Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Wow.

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.

Aren't high schoolers the wrong crowd? I mean it lets them get their feet wet, but most (read: 99.99%) of high schoolers won't be valuable employees to a technology company.

Speaking as a high schooler, I think there are plenty of us out there who would be plenty helpful to a company like Valve. (I like to think I would be one of them!)

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.

If you're seriously interested in learning about 3D rendering and have some programming (and some linear algebra) experience, you should look into Udacity's CS291 course.

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs291

Awesome, thanks! Programming experience I definitely have, and some linear algebra... although I'll be taking that course soon. Again, thanks!

I wouldn't say so. I'm currently in high school and working at a small indie studio on our flagship game. Working with other professionals on a title that matters is invaluable experience, at least in my opinion.

Invaluable experience yes, but it's really the employer who is providing the value, which is backwards in business sense.

You, my dear friend, just described an internship. I'm one of two programmers on the game we're working on. I feel like I contribute a fair share as an employee to the game.

If nothing else, they might be a good audience for Valve's older employees to bounce ideas off of. They could provide information about what teens (a big consumer of Valve's products) want and think are cool.

I was a full time dev at 16, and believe that I was quite valuable to the company. Some other comments tell similar stories, so it seems like its not that rare. I wouldn't be so quick to say that high schoolers aren't valuable at all, but I do agree that most of them probably aren't.

Valve is a company that has the margin and the culture to support products that don't pay an immediate return. That said, I see some immediate benefits:

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.

They are cheap and you can cycle them quickly without too much grief until you find the good ones.

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.

Absolutely, what a great program to be running.

You forget that Valve's offices are in Microsoft's backyard.

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.

Age has nothing to do with anything. Old or young, people can be intelligent, productive and very forward thinking. It is true that many people who have been in the industry a while have found a job and technologies where they're comfortable and don't want to change; but it's just as true that many continue to move forward and try new things.

Reading your post -- in particular the held-high observations of someone who was fired -- one would think that Valve was a relic of a company full of apparently useless seniors who are just waiting out their days until they can retire to go fishing. You know, the same Valve that is one of the most successful software companies operating, and is a company that is pretty much universally understood to have an incredible ability to execute.

It's a weird conflict, really. As others have said, there is a bitter taste of manifestly unwarranted ageism in your post.

The ageism in your post is disconcerting. On one hand you equate youth with innovation, age with stagnation, and on the other you posit that overworking youth for below market wages is simply a cost of doing business.

Youth haven't been conditioned and molded yet by their industries, they're young, stupid and make mistakes and in the process find new ways of doing things. Because they're young they don't have experience nor families to take care of, and thus will take low wages. They don't demand too many benefits, and you can work them like mules. They also flood the market and are over supplied and under demanded. The average game developer is a 31 year old white male. As soon as they start settling down and wanting to have a family they leave the industry. They burn out, and they are replaced.

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.

Now that Valve has caught on to this technique, other game companies are going to have to step up their game if they want to stay competitive. Working people like mules? Pssht, that's nothing. I suggest they take some advice from advisors of PhD students. Also, I'm willing to provide consulting services if/when I graduate.

There are laws limiting the amount a teenager can work.

> But for most of the industry it is a cost of doing business.

That's the part that is disconcerting. It's a despicable way to conduct your business.

"They burn out"

I think you misspelled "wise up"

Imagine how far a game company could go if it employed only 18 year-olds at minimum wage.

That's a gross over-generalization of youth. Age alone does not tell you anything about intelligence, experience or the likelihood of making mistakes. There may be a general correlation, but it is not causation. You may have a 20-year-old who's been programming and contributing to open-source projects since he was 10 against a 31-year-old who's been programming since he was 27. Who has more experience? Who's more likely to make mistakes? - Age has nothing to do with it.

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.

Yes, it's ageist, and so is Valve if they really have been cleaning house of older employees in favor of fresh college-age kids.

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.

Your lawyerly response notwithstanding (it's not illegal if they're under 40!), you don't fire someone because they are old. You fire them because they are underperforming, whether they are old or young.

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 seems that age is superfluous to your argument.

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