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

While I am not trying to defend Valve here, this could happen to literally any company with any structure if they manage to find a way to print money with no effort.

Who knew, companies work like countries. The more you spread the power the more it'll turn into an ooga booga shitfest after the initial good times, and then the entire thing is driven into the ground

They are high profile companies who hire people in the top of their field, for better or worse. Likely to get a lot of neurotic people who have had their egos pumped up over their career.

What does this even mean

It's an interesting read, but most of his comments on intra-corporate politics are not exclusive to Valve or flat-organized companies. These "ex-dev tells all" revelations pop up every decade or so. I don't know who it was, but there was a guy from the Windows team at MS who had a similar breakdown ages ago, talked about how a department head blocked improvements to Windows because he wasn't consulted & other crazy stuff.... basically power corrupts, and pseudo-egalitarian structures in companies don't make rules and power go away, they just obscure them, and they re-manifest themselves via inner circle bullshit and a latent paranoia about breaking rules that aren't supposed to be there in the first place.

I think a lot of this is just how it is to work for a not gigantic business. I work as a sysadmin at a small-mid sized company in an industry where there is a ton of money but volatile times repeatedly happen every cuple years. So much of this is just true for how to navigate your career and what to look out for. I would wager that most of this is true for any company that isn't a huge well organized corporation. I mean the biggest takeaway from this should be that you have to make sure the person you are at your job and your work both matter. I think the internal politics of a job matter a lot more than most people would go into their job thinking. You need to have good relationships with other people in the company and you need to keep your ear to the ground and most importantly you need to be ready to move on with your life if things start looking bad. It's funny this person talks about mass trauma because it sounds like they're also extremely jaded about having to work at these places.

I think its a personality trait that's also more prevalent in programmers as well and the IT industry too. I've met people who are both shit at there job and didn't make good money but still have an ego the size of a house.

And that's also why anyone expecting Valve to change is naive. They literally have no incentive to lift a damn finger, as long the ultimate money printing press remains in their hands.

Valve struck infinite gold with Steam and the community market. I still remember the story about how a Valve employee simply admin-granted his wife a Circling Hearts Unusual Bill's Hat as an anniversary present, and people immediately started trying to scam her, even openly admitting to it because as I remember one SPUF poster saying, "I live in a third-world country and the profits off of reselling that hat could feed my family for a month." The people at Valve can literally create massive value - value that some of us can't even earn over several months at our actual jobs - out of thin air and they've come to take it for granted so much that they're using these magical insta-fortune digital apparitions as cute gifts for their spouses on a whim. When people call Steam a license to print money, it virtually is in the absolute literal sense. Creating thousands of dollars of value from nothing in seconds, simply by typing in what's essentially a TF2 server console command...

idk what kinda fucked up companies you're working for but even the nerdiest of the nerdy really aren't that bad in professional environments. This sounds like memeing from someone that doesn't actually work with developers day-to-day. A lot of the times they're only awkward in the sense that conversation might be kinda forced or stunted, but they're not these mongoloid demons you describe them as. If anything there's probably something wrong with you if you can't manage to communicate with an engineer

All of this makes me glad I'm not pursuing a CompSci degree.

That's pretty narrow. Literally every degree has people suffering in their field for different reasons, you're gonna let one company's former employee dictate your entire image of a career field? lol.

I'd go as far as to say that there are people suffering in 95% of companies.

https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/?utm_content=buffer95a2e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer_pcgamerfb#comment-jump Summary if you don't want to read all the tweets.

I guess this explains why they stopped making games and started milking life as a publisher.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.