Valve Pipeline
pipeline.valvesoftware.com
pipeline.valvesoftware.com
1) Good for Valve. I think this is the beginning of an already awesome company evolving even further.
2) Jeri Ellsworth (fired valve employee) was right. Some of the older Valve employees really have been holding the company back in terms of culture and new hires. This seems to be Valve's response by fixing itself and focusing on recruiting new younger staff. The problem with being an awesome place to work is that employees don't leave even when they should. They might in turn refuse to let younger employees in out of fear that they'll be replaced. So slowly it destroys the natural cycle of replacement of old ideas with fresh new ones. It might not be set up as a recruitment platform but it sure can be used like one to Valve's advantage. They can support kids who want to get into the industry and at the same time snap up the best of the best before other companies do.
3) Also, Valve hires only the most experienced who can self manage themselves. This has allowed them to do a lot with only 300 or so people but expanding seems to be slow. Other companies hire juniors, work them hard, pay them below market wages, and can expand faster and create more IP. If Valve wants to launch more IP or expand they're going to have to change their ways. And it seems they've come to terms with that.
As for this project, I, for one, would like to learn about 3D rendering -- that's always been something that I'd admired from afar.
1. This will attract a large pool of young talent and some of them will make direct contributions and contributions through feedback and interplay of ideas.
2. This creates goodwill in the developer and education community which helps experienced industry professionals to think more highly of Valve. They will be more likely to apply or recommend applying.
3. This, as has been said, improves conditions at Valve and helps to shine light on more stultified areas of the company.
We (little ISP) get them for a few hours each day after school and put them to work answering phones. They get some work experience and credit under the high school's "industry as shop class" scheme.
The better ones get a job for the summer and a raise. If they show the right blend of bordom doing phone support combined with motivation to learn systems stuff we promote them and give them sysadmin projects.
Worst case they end up with some clerical work experience in a office environment. Best case they learn some combination of Sysadmin/Netadmin/Coder. Either way it beats working fast food or stocking shelves.
I helped out at http://studentrnd.com/ a few times. Hooooly crap. Some of those 14 year olds can code! Having two Microsoft Devs as parents is a pretty good strategy if you want to grow up and be valuable to Valve.
It's not the "right" way for every company. Valve and other companies do the opposite. But for most of the industry it is a cost of doing business.
I could have chosen to be politically correct or realistic & honest. I chose realistic & honest.
That's the part that is disconcerting. It's a despicable way to conduct your business.
I think you misspelled "wise up"
You could say people new in the industry haven't been conditioned and molded yet. They're young in the industry and thus make stupid mistakes in the process and in the process find new ways of doing things. That would be far more accurate.
But, is that bad?
As ChrisNorstrom's sibling reply points out, companies really do want young workers in technology. They're more up to date on languages and tools. They'll produce more work and dedicate more time when unencumbered by family concerns. They don't have an expectation of or a lifestyle that requires a six-figure salary. Experience is less of a concern in game and entertainment development than in other industries; it doesn't matter so much if a young hotshot clutters up the codebase a bit or reinvents some wheel algorithm, when this game will be shipped and a new one begun within a year. Even bugs stemming from inexperience are less of a concern for Valve than anyone else, when they own the distribution platform that can automatically push patches and updates anytime.
It's also not illegal if the "older" victims are under age 40. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act only forbids age discrimination against workers 40 or older. http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
Sure, it sucks for the fired workers. Sure, it sounds ruthless and inhumane. And sure, if Valve is blindly firing everybody between age 30 and 40, then they're being dumb, since of course some programmers are still 10x animals at any age. But Valve is not a charity or a government, and is presumably smarter than that. It's a business in mission to make games and money. Every business should be seeking to replace low performers with fresh faces. And in game development, the performance and business value of an employee does bear an inverse correlation with age, so lower performers will skew older.
This philosophy is just another extension of the fetishization of youth. Just because someone is young doesn't mean they'll be better than an older employee (and vice versa, of course).
Judge people on their merits and what they actually achieve, not on what their birthday happens to be.
It's a weird conflict, really. As others have said, there is a bitter taste of manifestly unwarranted ageism in your post.
Can I make a suggestion? Make your email capture form immediately visible and give it equal emphasis with the video.
Don't let intrigued people leave without giving you a way to contact them later. People who offer their email address are your biggest fans, and having that information will be valuable to you almost instantly.
Joking, of course, this is cool. I wonder how they'll recruit, whether it'll be from pre-existing modding community (does that still exist, given how relatively creaky their games are now?) or completely fresh. I imagine that these days, due to mobile apps and independent engines like Unity, there are more good young devs outside gaming/modding than before.
I appreciate that the Raspberry Pi foundation was set up in an attempt to readdress this issue, but I for one consider myself very luck -perhaps more so than this generation of kids- to have grown up in an era where school kids had the same (dis)advantages as the games studios. And I think it was that which cemented my desire to work in IT at such an early age - as I felt part of the industry even though I was just throwing together silly BBC / Amstrad BASIC, and later DOS games in Pascal, for my own amusement.
You are absolutely right. I am currently in high school, and I enjoy doing lower-level stuff like game engines, compilers, OSes and hardware.
I am currently thinking of dropping out of school, but it will probably force me to do freelancing and web dev.
It's almost impossible to get a job in any of the areas I am interested without a University degree.
Back in the early days of PCs, I could easily make a hardware startup and earn a decent living, or maybe even get rich. But now it's virtually impossible to do so.
It costs billions of dollars to setup a semiconductor fab and the field is encumbered in patents and politics. Majority of games studios also have budgets with about the same number of digits.
Whatever is making school unbearable for you, fix that problem instead (or ask for help to fix it) of trying to get away from it.
I dropped out of high school at age 16 because it made me fucking miserable, and self-studied for two years to get myself into college. I had a GED, a 3 in AP Calc AB, and a 5 in AP Computer Science by the end.
They admitted me to the honors college at UMass Amherst. I did my undergrad there BSc Computer Science (with honors), specialized in the Programming Languages and Compilers Track.
Today I'm at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, doing a research-track MSc.
You want to do stuff like compilers, OSes and hardware? Screw high school, get yourself to university as fast as possible, and once you're there double down on all of it. For specialized areas like these, even at a good undergrad institution you're going to have to take grad-level courses to get to the Real Deal.
You can do this! So hurry up and get to work!
EDITED to elide bragging. Stupid me.
Also, for some reason, the header image doesn't show up in Safari.
Like, yeah it's supposed to help high school students familiarize themselves with commercial game development, but how? Do they visit your high school and hold a presentation? If it's just information on a website, why do you need to register? If it wasn't by Valve it'd sound like a scam.
Don't really understand how it sounded like a scam, you just have to submit your email address to get updates.
But yea, definitely awesome to see Valve wants to engage a younger workforce, though we'll see if they actually commit.
That said, the video looks quite nice.
If you can explain it, I'd like to know why anybody ever browses on the phone unless you're literally travelling or on the toilet. I just don't get it. A tiny screen and no keyboard seems like a crappy way to experience the Internet when you could use a big screen, but everybody is saying it's the next thing. (Perhaps it is purely economic and I'm being a bit of a Marie Antoinette here?)
It really doesn't take much to at least make sure your website is accessible. If it doesn't work properly it's likely I'll give up and not even bother trying anywhere else.
I agree that if the site looks like that on a tablet, they need to fix it. It's not about being "too picky". There's no excuse for stuff like that.
The main thrust of the critique as I saw it was that the OP could have done it when he was 14, which is what led to the "too picky" comment.
If you really want to understand why the PC industry is drowning and mobile is on the rise, go out into the world an interact with the people using these devices. The answer will be obvious at that point.
> go out into the world an interact with the people using these devices. The answer will be obvious at that point.
I've done that, but I still don't get it. That said, I only really have close interaction with 2 people who use tablets (AFAIK). I see that with a tablet the screen is big enough to not be a pain. Isn't the on-screen keyboard a pain, though? Does it work just well enough to type URLs and fill out web forms? Or does it work well enough that people don't really care about not having a real keyboard?
the reasons for this and the tradeoffs are covered in the Valve employee handbook
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHa...