Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

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There is a serious flaw with this model. The flaw is that no one wants to fix anything because fixing things is boring and usually results in lower peer reviews than building a new feature or game.

Anyone who has daily exposure to Valve's infrastructure will notice the flaws.

- Credit card breach http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/13/steam_confirms_credi... ending up in foolish security measures like encrypting your password with RSA in javascript on top of SSL.

- Power outage of a single datacenter leads to Steam going down. http://kotaku.com/5884430/power-outage-knocked-out-valve-ste...

- Weekly unplanned outages of Steam Community and the Valve master server.

- Crashes and game breaking updates in nearly every TF2 patch. http://www.mail-archive.com/hlds@list.valvesoftware.com/inde...

This interview from Gabe shows that he knows there is a problem with this, but he doesn't realize how bad it is:

Newell: A lot of times people will want to complain. The first time somebody complains, you say, “Okay, fix it.” You just say, “I don’t know what you expect to happen now, but you’ve just given yourself a job.”

Fries: Does that train them to complain less or to fix things more?

Newell: If you hired the right person, it trains them to fix stuff. If you hired the wrong person, they’ll say, “Oh, this is mean.”

> no one wants to fix anything

Is patently false. I like to fix things. I get way more satisfaction from cleaning up a mess, improving X, etc. Than I do from creating iteration 1 of something that may or may not be used.

I am not the only person in existence with this quality.

"This interview from Gabe shows that he knows there is a problem with this, but he doesn't realize how bad it is"

That is an incredibly arrogant statement.

Maybe there could be a rotation of the sacrificial fixer. Every month, one dev is given perks (private office, free food, a really big chair, ...) while they handle the back-log. They work under the guidance of the last fixer, to make the transition smooth.

When I toured Valve last summer, there were quite a lot of large empty offices. Everyone's desks were on wheels, and the workstations were set up to make them extremely easy to move. Naturally, with no management structure, anyone was free to take up an office, but hardly anyone wanted to.

The receptionist who was giving the tour, indicated that Valve had constructed more offices than people actually wanted to use, so they were considering tearing many of them down. Most employees preferred working in more open areas in the midst of the rest of their "cabal".

As far as other perks go, Valve employees already have a nice selection of free snacks, drinks, in-office massage sessions, etc... I'm sure there are ways to incentivize Valve employees to do less appealing work, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that they already do this on an ad hoc basis, but they would have to go a little bit beyond your traditional office perks.

i'll bet something as simple as putting up a list of important if not very glamorous tasks somewhere prominently and continuously visible (e.g. large whiteboard on one wall), and then inviting people to choose a task and cross it off the list, would be motivating enough. note that the kind of self-motivated employee valve hires for usually wants to both make better things and make things better.

Can you explain what you feel is foolish about encrypting passwords on top of SSL?

If your SSL is compromised, the attacker can insert javascript to send the unencrypted password somewhere else.

That is why security experts like tpacek have repeatedly said js encryption schemes aren't secure.

Why do you say an SSL compromise necessarily means the attacker can manipulate the connection? And what about a promise between the SSL endpoint and the database?

"The flaw is that no one wants to fix anything because fixing things is boring"

I've always thought this was the funniest thing as I relish digging into a piece of open source software that I love to use and fixing little flaws. Just this morning I wrote a patch for guake the drop down terminal that allows the width to be resized on the fly as it was broken on Unity in Ubuntu 12.04. The sense of accomplishment at taking a piece of broken software and making it "right" is phenomenal for me. I guess different strokes for different folks.

Thanks for fixing that bug! It was really irritating. I guess I should try out guake again.

When your job is on the line due to stack ranking your opinion may change.

From what I've read Valve's use of stack ranking is for compensation bonuses only, not about who to fire.

That's what they say, but what do you think really happens when you are consistently rated lower than your peers?

You get paid less than you deserve but still more than you would get in most other less profitable firms? No one wants to fire the guy who takes out the garbage every day, literally or metaphorically.

When times are tough the guy who does the most menial tasks gets fired first and replaced with someone cheaper.

The thing about being the guy who fixes software, is that no one will hear about it if you are doing a good job at it.

I don't buy it. That's not what I've seen.

If you're fixing software, you're either fixing your own bugs or someone else's bugs. There's bug tracking software; these metrics are visible. If you're fixing your own code, you're also adding functionality (presumably you wrote the code you're fixing). If you're helping to fix other people's code, they will notice. People talk.

I've personally seen almost an entire team disbanded, the work outsourced. The people kept? The guys who fixed things, who made sure it shipped at the end.

You can see bug fixes on a tracker sure. But how many lines of code is that going to be compared to a new feature or game?

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