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[charlequin]

Valve is the company that panics about having to hire some dirty blue collar people who work with their hands, then promptly cans the project to avoid employing them.

Yeah, as presented so far, Valve's culture either doesn't think jobs outside of the technical engineer/designer/artist type roles are important enough to be done by dedicated employees, or recoils at the idea of letting the kind of people who do these jobs participate in the special employment arrangement Valve provides. Either is pretty contemptuous.

But I have read most of this thread, and the two things people keep mentioning as lacking at Valve are more/better PR and more/better customer service.

Right, because these are two of the most basic parts of running any company that has a consumer-facing operation, and because literally any company which does a poor job in these areas will fail over a surprisingly short timeframe even if they're doing a great job of everything else.

Valve's flat organizational structure is not actually a good idea the way that they've implemented it. At best, it enables a few teams that would self-organize effectively already to avoid too much external interference (though we saw from some of the departures that it doesn't even guarantee that.) At its worst, it ensures that employees of the company behave like children and collectively refuse to do important, vital work because they don't think it would be fun enough to do. As time passes and their business scales up, they move increasingly from the former towards the latter.