Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. How can a company claim to hire the best and the brightest, have some of the toughest interviewing processes in the industry and yet produce a clunky slow piece of shit software that's been dragging its feet for nearly a decade resulting in your account information splattered all over someone's screen. What an embarrassment.

View on HN

Part of this might be that Valve doesn't assign projects - everyone chooses their own. With so much cool stuff going on, it's easy to ignore less fun, less visible projects, such as fixing the Steam store.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

I'd love to fix steam!

That's great jay but what we're really looking for is people who can design hats

Flip side of the "flat, work on what you're interested in" company hierarchy.

If nobody goes to work for Valve thinking "I really love writing online stores wrapped in native apps with friends lists and voice chat bolted on the side," they don't progress very quickly.

I imagine the list of those that want to also fix bugs and performance issues for such apps at Valve is even smaller. Just my guess from being an active steam user for about a decade.

"Native" being a really relative word here.

Remember, these are people who are passionate about games, not necessarily games commerce platforms. It may be that most people, the best and brightest, choose not to wheel their desk to the Steam pod to do tedious, yet necessary, work to upgrade and polish it.

Valve puts more resources into Steam than all their games combined. Steam is their main platform, I had a chance to speak about several people who I know for a fact interned there (one stayed on as an employee) it's really not as chaotic and arbitrary as people think, you do not get to do just what ever the fuck you want regardless of what the scuttlebutt says.

They properly programmed the website so you can't abuse this occurrence, as well as it might be the fault of their cache provider. Although they do have some problems, it is without a doubt they hire extremely smart people if you watch any of the talks people from Valve give, especially concerning their marketplaces. They definitely have lots of problems with their policies, but they are definitely not bad at programming.

Didn't Facebook had a similar bug? shit happens, at least all of their other processes are good enough to compensate for this so while there is some (substantial) information leakage it's not exploitable which is more than you can say about Facebook's many API bugs over the years.

If you think that they do such a shitty job, you probably should enter the market as a competitor...

Steam has numerous competitors but by being the first major player they carry a huge inertial advantage. Having a huge library of games is a REALLY big incentive for people to stay there.

I've been thinking about it and honestly the only way I can think a new competitor could breach into a significant market share, short of Valve screwing up completely, is to offer to duplicate a user's library across to their own platform.

I was under the impression that many games, under Linux, could only be played using Steam.

I wonder if you could make a client that also wraps over Steam? So you have your own store and library and messaging system and everything, but you also log into your Steam account under the hood and it mirrors all your Steam things. So you can launch your Steam games and talk to your Steam friends, but have a nicer client.

a lot of games have steam DRM in them, making them unplayable unless the steam client is open and logged in.

so, this couldn't work unless steam creates some kind of API to get around the DRM, which they obviously won't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com