Former Valve dev rants on working at Valve

[rafbanaan]

A former developer at Valve, Rich Geldreich, wrote a rant on his blog that mostly describes his time at Valve. When he tweeted it, other developers joined in. I will try to keep this up to date and keep some sort of logic in the post.

 

Source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=964018

 

 

Rich Geldreich was part of the Linux team @ Valve and worked on SteamOS and VOGL. He already ranted about the OGL situation and left the company afterwards. 

 

It started with the following tweet: 

Thinking about writing a "What It's *Really* Like to Work at Valve" blog post, to get it off my chest. Worried I can't do the topic justice.

 

 

Which has let to the blog: http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms-suck.html

 

Some snippets: 

In case you've never seen or worked in one of these horrible office spaces before, here's a public shot showing a small fraction of the Dota 2 cabal room:

 

I heard the desks got packed in so tightly that occasionally a person would lower or raise their desks and it would get caught against other nearby desks. One long-time Valve dev would try to make himself a little cubicle of sorts by parking himself into a corner with a bunch of huge monitors on his desk functioning as walls, kind of like this extreme example:

 

 

 

In case it wasn't clear: I really dislike large open office spaces. (Not 2-3 person offices, but large industrial scale 20-100 person open office spaces of doom.) Valve's was absolutely the worst expression of the concept I've ever experienced. I can understand doing the open office thing for a while at a startup, where every dollar counts, but at an established company I just won't tolerate this craziness anymore. (See the scientific research below if you think I feel too strongly about this trend.)

As an engineer I can force myself to function in them, but only with large headphones on and a couple huge monitors to block visual noise. I do my best to mentally block out the constant audio/visual (and sometimes olfactory!) interruptions, but it's tough. It's not rocket science people: engineers cannot function at peak efficiency in Romper Room-like environments.

 

 

Here's the list of issues I encountered while working in cabal (open office layout) rooms:

1. North Korea-like atmosphere of self-censorship:

2. Constant background noise: visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.

3. Bad physical cabal room placement: Don't put a cabal room next to the barber or day care rooms people (!).

4. Constant random/unstructured interruptions. 

5. Hyper-proximity to sick co-workers.

6. Noise spike in the afternoon in one cabal room, as everyone all the sudden decides to start chatting (usually about inane crap honestly) for 30-60 minutes. 

7. Environmental issues: Temperature either too high or too low, lighting either too bright, too dark, or wrong color spectrum. Nobody is ever really happy with this arrangement except the locally optimizing bean counters.

8. Power issues or fire hazards due to extreme desk density.

9. Mixing electrical or mechanical engineers (who operate power tools, solder, destruct shit, etc.) next to developers trying their best to concentrate on code.

10. Guest developers causing trouble:

11. No (or bad access to) white boards.

 

 

 

We finish with the conversation on Twitter where he doesn't care what people will think.

[Trik'Stari]

Still beats working at EA or Ubisoft.

[Padunkadunk]

Damn...dat workspace doe.

[rafbanaan]

*Snip*

 

Brainfart. 

[Jobbe03]

Holy shit, working at Valve is like working in any other office!?!?!?!?!?! what a surprise... 

 

This dude needs to get his head out of his ass and realize that even multi billionaire $ companies will do just about anything to cut costs. 

[minibois]

I thought working at Valve was awesome

[theKumba]

Say wuuuut?!

[SurvivorNVL]

But.. what about the candy room!?!  THE CANDY ROOM!?!

[Jaybird]

If you don't like your job quit. I've been saying it for years. I don't feel sorry for anyone who hates or rages out at the company they work for and continues to work there.

[theKumba]

Still beats working at EA or Ubisoft.

From what I've seen at least Ubisoft's studios are really pretty and well spaced. I think it's due to them really making their money of selling games and not reselling games like Valve does so their staff is more important to them.

[Trik'Stari]

From what I've seen at least Ubisoft's studios are really pretty and well spaced. I think it's due to them really making their money of selling games and not reselling games like Valve does so their staff is more important to them.

And yet their games tend to still suffer quality issues when they release.

[XTankSlayerX]

Yeah, I haven't heard any good stuff from people who have worked there.

[werto165]

As long as you've got a comfy chair and a good PC I see no problems really. Just looks like any other office, to be profitable they can't all have luxurious office spaces.

[rafbanaan]

If you don't like your job quit. I've been saying it for years. I don't feel sorry for anyone who hates or rages out at the company they work for and continues to work there.

 

He already left.

[patrickjp93]

As long as you've got a comfy chair and a good PC I see no problems really. Just looks like any other office, to be profitable they can't all have luxurious office spaces.

You've clearly never worked in this sort of studio. You need good headphones to cancel the noise of the PC fans and the chatter. The smell of stress sweat begins to permeate even with good air filters when deadlines roll around. Every once in a while someone yells and fist pounds a desk when everything goes wrong that day... It begins to feel claustrophobic. Everyone's looking at you if you walk out for a break from it all...

 

Even just having wall separators helps tremendously.

[Doughnutnator]

At least they have keyboards with lights....

[theKumba]

And yet their games tend to still suffer quality issues when they release.

Which is due to their shitty HQs that push them to release the games as early as possible.

[theKumba]

Yeah, I haven't heard any good stuff from people who have worked there.

Maybe he was just really pissed because he got fired and now writes some random shit about Valve. Everything's possible.

[Deletive]

Still beats working at EA or Ubisoft.

Maybe ubisoft, but EA (well EA Vancouver atleast) sure would beat what was just described.

http://www.ea.com/locations/vancouver

[LancerBG]

It's work, you get paid to work not have a good time. People always find some reason to bitch about things....been on the net lately?

[SIGSEGV]

Um... That's not that much of a problem at all... Just wear ear plugs

[XTankSlayerX]

Maybe he was just really pissed because he got fired and now writes some random shit about Valve. Everything's possible.

But from 5 different people who one of which have been a member on the forum?

 

I still think Valve is just a wolf in sheep's clothing,   They've been around for so long and "GabeN" is so praised that any PC gamer will for give them for anything.

[ACatWithThumbs]

Still beats working at EA or Ubisoft.

Not true just look at DICE:

And Naughtydog as an example has the same big offices as Valve but they use office walls to split up the sections.

 

[XTankSlayerX]

Um... That's not that much of a problem at all... Just wear ear plugs

 

You've clearly never worked in this sort of studio. You need good headphones to cancel the noise of the PC fans and the chatter. The smell of stress sweat begins to permeate even with good air filters when deadlines roll around. Every once in a while someone yells and fist pounds a desk when everything goes wrong that day... It begins to feel claustrophobic. Everyone's looking at you if you walk out for a break from it all...

 

Even just having wall separators helps tremendously.

 

....

[TwistedDictator]

Well for a big company like valve this is not right IMO. I remember they have this hand book on how great it is to work for valve but it look like crap tbh. From the amount of cash they get, they do be cheap. Valve gets it quite easy, if this was EA everyone would be going crazy right now lol

I know there a lot of gaben fans here but they make so much from CS:GO but there are ton of hackers still on (on the Europe side servers (don't know about other areas)) that they haven't bothered to seriously fix.

 

Its nice to see some decent comments from you guys. At least some people have senses and know valve is in the wrong.