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Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed

HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Yeah, also its less “valve staff get bored and dont do mundane tasks” iirc thier pay is based on what thier coworkers think the value of thier work was, which is usually in how visible/noticeable which discourages long projects thay take more than a year and mundane tasks that are not very clear and visible

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PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarelt leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.

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- sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You appear to be wrong.
  
  geekwire.com/…/behind-scenes-half-life-alyx-valve…
  
  GeekWire: So you’ve been working on this _(HL Alyx) _full-steam since 2016?
  
  Robin Walker: We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that, understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up.
  
  We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through. The exact size of the team I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The way things work at Valve, people organically join once they’ve finished up what they were doing before, and if what you’re doing makes sense to them.
  
  So it was always full steam ahead, I guess, but not in the sense that all 80 people were there from day one.
  
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- HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  ah, didn’t hear that, yeah its from heard a long time ago
  
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sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.

I think it is closer to:

You get hired to fill a specific role (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.

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- HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  They may have moved on from the structure they had ~10 years ago but there was documentation and interviews about that internal structure. yes it worked similar to that, there where tasks to be done but employees could largely choose whatever they want to work on, there where no formal managers but plenty de facto managers, there was base pay scales but most of the pay was bonuses, that where indeed based on the reviews of your coworkers based on how much work/value you appeared to make for the company. Because valve is private is why it had such a unique structure. Alot of former employees spoke about how that pay structure killed alot of projects and deincetivised maintenance tasks. Then because there was no formal management, if you wanted to work on larger projects you had to convince coworkers to work with you there was no assigned teams or bosses, and if your project took longer then the year, it would be likely there would be no fruit of your labor and you would likely be rated lower, i.e. less pay. Of course no formal bosses does not mean there was not cliques employees that had been there longer and/or had more influence with more coworkers had more power to form teams and trusted when working longer projects, also employees would connect with coworkers so that the work they did would be noticed. Who completed your employee review would be basically random, so you had to hope/ensure everyone knew what you where doing.
  
  Obviously there are alot of issues with this, I hope they have since moved on but last I heard there wasn’t much traction to change it. There is no board to appease and Gabe is the one who made the system, change is difficult for valve.
  
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