[komali2]

Valve fascinates me because the devs there occasionally seem to be simply the best on earth in a given field, but despite that, bizarre bugs will persist for a long time. My favorite was how steam in home streaming from a PC to a steam deck wouldn't work if the steam deck had an Ethernet and wifi connection - one of the connections had to be disabled or the stream would always crash.

Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.

[3form]

The company is very small, and they're doing a lot with what they have. Steam alone is full of arcane features that I keep discovering. There's a lot of backend stuff. They're making games and hardware.

Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)

[trumpdong]

The company makes $50,000,000 for every employee each year. It can afford more employees.

[zipy124]

But would it actually help. More employees means more communication and overhead. Lean organisations can move much quicker. Part of why valve can do what valve does is how lean it runs.

[trumpdong]

To summarize this conversation:

"Steam is bad because it has few employees."

"Steam can afford more employees."

"Adding more employees would make Steam worse."

Good talk.

[3form]

No doubt they can, maybe they should. My point is that I'm more impressed with the results than many other companies that I know.

[DanielHB]

The number of developers needs to grow log(n) to the number of users to handle all error reports. Valve is way under the log(n) of user.

[stackghost]

Valve famously has a very flat org structure so it's possible that that problem just isn't sexy enough for someone to pick it up on their own, without being told by a higher-up.

I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.

[sph]

People keep blaming the flat org, as if conventionally-organised companies never had any bugs or never focused on very visible and marketable features rather than bug fix.

In fact, the flat org allows a random person to work on a niche bug management doesn’t seem to care about, which wouldn’t be possible if you had a boss breathing down your neck.

[PeterHolzwarth]

They say they have a flat structure. People who have worked there, despite some axe-grinding, indicate otherwise.

[formerly_proven]

grug tribal animal, tribe always there even when chief say is not

[mhitza]

My favorite bug family, that somehow to sneak in every time, is how their react frontend (or whatever the store runs) manages to semi-crash and the controller inputs are no longer recognized.

I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.

[philistine]

That is the bane of my existence. Steam's UI is so slow to react due to its web roots, that I feel like people must be insane to think that Steam is somehow this great app. It's terrible.

I shop on GOG.

[csande17]

Steam was rewritten in React relatively recently. I think most people formed their opinion of Steam back when it was mostly developed in VGUI, the same in-house native UI framework Valve used in games for stuff like the Half-Life 2 title screen and the TF2 server browser.

[NekkoDroid]

> Steam's UI is so slow to react due to its web roots

I actually wouldn't blame the web roots. Battle.net is also a CEF based launcher and it feels so much more snappy compared to Steam. For some reason Steam just feels really slow.