Verno wrote on Dec 2, 2011, 14:30:
I'm not going to argue it any more with you Dev, you're again taking something out of context (that story was about Gabe giving a long time employee time off when he had a life threatening illness) but let's put that aside. What do we get when HL3 comes out? I mean from you specifically, will you eat a shoe or something?

But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all. We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.

So, essentally you're saying that Valve needs autonomous developers.
Yep. We don’t really have titles here; people decide for themselves what their role should be. People self-organise here.

That’s why Valve is organised to find people that are cross-disciplinary. [Valve developer] Ken Birdwell is a fine-artist that taught himself to program. He did the skeletal animations for our games starting all the way back from Half-Life 1.

The interesting thing is, that approach leaves you with so many avenues to go down. And as stretched as you are with resources, I have no idea why you don’t hire 50 new people to get more done.
Well, we’ll hire anyone who walks through the door who can pass our review process. The problem is very few people can do that successfully.

In other words, we don’t say they’re working on project X and it will ship in three years.

It’s a very different environment than normal. A lot of the time our new hires ask us, how do decisions get made? How do you pick which projects to work on? People think there must be some secret cabal somewhere in the company that’s making all these decisions. But after about six months in they get it.

What about when you’re in full production though? What about when you have six months before a project is released?
And so people pick up their shovels and start digging. Since everybody gets used to this idea and no one tells them what to do, everybody gets used to this idea of picking what’s best for them to work on

After Half-Life 2 you had openly discussed the health and wellbeing of your staff, and how you were going to attack this problem by adopting a less intense episodic production model. During that five-year Half-Life 2 project, did you personally feel a sense of impact you were having on your teams’ health?
Oh, absolutely. I’ve become obsessed with this issue now. In fact that’s why we’re all going to Hawaii in a week.
We do it every year.

Am I right in thinking there have been two attempts in changing the way Valve works since Half-Life 2? The first being the episodic model, the latest being the ‘entertainment as a service model’?
Yeah we’re thinking of this all now as entertainment as a service.

Is Facebook a viable platform for Valve?
We tend to think of things in terms of our customers, so if our customer is a heavy Facebook user, we have to think about how Team Fortress 2 or Portal 2 can be better for that customer.
So when we look at Facebook we see a collection of services, and a lot of our customers there, so what’s the useful thing we could do for them.
The point is, too many of our customers use Facebook for us to ignore it. The same way too many of our customers have iPhones and Android phones for us to ignore it.