[endianswap]

This is basically how things work at Valve, since it's almost entirely an engineering driven system that keeps us moving forward. Therefore there's always incentive for anyone in any non-engineering department to pick up what they can to make their work easier or more efficient. Of course the converse is true, too, you see engineers learning more about the art pipeline, business, et. as part of the concept of wanting to become more T-shaped.

My quintessential example of this is seeing artists create a new effect, model, or sound, and lacking the appropriate hooks in code, go into the C++ source tree and hook their assets into the game themselves.

[smspence]

You work at Valve? That's cool, and this may sound kind of dumb but oh well: you guys are my heroes. I am an engineer who does a lot of computer graphics programming and I have always looked up to you guys.

[juan_juarez]

Everyone?

I know a lot of people have seen that new employee manual but I assumed that only applied to the 'elite' & that there is a giant pool of peons that support them. Am I right or do the people doing things like billing and tech support get the same royal treatment?

[endianswap]

For example, the support team has internal tools that they use to do their job, and for the most part do all development of that tool themselves. Sometimes other developers help them out with specific features that are in the domain of that developer, but most of the tool grows as the support team needs e.g. better wizards to answer tickets quicker. Several members of the support team are taking programming classes, too, to learn how to do more developmental work along these lines.