message incredibly wrong, but in 2018 im not even sure anymore.

Can confirm being able to dismember stubby bald men with haptic feedback is the future of sadism gaming.

"Not derogatory, but actually on the spectrum. And everyone on the spectrum is two-faced and plays mind games." Like, way to go. You basically did the equivalent of "no offense but [insult]", but with autistic people. You even went back to being derogatory in your last paragraph.

im wondering if you even know what the fuck "autistic" even means.

You haven't worked with a bunch of socially stunted computer people. Yes, he shouldn't say "autistic" but there isn't really a word for the for the kind of 30-40 year old guy that has spent his life at the computer and lacks the required emotional intelligence and empathy to affectively manage people. I feel like most are "normal" but simply aren't experienced at dealing with people in healthy ways. The point he made about peeling back the layer of normal and finding an asshole underneath is dead on. I suspect that depression and anxiety are rampant among segments of programmers. I don't have any data but from talking to them and knowing them that's the impression that I get.

Autism and "i think this guy is an awkward loser" are not the same thing.

Using autism as a slur to devalue people because they have a social attitude that differs from yours in a way that's negative is like, the number one bitch baby move on the internet, and doing it makes the both of you look like 13 year old /v/ posters.

Woosh

Anyone else here work in business there whole life not surprised by any of this? Sounds pretty standard to me.

That's what I said. All I'm saying is these traits are bad things in managers and it's not all that surprising to see these company structures go bonkers as soon as something tips peoples motivations away from working together.

Considering how Bungie has fallen lately, and how "SelfEmployingCo" would use their "infinite money printer in the basement" (a.k.a. Steam) to generate a hiring black-hole to pull prospective talent away from them, it makes perfect sense. It's clear what "the corporate arm's pampered, low-stress projects" are as well - monetization, eSports (CS:GO league and DotA's international), and VR. Especially the VR department, which on top of being the big "future of gaming" darling for Gamers™ seems to be the "reclusive secretive zillionaire's" (Gabe's) personal obsession. Really, it's no wonder that we haven't seen anything from L4D, Half-Life, or Portal in years (aside from Portal's corpse being slapped on whatever VR demo they're doing next), and TF2's basically on life-support with maybe one major update per year nowadays. Employees seem to be actively discouraged from working on those teams in favor of the new (and more profitable) hotness and anyone who goes ahead and tries to work on them anyway gets purged. And Steam has been turned into the no-standards cesspool that it is nowadays in order to generate all that money to keep this cutthroat bonus-based culture going. Honestly, I was already frustrated enough at them for being what I thought was a couple hundred lazy devs in their little "genius paradise" with so much money that they have no incentive to actually do anything to earn it, but this is even worse.

>Patent trolling attacks can be used by large companies to control individual developers who have open source software. It’s one tool in their aresenal. Is there an example of this? I have written quite a lot of open source software out there.