Personal computing discussed
Bensam123 wrote:Their whole utopia is actually working against them as their company is apparently made up of a bunch of lead developers and no worker bees. Pretty much everything you could imagine going wrong seems to be taking place. People game the system to get ahead, there is no overall 'lead', people can't actually get manpower because of the Valve hiring process, social enclaves of people formed and compete with each other to get bonuses and put other groups out.
Bensam123 wrote:You missed the point and decided to rant about working man pride
Bensam123 wrote:I assume you don't actually know anything about Valve or the company and just assume they're like every other developer.
Bensam123 wrote:Read the original thread then read the interview.
Bensam123 wrote:Perhaps you should take a look at the Valve handbook
Bensam123 wrote:And then do some google searches on top of it as how the company is portrayed, seen by it's employees, and also by people outside of it.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:I certainly have heard the mentality that they are a little more humane than the likes of EA. Guess not eh.
Article wrote:Ellsworth and her team had built a unique area of the office, filled with all sorts of strange equipment and unique lighting - including a chandelier - and some of it her own hardware. She started effectively shutting down the AR studio literally. "It took at 26 foot truck to get my stuff out - place looked like a ghost town after I left."
When the time came to confront Gabe Newell, she said that "you should fund this externally or give it to us".
"There was a lawyer in the room and Gabe just turned to him and said 'Give it to 'em'."
Article wrote:Ellsworth later adds that there were protracted lawyer discussions, and it wasn't this simple. 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.
Article wrote:Hardware hacker Ellsworth joined Valve to help build out a hardware offer - which over time was name checked by founder Gabe Newell as an important part of Valve's future. But the problem was that Ellsworth struggled to get approval from her new colleagues to let her hire in more staff.
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."
Valve handbook wrote:At most organizations, it’s beneficial to have an army of people doing your bidding. At Valve, though, it’s not. You’d damage the company and saddle yourself with a broken organization. Good times!
Bensam123 wrote:They're essentially running a completely inefficient company with no direction in order to maintain absolute creative freedom, which in turn limits the freedom of said individuals because they don't have the resources to accomplish this (man power). I definitely agree with Ellis in the interview, a structure like Valve works on a small scale (like 20 people), but not when you're a giant company trying to put out AAA games.
I'm sure this is why we haven't really seen any decent games out of Valve since HL2 or Portal (which turned out to be a fluke).
superjawes wrote:She had "millions of dollars" in equipment, was pouring a lot of effort into augmented reality, but was hitting a "brick wall" when it came to hiring. Instead of trying to deliver something (anything) with the resources she had, she's continues to complain about hiring. This idea that people only want to work on "high profile" projects, but if you deliver something worthwhile (especially something that the company has not traditionally produced), it will become high profile.
Article wrote:Ellsworth was hungry to build scale so Valve could build hardware, and points to that other famous Seattle business that does have that kind of scale: "Like Microsoft, the rumour is that its hardware department has 1,000 people working in it [making the Xbox]."
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.
superjawes wrote:This is just me, but I would have taken the band of five and worked on something much simpler but functional. Once we got recognition for that project, I would leverage that against the company to hire more people and work on something more impressive, rather than trying to build Rome in a day. Or it might be more appropriate to compare Microsoft's Xbox empire...
cphite wrote:Left 4 Dead and it's sequel did pretty well; Portal was actually a really cool game, and Portal 2 was even better.
superjawes wrote:She had "millions of dollars" in equipment, was pouring a lot of effort into augmented reality, but was hitting a "brick wall" when it came to hiring. Instead of trying to deliver something (anything) with the resources she had, she's continues to complain about hiring.
Bensam123 wrote:cphite wrote:Left 4 Dead and it's sequel did pretty well; Portal was actually a really cool game, and Portal 2 was even better.
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.
Bensam123 wrote: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.
Bensam123 wrote: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.
That sounds like almost every company. The only difference is Valve doesn't make the promotions "official".
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you need someone to work on machining things, you do run into brick walls. People have expertise in other areas besides what you do. You pay them for their time and work because the amount of time it'd take you to do the same thing would take infinitely longer, you're talking about a order of magnitude difference, not to mention the quality of the work. You don't have skills in the same areas or experience, not to mention you may have to learn their trade skill from the ground up. What Ellis is talking about is very real.
Aphasia wrote:Actually, a bit of witch hunt is probably a good thing when it comes to Valve since so many in the gaming community literally think they are the best thing that's ever happened to them. When in fact they are still just another company that exploits DRM, Market share and several other mechanism to do what they see fit, not what the community wants, or needs for that matter.
Aphasia wrote:You are entirely correct in that they are both. And it's the same corporate mentality that gives rise to both of the, so if they have the ability to be draconian in some respects, they have the ability to be it in all aspects of their work.
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.
Aphasia wrote:But I would not dismiss this as only the workings of a disgruntled employee getting laid off, because that is not at all what I get from the article. If you take away the passion and expression of the creative person that had invested a lot of time in something, what are you left with.
Aphasia wrote:I would say it's something like getting tasked with something and getting it done, but you cant get the necessary expertise and competence hired to get it finished, and since you cant do it yourself, what do you do, try to change something and running into a brick wall extremely resistant to change and that has the power to not only refuse you the help you need to get the project moving, but also remove you completely from the company because they don't like you.
Aphasia wrote:And I think the points about how power accumulates around certain prestigious projects when there is bonus incentives around is quite important. If you have bonus incentives in a company and those only reward high profile visable projects, the ones manning those will have power, and people with power, seldom stay fully objective with regards to surroundings, or their so called peers.
Article wrote:"They have a bonus structure in there where you can get bonuses - if you work on very prestigious projects - that are more than what you earn. So everyone is trying to work on projects that are really visible. 'Look at me, I am making all these great improvements to the latest and greatest video game'.
"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."