Bensam123 wrote:Yeah, Valve is essentially considered a paradise. While Glorious said he read all of the above it seems painfully obvious that he hasn't and is even trying to push views on others that are uninformed.
I quoted the article
numerous times.
Bensam123 wrote:Gabe is not the same as Valve. He is also not considered some sort of hardcore developer that 'eats newbie developers and spits them out'. To people in the company and people outside of it, he's almost considered a father figure of sorts that helps try to push things forward. While Valve has sort of gotten away from him now days as it's too big, it still remains that way. He even gave Ellie from the report the technology she was working on instead of simply having their lawyers lock it down. Something like that is relatively unheard of.
And who pointed that out? Oh, right,
me.And while it was obviously at Newell's instigation, it was Valve's property. He maybe the majority shareholder, but the property Ellsworth walked off with belonged to Valve L.L.C. Hence acting as if what happened had nothing do with Valve means you think the Corporate veil can only be pierced one way.
Bensam123 wrote:Valve is considered to be a paradise by many people, including those there. They talk all the time about having upwards of a 99% employee retention rate because they simply don't fire people. If you read the Valve handbook (and developer interviews) you know it's extremely hard to get fired from Valve (usually). You also have absolute creative freedom to go and work on whatever you want.
Which Ellsworth claims is completely true! You keep accusing me of not reading it, but she said, repeatedly, that her primary problem was that she couldn't get people to agree with her or work on what
she considered important.
Article wrote:"I was struggling trying to build this hardware team and move the company forward. We were having a difficult time recruiting folks - because we would be interviewing a lot of talented folks but the old timers would reject them for not fitting into the culture.
"I shouldn't say the numbers, but there were very few of us in the hardware department. We were understaffed by about a factor of 100."
Other employees voted against her when she wanted to vastly increase the size of Valve, which is literally following what the Valve Handbook says, as I previously quoted.
Article wrote:The Valve hardware team were devising some strong concepts, specifically around augmented reality. Yet the ideas were killed off by the company in its regular peer-review process - a staple of the flat management structure - which can see colleagues that you rarely interact with vet your work and decide if your employment is safe.
Other employees voted her ideas down.
Article wrote:"And it's impossible to pull those people away for something risky like augmented reality because they only want to work on the sure thing. So that was a frustration, we were starved for resources."
She wasn't able to force other employees to work on her project instead of their own projects.
Bensam123 wrote:However, it's become apparent that since there is no real leadership at valve (or management quoted in the article), this has lead to the entire company essentially falling in on it's own weight. Highschool cliques have developed to take the position of management in which popular people have all the say and get people on their projects (also fire those they don't like), which of course doesn't always work for the greater good.
Maybe not, but it this case it's clear that it didn't work out for what
Jerri Ellsworth thought was good, and that's by design.
Bensam123 wrote:As I said, I would highly suggest reading the first link I posted. If your entire reply consists of only rebuttals to single sentences it's not worth reading dude as it's apparent you aren't even trying to make your own point or list your views and instead decided to attack my post. Rebutals aren't the same as proving your own point. Person A is wrong, therefore Person B is right doesn't hold true at all. Completely putting aside this topic for a bit here. You have to actually prove what you're saying in addition to disproving someone (if it doesn't coincide with your point), although it appears as though some people are falling for this in this thread. All you're doing is trying to disprove person A without any sort of alternative explanation for their actions. Not just disprove you're looking for small nuances to catch people on and you believe that's the same as talking about the overall point, that's why quote wars are bad and generally good forum goers don't engage in them.
Bensam123, how about you read my posts? I read the entirety of your link, how about you return the favor?
Bensam123 wrote:Yeah as far as sales go they did pretty well. But that's not what I consider to be an amazing piece of software released by an amazing company, such as Valve. It definitely felt like a mod, because it was. That really goes for pretty much all the games Valve has released lately, the exception being Portal series (which is a fluke, the way it was developed and caught on inside of the company). They haven't released anything like Half-Life 2 or newer games like Crysis 3, Skyrim, Battlefield 3, you get the idea. It doesn't represent either their income or their company, they're just little side projects.
Yes, a game franchise of two games that sold
TWELVE MILLION PLUS copies doesn't "represent either their income or their company."
Why?
Because you *FEEL* that they are just mods.
WOW!
Bensam123 wrote:Essentially what Valve has is a bunch of lead developers and no extra people to do the 'grunt work', such as modeling, perhaps working on coding modules, other parts of the game besides the core development. Really anything, once again besides the job of the person working on it.
Where are you getting this from, again?
Bensam123 wrote:In this specific example though she was attempting to design a VR headset and they had a team of five people. She compared it to working with Xbox one in which they have 1000 people working on the same thing and they can actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
Why don't you read your own article or my posts, because Ellsworth clearly says that within FOUR WEEKS of being fired she and ONE OTHER GUY finished a prototype.
But yet she needed a 1000 people?Contradict much?
Bensam123 wrote:She even went on to say Valve time is a product of this inefficient setup, which makes complete sense. They simply don't have the manpower to put out products in a timely manner or at all (somethings could literally take hundreds of years done on your own, depending on the scope of the project).
Or, you know, FOUR WEEKS.
Article wrote:But to all intents and purposes Ellsworth and Johnson were effectively working continuously the next day at his house. Four weeks after leaving Valve, their project came to fruition with prototypes for augmented reality glasses that use head mounted projectors with a special reflective mat and sub-millimeter head tracking - likened to the holographic 3D chess in Star Wars - demoed in May at the 'maker' event Maker Faire.
Look what you can learn when you actually READ instead of falsely accusing everyone else of not doing their homework!
Bensam123 wrote:I am sure she put out a product too, nothing you'd find in the store because it wasn't finished, but being able to demonstrate the technology. You can't just release a prototype or idea to market, which barely functions and may not even be close to representative of the finished product. Nothing said she had nothing to show for it and what they had done Valve gave to her, to which she went on to found her own company and four months later actually has something that is close to being market ready.
Dude, how can you say all that without acknowledging that you demonstrably refuted your own case? Ellsworth worked for Valve for LESS THAN A YEAR. If, after being fired, she had her product "close to being market ready" within 4-5
months, just what, exactly, did she ever need a "factor of 100" more employees
for? A product development cycle of a year and a half isn't even remotely "bad', especially given the experimental nature of the project.
Bensam123 wrote:I'm also not entirely sure you guys are grasping how the ability to manage a team works. It's entirely possible to hire more people as temps or contract work and not make them a part of the company or otherwise segment them from Valve.
That is explicitly contrary to the Valve Employee Handbook. I mean, seriously, did *YOU* read it?