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Comment by spikels | Hacker News Reader

Why is Jeri still whining that her job at Valve didn't work out? As best I can tell she was treated fairly but she was just not a good fit in this rather unique company. Maybe this was news in February when she was fired but now it is either a childish grudge or a cynical PR move or both.

Listen to the Grey Area podcast if you think this is wrong.

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Exactly. There were a number of comments on Slashdot[1] that pointed out that Valve may not be the problem here, but that Jeri did not fit into Valve's culture. If you read here Wikipedia[2] page, you'll see she dropped out of both highschool and later college (college due to "cultural mismatch"). Reading her wikipedia page reads like someone that may not play well as part of a team (I haven't fully listened to the Grey Area podcast yet, so I could be totally wrong here).

Jeri couldn't get buy-in for her projects at Valve so they failed. For a project at Valve to succeed you need to convince a number of other people at the company that your project is a good idea and that they should help you work on it. It sounds like she wasn't able to convince others at the company to come help her on her ideas (maybe because she didn't put forth the effort, she wasn't good at selling it, or no one thought her ideas were worth it).

Valve has a very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in. Sounds like maybe she wasn't a good fit.

[1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-v...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

"A very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in."

Sounds a lot like high school to me :-)

Except they make you attend high school whether you fit in or not.

But still, you have to take it as a "no hard feelings" thing and move on. The company I work at has an extremely casual attitude and some similarly extremely casual personalities. We've had a few employees that could do the work requested, but clearly didn't fit the culture. Nothing against them; it just didn't work out.

> Sounds a lot like high school to me :-)

Sounds a lot like most work environments to me. :-)

One of the reasons to adopt these non-traditional organizational models is to foster innovation.

So, the question becomes "If Valve can't retain people like Ellsworth, are they systematically missing out on innovating? Do they have a systemic blind spot?"

I don't know the answer to that, but that's the real question. Saying someone isn't a good fit end of story is missing the point from a business process and innovation perspective.

There is a tradeoff between being selective and inclusive. If you are too inclusive (i.e. almost everyone fits) then you can't be very selective. On the other hand if you are very selective you must be definition not be very inclusive.

From what I know Valve is very selective. It seems that both Ellsworth and Valve thought it would be a good fit but for whatever reason it turned out it wasn't. While they lost out of her many talents they preserved their culture which has been very successful so far.

This. Valve is a business and it sounds like they didn't think her ideas were going to provide value. In the end she got to walk away with all of the IP that she had developed on company time (and probably severance). I don't see what she has to complain about.

Jeri took quite a hit when she put her established and successful, entreprenurial lifestyle on ice to work "for the man." If you listen to that great podcast, you'll hear how she had to pack up her personal projects and local consulting gigs for regular, paying customers as well as her profitable and fun local-pinball-business to work at Valve.

Some people are perceiving Jeri's emotional crying about the experience as "whining" and "complaining." I don't think she's "butthurt" about the experience at all. It is just that it was intense and very personal, near to her core.

The interview from which the guardian article is highly condensed (remember to take your grain of salt) is a very inspiring example of going from one peak to another. She is certainly very savvy to go from being laid off in the morning, to marching out the door with the IP she created. We should all learn to be so clever!

So yes, she has nothing to whine about and no, she hasn't actually been whining about anything, only crying while telling the story because it was so intense. The world has sometimes gotten used to softballs, but Jeri is a hard-banger all the way. She mentions in the interview that she's actually going so far as to make a custom ASIC for the AR product. That's a step you only make if you are foolish and wealthy, or preparing for a major, major market movie. In EE terms, it's a cost-reduction move that only makes sense in >10K-100K quantity (well, depends on margin. Government contracts have lower thresholds.)

It doesn't surprise me to see this kind of Valve-apologism on HN. It doesn't help that we're talking about a female who is successful in tech, so we get the nice sexism icing on the cake.

Virtually every single Valve article posted and upvoted here is overwhelmingly positive. The fact that Valve is worshipped in this manner should be sufficient to raise alarm bells, as Mark Twain once said, "Whenever you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." This woman is making some very, very valid remarks about Valve as a company. My hope is that she continues to do so until Gabe himself listens and takes steps to implement the necessary changes.

I'm going to have to disagree with you, mostly because you're bringing sexism to the table, where nobody else in comments or article (as far as I can see) has.

The cake didn't have icing on. Or it had different icing. I dunno anymore because you put that sexism icing on and now I can't see the other icing.

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