At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus
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But let's assume for a minute that what you're saying has some merit. Maybe Valve does have grounds to sue. And maybe they're interested in suing. In that case, is this lousy attempt at being coy helpful? It's clear from his bio that he's only worked at one such company. So it's abundantly clear to everyone who he's working for.
In reality, this pattern ("worked for a large software-advertising company with a double O in it's name") is fucking annoying. It's designed to make the reader curious and more likely to read the rest of what's written. It's similar to clickbait in that sense. And I wish to God it would stop. I'd request people to please just name names, or keep it yourself.
This isn't about civil disputes anyways. No employer wants to see a prospective new hire trash talking their previous company. Doesn't matter if it's deserved or not, it's seen as a liability.
[1] You know what, one employer definitely did that, apparently bribed my lawyer to get them to drop the case, got that vibe from the lawyer. Yeah, I thought I could argue with you at the very beginning, but no longer.
[2] Extradition from a country of which you are a citizen requires a real trial, like that takes years, America will let me go to prison without trial but Chile will not let America do that without any kind of extradition trial at all. A lawyer congratulated me on this defensive maneuver.
It isn't fair, but that's how it is. Don't poke the bear anymore than you have to. All you have to do is personally anger one executive and they can go after you.
yes, exactly. Esp. if he is the only one talking about it this way publicly. If it's truly awful, employees will vote with their wallets and quit.
And if valve wins the law suit, what reward would they have gained, other than stopping him from saying what he has already said (which cannot be taken back). There might be punitive damages to be paid, but it's not like the corporation is going to make money from doing so.
And in fact, making a law suit would legitimize the claims!
They most likely won't, you are correct. But it just simply doesn't seem to be worth the trouble on the off-chance that they will decide to do it.
The whole thing is just a situation where you risk a lot (even if the chance of that risk materializing is very small), but you aren't really gaining anything by taking the risk. What's the point of taking the risk of naming the company, if you can tell the entire story just as fine without naming them and reducing the risk to zero?
That’s my point. He’s not reducing shit. We all know exactly who he’s talking about. All he’s done is curiosity baited us into reading this.
I would certainly have a different opinion about someone saying negative things about me in anonymous generic terms that people paying attention could figure out, vs using my name and posting direct criticism. As would most people I think.
https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless...
I also can't help but not overlook that he's an UFO nut. can't trust info from someone who can warp reality in a way to see only what fits his own preconceived notions even if they fly in the face of basic facts.
That's not true.
There's been lots of criticism coming at Valve's management style over the years: There are many people who _hate_ it, but also many people who love it. It really depends on the type of person you are. If you really really dislike bureaucracy Valve's a great place to be, but also don't expect them to enact any quality-of-life systems: If your coworker wants you dead, then that's something you yourself have to deal with.
This is also why you see a lot of different opinions when looking through e.g. glassdoor: Some people that do the murdering love it there and thrive, but that system only works if people are there that can be murdered. Some people I know have described the atmosphere as "prison yard style": You trade rigid bureaucracy against a "you have to know who you have to know" bureaucracy. Richard Geldreich's account lines up pretty well to what I have heard about valve's emergent self-organization system.
A couple of years ago there was a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41XgkLKYuic that summarized the working environment.
Looking at it as a consumer, Valve didn't get anything released for many years, which imo would point at there in fact being a problem. Not necessarily what this guy is claming, but there did seem to be issues.
They have shipped HL:A and Steam Deck now, so maybe they've solved it or are solving it.
They have first mover advantage on a platform that's true, but even when competitors significantly undercut them they can't take any notable percentage of Steam market share. Epic is literally giving away free content every month and can't compete.
Well, that’s your personal opinion but I’m not sure how his thoughts on UFOs discredits his view of the work culture at Valve. One can have metaphysical and spiritual beliefs and be an extraordinary scientist as well for example.
Many have left Valve but usually people in the relatively constrained game dev industry tend to be conservative in voicing their opinions if only for their future careers prospects.
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong... but that's how you bet.
false. wrong, wrong, wrong.
he's the only one you know about, is all. he's not even the only one that has spoken publicly about it.
You have to make a really cool looking hat for Team Fortress 2.
"Valve fires Jeri Ellsworth, who was developing Steam Box game controllers"
(Unless it means 'expert witness' in court, in which case 'and the FBI were involved' is the weird bit.)
Thankfully, at a large company with plenty of hard problems to solve (and smart folks to work with), you can grow quite a lot whether or not the company chooses to recognize said growth.
Rewarding people is hard. But you can't shirk from it unless you want people to leave.
Once my team owned a service that did X. Among it's functionality, it had an API that, as a side effect, stored some data that could be retrieved. Sadly, this service had no validation that the data being input made any sense in the context of what this service did.
A developer on a neighboring team had a big promo project on the go. As a simple hack, and as a way to save time, his project used our service as a basic key value store database. They already called this service for the correct functionality, so they had access keys. The stuff he was storing could be argued to kind of make sense, but as the owners of this service we said "no fucking way, we aren't your database". He escalated to management who knew he was going to quit if he didn't get his promo. They overruled and last I heard that service was still being used as that asshole's database. He did promise to fix it right after the project launched, but the second he had his promo he changed orgs.
For some reason, Amazon is full of this sort of terrible tech debt and they can't figure out why everyone has to be on terrible on call rotations.
There are a lot of excellent ex-FAANG programmers I've worked with, and a lot of terrible ones, and my experience is that usually the ones with the most prestigious titles show up, do 3 months of junior level work which we end up having to rip out later, and then leave to their next high-paying gig.
i just don't understand this at all - why would someone who is working for you be a threat? They cannot take your job - it's not like them being a good programmer would somehow make them a good dev manager or "boss".
But the upside is that it’s a competitive advantage for startups that intentionally build different hiring pipelines.
I would say it is more of a fault of compensation structures.
Why would one stay for 3 years and get very meh comp increases every year, when they can switch to another company and instantly get a 30-40%+ increase (up to a point). It is also somewhat disheartening to see new hires get paid significantly more than you are for the same level.
And arguably this principle holds for most team members in any organization - since it’s only very few at the very top that actually get held accountable for overall team success.
When this terrible thing was done, we immediately realized we needed to add validation. We had thought that by limiting who could call through access controls, we'd never have a malicious user. So naive.
Sadly, at that point we couldn't add it because his awful project was running in production.
It's weird to have to say this, and some people probably think it's naive, but I stand by it.
No one suggests I am at fault if you break into my house and steal my stuff.
At least at Microsoft, there's a culture of where your title determines if you're a part of the "in group" or not. Not at least Senior? Forget about anyone outside your immediate working group taking you seriously, let alone deferring to your judgement on things. Not at least Principal? Put your ambitions aside, because you won't be allowed to make decisions that are actually important. There's exceptions to this, like if you're in charge of something nobody else thinks they understand.
As a result, this means that there's a lot of squabbling and weirdness around September. Especially in the Senior -> Principal jump, since that is also influenced a lot by department budget. There's also not any official acknowledgement of a good terminal level. Implicitly, that's the Senior band (and really the 2nd level within the band), because beyond that you're usually expected to do more than just be a wildly productive individual contributor. But everyone who's Senior eventually feels the pressure to somehow level up to Principal, because they have the expertise to make important decisions but their organization often won't allow them to be in the room where those decisions are made. Thus the backstabbing, jealousy, weirdness, and more.
It’s gotten better but there’s still limitations, and many people solve it by switching organizations- which has more costs than many realize.
Your hiring process should be good enough that firing is rare but nobody is perfect and if/when the situation arises (either due to a bad hiring decision or the situation changing) it's better to resolve it earlier rather than later.
Maybe it’s different now, but I doubt it. Any place that pays for performance has to differentiate rewards in some way.
Making a lot of money is great until it doesn't come for whatever reason.
It should go without saying that you shouldn't take out a mortgage where you can't afford the regular payments out of your regular income. Banks are very unlikely to grant you such a loan anyway.
There are situations where it definitely makes sense, like if you're pretty secure without the bonus, you're friendly with the people deciding the bonuses, the base salary is high enough, there is some guaranteed minimum bonus, and you don't burn out trying to attain/maximize it.
Ultimately, you can't get away from the fact that some financial health is at the whim of persons within the company and frankly they just aren't going to care as much about it as you do. It's very much a gamble instead of a solid investment.
A buyer can easily outbid an all cash offer.
In fact, if you offer 100% over asking price you’re almost guaranteed to win ;)
As someone on the other side of the table who has to make comp decisions, I honestly want to pay the team as much as we can afford while being careful to maintain the financial health of the company. I really do, the more I pay people the more likely they are to feel rewarded and go the extra mile and not quit.
But that can be scary, since you can’t lower comp as a manager, that’s not really possible. If you’re overconfident you can end up in a genuine crisis.
So I pay as much as I know I can afford, and then as a period closes I can look back and pay the extra that I can now be sure I can afford since the results are in.
It’s a mechanism to help me pay the maximum the business can afford. It’s in place to help the team make the most money possible.
Clearly not every situation will be like this. Clearly somehere there’s someone dangling bonuses as a cynical way to exploit people.
But it’s unfair to dismiss the concept out of hand. Especially in volatile lines of business or very fast growing companies.
Just a good way to proverbially crack the whip.
This seems like a potentially self-destructive way to accomplish this. Not sure what company he is referring to, but at all I have worked at, this would be filed as a bug report and a quick git blame tells you all you need to know. Over time, if your name keeps coming up in that commit log, you'll get a bad reputation and your code in particular will acquire a smell ("Oh Bob, wrote this code... better be careful here," etc.)
There were some perverse incentives - people wanted to work on bestsellers, there was jockeying for credit for carryover work from previous editions, but in general it promoted a creative energy around trying to publish hit books, editors had a good deal of direct ownership that could actually impact the product they were shipping, and the scheme even helped align you on the same team as authors, whose compensation is also royalty driven - where for many other publishers author royalties are almost in conflict with what the publisher wants from the deal.
Such a direct unit sales driven profit share is hard to imagine engineering into many other businesses but it’s always stood out to me as a remarkably powerful model.
What Wrox did, though, was very clearly assign editors to book projects. You worked on one book at a time - each book was a little startup venture that shipped a product at the end.
As opposed to IT work where sure, if the editors computer doesn't work, it's hard for them to do their editing, but there's not much connection to a specific item.
That's pretty much what every finance department in every company on earth large enough to have one does (with notable exceptions maybe of hyper-growth start-ups).
I've seen this work well at a small software company. It paid out once a quarter for anyone who had been there a year.
> we have to measure what your individual contribution to the company's profits was
> But we have to make a decision.
Besides that, there weren't many discussions on the "fairness" of either system, people just went with it
An interesting firsthand view on the dynamics of the motivations comes from HN post from some times ago (https://frantic.im/leaving-facebook). Some excerpts:
> The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation in the market (we’ll get back to that). This makes a lot of other things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant without worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a nicer house, better stuff.
> The benefits are top notch. Almost every doctor I visited said “wow” when looking at the health insurance. It’s very comfortable to know that you are likely not going to receive a huge bill for doing an ultra sound for a routine checkup.
> Then there’s the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in media lately, but in everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line.
All the benefits above, in one way or another, are relative¹ ("niceR" car, not "nice" car) so ultimately, it's a matter of aspiring because aspiring, rather than aspiring to reach a certain level.
So unfortunately, being a developer with a comfy life tends not to have an effect on ethics.
Note: the above statements give an unfair image of the author/full article; the extracts are only meant to give an idea of certain dynamics.
¹=with bottom limits; being too poor certainly hurts.
This is unrelated to "tech" people. It's a common trope for shows about bankers, attorneys, consultants, etc.
Separate from that, who in their right mind would enter into a contract to make so much of their salary optional for their employer to pay them?
And yeah, if you set them up as the reward for a prisoner's dilemma, of course you'll see insanely bad behavior.
It's pretty reasonable if you "ship your org chart" and can easily measure each team's contribution. It's much trickier and more prone to unfair allocation when people switch teams a lot or contribute outside their team, i.e. if one of my engineers went above and beyond and boosted some other team's profits by a bunch, I'm probably not going to get extra money to allocate to my people as a result since the higher level execs don't usually follow credit assignment at that level.
Reward people for adding value. If everyone has added value then reward all of them.
Even most people that are doing nothing can probably do nothing somewhere else for 100% or their salary.
If you do nothing at the company, they can pay you $0 bonus and hope you get mad and quit and go do nothing somewhere else instead.
Bad years, you have a trivial pay cut (no to low bonus), good years people get money. If you have very high base pay, bad years you lose money.
If you're young, volatility is ok. If you're getting older and have kids, then you value certainty a bit more and want higher base pay, but you might make less money overall (say 2 dollars bonus is equal to 1 guaranteed dollar, but this is obviously highly dependent on the company/sector)
When I was just starting out, I probably wouldn't have thought of tech as a money-focused business, or that there would be any real competition.
I just kind of thought once you were successful, as long as you still had a job, you were effectively way too rich to bother actively seeking higher pay, and that nobody would ever want to do something like this kind of sabotage.
I also thought that people would be generally excited about the future of tech and everyone on all levels would want to do what they can to keep innovation going....
But as it turns out, programming is in fact just a job, most people seem to be largely in it for the money, they don't think Tiles and AirTags are as cool as I do, and game dev especially seems to be very businessy and DLC driven and even NFTful and not exactly managed by artists.
What happened to the dot com era vision of what tech should be?
I would have thought management at the billion dollar places really would run things well, but it seems like there's plenty of dysfunction even at the top companies.
Nothing has changed, you were just young and naive.
I don't think it was just about money for the average lay programmer. Everything everywhere is always about money for the business guys, but a lot of people got into coding with no real thought to money besides just wanting a normal comfortable living.
That is technically a requirement, but still zero sum.
Sure. It's an incentive mechanism to be seen as better than your peers.
> The question really is what things influenced the bonus award? Sensible things or not so sensible things? Did they tie the bonus to things that the company wanted or not?
They tied the bonus to "being a top performer":
> Then tie the bonuses to some shadowy and illusory "peer review" system and watch the sparks fly.
But frankly any time bonuses are involved the risks shoot up exponentially. For instance sales are commonly highly bonus-based, and as a result at least in software they will promise any and everything to the client so they can close and get that sweet, sweet bonus, and let everyone else hold the bag when the client finds out there was only a very tenuous relationship between their promises and reality.
I always wondered what it was that caused valve to be “run straight into the ground”. Great to have this former disgruntled employees inside perspective. I’m sure it’s objective and aligns with reality.
Everyone is incentivised to make the company more profitable, no individual/team/department/division can siphon bonuses from anybody else.
If you're at Valve, you can count on your monopoly still printing money while you carve out pieces of the pie for yourself. Any negative effects from your work will be felt years later when you're long gone.
If they allowed the best people to get promoted to their level, it would adversely impact their own bonuses and career. So instead they fight to get incompetent people promoted to their level so they have no competition.