“Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

pcjunkie said:
She couldn't possibly be somewhat right could she, cuz we know HL3 is just around the corner...er, wait a sec...nm.
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Look. When she says her "hardware department" was understaffed by factor of 100 in a company with total employee number of 400-500, then there is something very wrong on her side. She didn't join Microsoft or IBM or Intel or ASUS, or some other big company where few hundred hardware designers would be an acceptable number for a project, she joined a software company where hardware is a side project at best. So if they would get the hardware department up to 50 employees i would say Valve is overcommiting to the hardware business.

And then this "clique" thing. Sorry, but if someone is in the company for 10 years or more, then his opinion naturally gets more weight.

Then the "fear of the contamination" part - well, technically they are right to demand that. They have to work with those people, so you choose people who you can get along, and in that step we get back to the "weight of the opinion" point above.
 
pxc said:
I can't imagine what good steam's own hardware survey is doing for Gabe's mental health. The cognitive dissonance between a falling Linux share on steam (1.56% in May, down to 1.07% in June) vs the "failing*"/"closed" Windows 8 (now closing in on the #2 spot). I think it's just a matter of time before the Linux powered "SteamBox" is cancelled.

* MS's app store certainly is failing. :D
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Well the failure of gabe's linux box was inevitable. Has anyone else here actually loaded up steam on linux? I did and only about 5 of my 150+ steam games were compatible, all of which were valve games or games from smaller devs like bastion.

Gabe would've needed to get the majority of the major developers onboard with not only releasing their new titles with linux compatibility (and you know how much these gay-for-consoles game devs love supporting pc in the first place), but also retro-fitting their games from at least the last 10 years to be linux compatible before it became even mildly attractive as a gaming platform.

Hey everyone, go buy a steambox, you can play some of the most popular titles from the turn of the millenium like half-life 2, team fortress 2 and a whole pile of indie titles nobody gives a crap about.
 
I wish the best for Jeri Ellsworth, she is talented and has a lot to offer, I'm sure. Living in the past doesn't usually help anyone, and how you work with others is a HUGE part of the job too. Respecting others is the obvious thing, but we sometimes forget the more difficult one: to also respect ourselves. Take care...
 
pxc said:
I can't imagine what good steam's own hardware survey is doing for Gabe's mental health. The cognitive dissonance between a falling Linux share on steam (1.56% in May, down to 1.07% in June) vs the "failing*"/"closed" Windows 8 (now closing in on the #2 spot). I think it's just a matter of time before the Linux powered "SteamBox" is cancelled.

* MS's app store certainly is failing. :D
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It is not a statistically relevant survey because if you have more than instance of Steam, it will record only the instance that you use the most. So you can't use it to estimate the number of users for a given operating system.

If someone has both a GNU/Linux install and a Windows install, and they play more Steam games on Windows, it will record them as using Windows and not GNU/Linux. Similarly, if someone is using Wine to run the Windows version of Steam, and they spend more time in Wine than in the native GNU/Linux version, it will record them as Windows users (or possibly "Other" but there is no way to tell for certain because they haven't disclosed that information).
 
gaspah said:
Well the failure of gabe's linux box was inevitable. Has anyone else here actually loaded up steam on linux? I did and only about 5 of my 150+ steam games were compatible, all of which were valve games or games from smaller devs like bastion.

Gabe would've needed to get the majority of the major developers onboard with not only releasing their new titles with linux compatibility (and you know how much these gay-for-consoles game devs love supporting pc in the first place), but also retro-fitting their games from at least the last 10 years to be linux compatible before it became even mildly attractive as a gaming platform.

Hey everyone, go buy a steambox, you can play some of the most popular titles from the turn of the millenium like half-life 2, team fortress 2 and a whole pile of indie titles nobody gives a crap about.
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The fact that indie studios can handle porting to GNU/Linux but big corporations can't is very telling as to the competence of the typical commercial programmer these days (and given the nonsense they teach in C/S these days, I'm not surprised).
 
Like other people have stated, this is pretty much like any other company.

I do try to keep an open mind though. There are multiple parts of the story, and some truth to every side.
 
damicatz said:
The fact that indie studios can handle porting to GNU/Linux but big corporations can't is very telling as to the competence of the typical commercial programmer these days.
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Actually, it isn't. We have no idea whether the lack of Linux ports from larger organizations is due to managerial decisions or to technical incompetence (or some combination of the two). You only assume that it's due to technical incompetence.
 
This is the quote that got me:
"I'm sounding bitter, and I am," Ellsworth said. "I'm really, really bitter, because they promised me the world and then backstabbed me."
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Valve closing their in-house hardware R&D team was a business decision and one that I doubt came easily amongst the senior 'management'. They didn't hire Jeri Ellsworth just to punk her for 12 months (it should be noted that Valve gave them exactly 12 months). I'm not surprised that her team felt alienated. They were a 'hardware division' in what was for ~20 years a software company. Microsoft, HP, Apple all have that friction. The troubles she experienced with hiring engineers probably foreshadowed the end of the R&D team months ahead of time without it being explicitly stated that they were going to be fired. She was too obtuse to recognize the not so subtle clues and instead took it personal. Her reaction demonstrates a lack of experience in an office environment and show that she was completely caught off guard.
 
Another observation: How many people have been hired to work on a videogame that has been cancelled halfway through development? It sucks, it throws your life into disarray but you dust yourself off and move on to the next job. You don't take it personal.
 
You also get the sense with that statement that she believes Valve wanted its hardware projects to fail, as though they hired an entire team for a year only for the satisfaction of terminating them after twelve months of sucking up the payroll and other associated costs.

Valve's a successful company because they make good bets (the hiring of Ellsworth perhaps being a notable exception). They're not a successful company because their pursuit is to throw money down the toilet.
 
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