How does Valve operate when some jobs might be less desirable than others? For instance how do they get anyone to do QA or man the ticket queue? I get that some of this will have to be outsourced but at what point does it happen during a project?
There are so many people who want to work in games that there's a sometimes toxic codependency between management and new employees. People will put up with a lot of shit to work at these places.
That makes it difficult for those of us who mostly work outside of games to draw conclusions and parallels to our own corners of the industry. People just don't feel that way about a lot of other things.
Many of those kids, now educated programmers and IT folks, would give anything to work at Valve. "Just happy to be on the team".
It's also a well known tool with a very, very large userbase -- not a bad line to have on a resume.