80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.

Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.

And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.

80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 month ago

For serious. I wish they hired remote.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

This likely management 101 in action

Amazing what happens if you treat people right and let them do their job

Instead we got too much management constantly causing churn

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

"I have 8 different bosses. That means when I make a mistake, I have 8 different people coming by to tell me about it."

[–] Gigasser 2 points 1 month ago

From a comment below, Valve as a whole supposedly has around 350, of which around 80 work on Steam.

[–] ProxyZeus 7 points 1 month ago

Love to refactor, the more I watch the Mesa graphics drivers and the employees valve hired that work on it the more I believe it