[bdunbar]

Related

1. How do you handle jobs that suck, but must be done.

Like backups ... nobody really likes the job of 'backup guy'.

It's boring. Tedious. A backwater of a role with no meaningful career progression. Also - the software typically sucks, and is expensive. Also - the hardware typically sucks, and is super-expensive.

But someone must pay attention to backups because stuff happens and you might actually need to recover everything from tape to get the company online.

How does Valve get the tedious, boring, nit-picky, utterly necessary stuff done?

[gauravk92]

I would imagine no one at valve is an expert at managing backups for hundreds of machines and keeping an appropriate level of redundancy. Valve is definitely a company that is going to focus on where it can do better then others. They probably use many outside services to handle the things they don't want to have to worry about or specialize in. Other companies will handle it better because that's their focus, Gabe definitely gets that.

[bdunbar]

They probably use many outside services

We experimented with out-sourcing a few years ago. It was a disaster: the out-sourcing company was 'fair-to-excellent' with standard products and services.

But we're a manufacturing company. The majority of our software is specific to our industry. Suddenly the vendor is dealing with dozens of apps they've never even heard of. And - whoops - some of the guys who dealt with that stuff are laid off.

The rest of us got calls from confused techs in Austin plaintively asking what in the heck was the UmptyFratz service and who can restart it?

Long way of saying that - I imagine - some of what Valve does is industry specific and hard to out-source.