
Abrash on Valve: How I Got Here, What It's Like, and What I'm Doing - psykotic
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/
======
Roritharr
This is it. Never has anyone more perfectly described the way in which I want
to work. I love to work in teams on projects where I feel I can make an impact
to the extent of my capabilities and starting projects myself is deeply
entrenched in my nature.

I've been thinking about wearable computing for the past 5 years and even went
on to study Computer Vision because of it, but after 3 semesters i switched
the field to general computer science, mostly because i didn't exactly wanted
to reimplement AR-Engines and learn about all the algorithms behind object
recognition but just use them for the things I had imagined. I've been working
in the past year with Metaio's AR Framework called Junaio and Qualcomms AR SDK
for Unity 3D and will write about some of my ideas and findings in the next
weeks. (You can create impromptu Project Glass glasses by taping a HD Screen
Phone like the Galaxy Nexus in 10-15cm distance from your eyes onto some fake
glasses and add counter weights on the opposite side, it's enough for testing
all the ideas you have in that field until the real Glass comes along)

Right now i feel very bad about my decision to switch fields and focus on
working more while studying to get more experience, simply because I think
that if i would've finished my computer vision studies i would feel more
adequate to send them a job application now...

~~~
wallflower
> I think that if i would've finished my computer vision studies i would feel
> more adequate to send them a job application now...

Well... I'd like to suggest that you do not pre-reject yourself. Let them
decide. At the least, it will allow you to get on their radar. Remember they
seem to have a long term view.

~~~
read_wharf
"Well... I'd like to suggest that you do not pre-reject yourself. Let them
decide."

Everyone post that on your wall above your monitor.

~~~
mkramlich
Indeed. If you're a guy, this advice is also gold with respect to women.

~~~
tkahn6
Reminds me of this: <https://twitter.com/#!/shitmydadsays/statuses/4811790555>

~~~
kruhft

      $ echo https://twitter.com/#!/shitmydadsays/statuses/4811790555 | wc -c
      57
      $  echo '"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."' | wc -c
      116

~~~
mcantor
_"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they
won't screw you, don't do it for them."_

Source?

~~~
kruhft

      $ echo '#shitmydadsays' | wc -c
      15

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting read, a long way to go for a recruiting pitch but I digress.

The description Michael gives of Valve is _exactly_ the description of
Google's work environment / culture in the early days. I found that that part
fascinating. Google's ended up blowing up, but its not clear the mechanism.
Old timers espoused the 'too many bozos' theory, I think it was deeper than
that.

As a trend / theme / disruption wearable compute has been a staple of talk and
research at the MIT Media lab, NASA, and elsewhere. The question I have is
whether it is any more than the display equivalent of a 'hands free' kit for
your phone. (you wear the speaker & microphone on your ear, you wear the
display on your glasses or forehead?).

I've tried in the past unsuccessfully to create a 'fixed' heads up display,
which is to say a display which places pixels in the environment space rather
than display space. This requires understanding precisely where your head is
pointing, and creating a view frustum which is aligned with your physical
orientation. The challenge is that it has to respond quickly enough that your
brain doesn't see the pixels move from their 'relative' position in the
environment. That degree of frequency response has been hard to come by, but
there are lots of new inertial units which might address that these days. I'm
guessing that you need at least 250 updates / second for 6 degrees (X, Y, Z
orientation, X, Y, Z angular velocity) but its an interesting problem none the
less. And fun to work on since it combines old school 3D graphics with today's
internet of things.

~~~
shuzchen
I'd garner to say the difference between Valve and Google would be their size.
Valve (according to wiki) has ~260 employees. I'm sure Google has more
janitors than that. As I'm assuming very few people leave a position at Valve,
that must mean they're very very very*9000 particular about hiring, much more
so than google is.

~~~
raphman
The parent compared Valve to _Google's work environment / culture in the early
days_ \- not as of today.

~~~
shuzchen
Nobody said that they're the same today. The parent claimed that Valve and
Google's work environment were the same (at Google's early onset) and wondered
why "Google's ended up blowing up". My answer to that question is that Valve
was able to keep the culture they have because they kept the company size
small, and Google was unable to sustain that culture because they exploded in
size. If Valve were to start hiring like crazy (as Google did), you'll see the
same thing happen. I believe strongly in the culture that Valve promotes in
their company, but I don't believe it can survive a mass influx of hiring.

~~~
raphman
Thanks. Now I understand your point (and agree with it).

------
roc
As perhaps an aside, I think the first-mover advantage is quite debatable.

I'm pretty sure the benefits of Unix have not primarily accrued to the firm
that generated the original creative act. Neither did the benefits primarily
accrue to the firm that generated the original creation of the Windowed GUI.
Nor the web browser, web server, search engine, blog platform, flash-based
personal media player, social network, smart phone, tablet, etc.

I believe a strong argument can even be made that followers-on have an
advantage in seeing the landscape laid out before them and planning for the
future, while the first-mover is mired in legacy concerns.

Granted, much of this rests upon the definition of a discrete invention and
thus the original creation of it. But it seems things are quite a bit muddier
than Abrash claims.

Edit: Indeed, his citing of _any_ Zynga games as examples of first-mover
advantage seriously undercuts his argument.

~~~
courage
I don't think Id got most of the money, or any sustainable advantage from
making the first networked first person shooters, but that's not the point.
First mover gets to change the world. That was true for Id, Xerox, AT&T, etc.

~~~
roc
I don't dispute that. But the way Abrash phrased things, it certainly seemed
to be an economic argument.

~~~
SpiderX
Yup. He said " the first mover dominates". Not true. Sixdegrees.com was the
first social network, bet you've never heard of it until now.

"First mover" means jack.

------
harryh
I'd be interested in learning more about valve's peer based compensation
system. Does anyone know more details?

------
guynamedloren
This is amazing. I love the fact that there are no hierarchies and
organizational induced inefficiencies, and I especially love the culture of
experimentation. This leaves a LOT of responsibility up to the employees -
they must be very creative and very driven for an ecosystem like this to work.
I imagine one of the biggest challenges for Valve is finding employees that
fit this description. There are loads of smart developers/engineers/designers
out there, but not many who can be productive with little or no direction.

The author stresses that he was pushed to work on the most valuable thing he
could possibly work on. For many programmers, just working on _anything_ is
okay, as long as they're staying busy and committing code. If Valve is filled
with employees who are constantly assessing value and thinking about things
other than lines of code, it sounds like quite an amazing place to be.

------
haberman
"I had met John [Carmack] in person just once before, but he knew me from PC
graphics articles of mine he had read when he was first learning to program
the PC"

Ha, if that's not geek cred I don't know what is.

~~~
sbierwagen
Abrash is a Big Name in the computer graphics field:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash>

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_at_ep_srch?_encoding=UTF8...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_at_ep_srch?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-
alias=books&field-author=Michael%20Abrash)

~~~
haberman
I know that, I own several of his books. :)

Still, to be the person that John Carmack learned graphics programming from...
that's pretty badass.

------
llambda
Possibly the best job advertisement I've read, and I don't mean that in a
disparaging way. Very well crafted and inherently worthwhile. After all, who
couldn't be excited about Valve after reading this?

------
stcredzero
_The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There
was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value
was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time._

Movie studios forget this all the time. Book publishers and TV networks often
seem to forget this. A lot of folks looking to do startups forget this as
well.

~~~
Bamafan
I don't know. Michael followed that sentence with the following:

" _Similarly, if you’re a programmer, you’re probably perfectly capable of
writing Facebook or the Google search engine or Twitter or a browser, and you
certainly could churn out Tetris or Angry Birds or Words with Friends or
Farmville or any of hundreds of enormously successful programs. There’s little
value in doing so, though, and that’s the point – in the Internet age,
software has close to zero cost of replication and massive network effects, so
there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates._
"

The problem with this: there are TONS of examples in the software world where
the first mover DOESN'T dominate.

That said, I enjoyed reading this job post. It might be the best job post I've
ever read.

EDIT: user "roc" below says this same thing, but much better:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3839190>

------
corford
A little off topic (and the last game I played obsessively was quake so please
excuse me if what I'm about to ask is stupid, I'm a little out of touch!),
but... why don't Valve have much of a footprint in the mobile game space?
Considering what they have done with steam in terms of a distribution
platform, it strikes me as odd that they haven't gotten in to the mobile game
world e.g. something like a hybrid app store/steam platform but exclusively
for mobile game content. Or have I missed something and they are actually
engaging with the mobile/smartphone platform?

~~~
Splines
They could do something for Android, but iOS and WP7 would never allow a 3rd
party "store" application.

They do have a Steam iOS application, but it's an adjunct to the PC Steam
application.

I wouldn't mind for them to create cool stuff for iOS (since I own one), but
Valve's games don't lend themselves well to portable versions. I haven't seen
a portable first-person game done well on _any_ platform (even NDS and PSP).
They'd be better off creating new IP or a different genre for mobile (like
ID's mobile games - the on-rails shooters aren't bad, and the RPG games are
great fun).

~~~
corford
Interesting that you say no one has managed to crack first person on a
portable platform. Maybe Michael Abrash can bring some of that game changing
"Quake" style magic to mobile (although I guess Carmack is a pretty big
missing ingredient).

~~~
Splines
It's not a technological problem, it's a hardware problem (at least from my
non-visionary point of view). Twin thumbsticks are required. Anything else and
it's a recipe for frustration.

Metroid Hunters on NDS was probably the best I've personally seen, but it's
the best of a poor breed.

The Vita is the first mainstream handheld with twin thumbsticks, but IMO Sony
has an extremely hard uphill battle with their device. Portable gaming is
moving away from handheld consoles. I would love to see it happen, but I
personally doubt we'll see a Quake-level success on the Vita.

------
judgardner
Learned a lot about optimization from the black book, might be worth a scan if
you like asm.

~~~
agumonkey
This book almost reads itself. Will never forget it.

------
DanBlake
Preface: Valve is one of those companys I admire and wish I could buy stock in
them.

Saying that, Its too bad they have said they will never go public/sell.
Working there would be even more awesome if you knew there was a possibility
to become a millionaire before working there for 20-30 years or getting lucky
and advancing up the corporate ladder to where you could make 200k+ a year.

I wonder if facebook would have been such a hot place to work at if zuck said
right at the start he would never go public and never sell the company.

Its obviously in a startup guys DNA to look at day jobs and retirement plans
in disgust ( we are all trying to make tons of money now, right? ). I accept
that type of thing is fine for most people and thats cool with me. I could
personally never work for a company knowing that the most I can hope for is a
higher salary though. (Unless you climb to the truly top of the ladder, where
bonuses and whatnot await you). Working at valve, I wonder if there is going
to be any stories of chefs/masseuse's who become millionaires because they
took the risk early on. Probably not.

Again, not that there is anything wrong with that. Valve is never claiming to
be a startup. Just saying, I wish they were.

~~~
dhimes
That's a tough game- the startup lottery- and there are professionals playing.
Sure a few people manage to win and become millionaires by being there when it
all started. But far more common is the scenario where the employees take
"equity" over salary based on this dream, and the equity evaporates in later
funding rounds.

I think a system that is much more fair to the employees is this what Peldi's
doing at Balsamiq: <http://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/12/profitsharing/>

Here, employees get regular bonuses based on how well the company is doing.
Everybody is sitting on the same side of the table. And if the company is
profitable, employees win- a situation that is not always the case with
stocks.

------
jes5199
Ok- this reminds me of Xerox PARC, or Google in the early days... What other
companies these days have this level of trust, confidence, and creativity?
Any?

------
xal
Did you hear this? This was the sound of Seattle becoming the gravitational
force to the best and brightest.

Valve has been known for all this. They clearly think that now is the time to
loot the rest of the truly great in the game industry. Genie is out of the
bottle.

~~~
gruseom
Actually, I think that was the sound of Michael Abrash rebooting his writing
superpower. Seems to me one of the biggest ways that guy could add value to
Valve is by unleashing it (like he did in this post) on a regular basis.

------
10098
It's a great thing he started this blog. I hope he posts regularly, I have
always wanted to take a peek at how things work inside Valve.

~~~
jdrols
I agree. Everything I've read about them just seems so weird and fascinating,
especially since it seems like they could introduce something completely
unexpected with the ad-hoc way the teams are organized. Valve doing R&D on
wearable computing just because someone felt like doing it is mind-blowing to
me.

------
FreakLegion
_> Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all._

So _that's_ how IceFrog made it through their hiring process. I've always
wondered why they were so interested in a person whose sole accomplishment was
inheriting a Warcraft III mod created by someone else (Eul, real name
unknown), then appropriated and popularized by a second person (Steve Feak,
a.k.a. Guinsoo, now of Riot Games).

I'd certainly like to think that the series of events leading up to Valve's
current legal battle with Blizzard over the DOTA trademark was an
organizational rather than an ethical lapse. They seem like a great company to
work for in other respects.

~~~
oconnor0
This seems like a unnecessarily antagonistic comment. It's not like Eul &
Guinsoo are gods & IceFrog's cretin. As I understand it, Guinsoo had some good
ideas but couldn't balance them well enough to make the game fair & IceFrog's
done a far better job of that.

It's not like Valve or Blizzard should own the DOTA trademark.

~~~
FreakLegion
Antagonistic toward whom? It's a fact that Valve hired IceFrog, apparently
thinking it an acquisition of DotA (like they did with Counter-Strike, Team
Fortress, etc.). It's also a fact that IceFrog was neither the original
creator of DotA (Eul was) nor the person who elevated it from a merely very
popular mod to a worldwide sensation (Steve Feak was[1]). So it's always
seemed to me that Valve skipped their due diligence on IceFrog -- otherwise
why hire him? He didn't create DotA, was only tangentially responsible for its
success, and doesn't own it[2]. On the other hand, he brings with him the good
will of the community and a claim to the DOTA trademark based on use,
regardless of whether the underlying IP belongs to him.

Thus, Valve's decision to hire him has always puzzled me[3]. Did they do it
simply because of his claim on the trademark and his relationship with the
DotA community? I have no idea. Based on this article, it seems there's at
least one other possibility: they were too trusting and didn't have the
organizational infrastructure to do a thorough background check (and possibly
still don't realize where IceFrog stands in the history of DotA development).
We'll never know what Valve's real motivation was, but I[4] at least have lost
a fair bit of respect for them since this whole thing started.

Edit: I agree with you that neither Blizzard nor Valve should have the
trademark. Ideally I'd like to see it ruled generic.

1\. For all that it matters at this point, Feak did this without Eul's
permission, and has profited enormously from infringing Eul's work.

2\. Though trademarks are different from other forms of IP and it's not
impossible that Valve will end up with the mark anyway. But regardless of who
owns the mark, the characters and such in DotA aren't IceFrog's IP, and could
be used by other people in other games.

3\. This because, aside from these considerations, he's a not a great coder
and has no art or other skills. So Valve can't have hired him for technical
expertise. If he was a superstar developer I'd happily chalk it up to that.

4\. Disclosure: I was heavily involved in the Warcraft III modding community
from before the original DotA up to the release of StarCraft II. I watched
this all play out in real-time, which absolutely colors my take on it.

~~~
lccarrasco
What makes you think there wasn't a complete background check?, I don't know
how you can rate his coding skills (much less say that he lacks others) but
having worked with him I realized that he is really committed to the players
(trying to give everyone a great playing experience), has an excellent work
ethic and was overall a really nice person to work with.

I also remember the times where Guinsoo and Eul where in charge of development
(not fondly) and in my opinion it's thanks to IceFrog that the game achieved
it's current popularity, even while developing DotA2 he still delivers new
versions with new content regularly to the community.

Disclosure: ex-Forum Moderator dota-allstars.com,playdota.com ex-Beta Tester

~~~
FreakLegion
I wasn't saying I think there was no background check, just that that would be
a plausible explanation for the hire. And by background I meant the background
of DotA, not IceFrog. I'm quite sure he's not a felon or a KGB spy.

About his coding skills, see my reply to MrJagil below. About art and other
skills: IceFrog didn't create any of the art in DotA. It all came from
community sites (wc3c.net, hiveworkshop.com, the now defunct war3sear.ch,
etc.). The game design was overwhelmingly done by previous DotA maintainers
and the DotA community via the sites you moderated. Even the tools on which
DotA depends for its life (in particular The Widgetizer[1], without which, as
a practical matter, DotA can't be loaded because it has too much object data)
were all made by other people.

This is why Valve naming their game DOTA 2 and attempting to trademark DOTA
has angered so many people, and why Blizzard is now going after them. DotA
isn't IceFrog's to give, which Valve should know if they did any research into
its history. But because they're Valve, people on the outside don't seem to
care. If it were Microsoft or EA, I'm sure we'd be having a _very_ different
discussion.

1\. <http://www.wc3c.net/showthread.php?p=704434>

~~~
FrankBooth
> DotA isn't IceFrog's to give

No, but it may be Eul's, who is also a Valve employee.

~~~
FreakLegion
_> No, but it may be Eul's_

At this point, no, I don't believe it is. There have simply been too many
people involved, too many fingermarks in the clay. Even if Eul, Guinsoo and
IceFrog teamed up together, Blizzard would still have a valid claim.

 _> who is also a Valve employee._

I also don't really believe this. People keep repeating it, and the source is
always that same, single, ambiguous sentence of Gabe's. Hopefully some real
information comes out during the trademark litigation.

~~~
FrankBooth
<http://i.imgur.com/Y8g9L.jpg>

------
fijal
So in my experience this works incredibly well as long as everyone is
generally willing to cooperate. A single person that has dictatorial
inclination can ruin it all, because you can no longer reach consensus on
pretty much any topic. You have to either decide to give up on your core
values (introduce voting or management) or have to think how to get rid of an
otherwise interesting team member, which might not always be feasible.

------
ericd
The extent to which Scifi can change the world indirectly by inspiring
creative people and changing the course of their life is fascinating.

------
egypturnash
_sends an application to Valve even though she's a 2D artist through and
through_

------
justjimmy
Awesome read! Valve have really caught my attention ever since I learned that
they had wheels on desks, allowing their employees to freely move about and
join up with others as they move from project to project. I can definitely
relate to that part – I love working closely with our Android and iOS
developers, but our company has them in like separate pods so I have to keep
getting up and walking over to them whenever we discuss our projects. Tried
asking if it's cool for me to move next to the developer I work with till
conclusion of project but I guess the management likes to keep the teams 'neat
and tidy'.

------
cmicali
The book Zen of Graphics Programming was one of the seminal books that got me
deeply interested in programming. There's a good argument that my life today
is as good as it is in no small part to the hard work Mr. Abrash put into that
book. So nice to hear what he is up to 16 years later

------
The_Sponge
I like the concept of people being allowed to work freely on things like
wearable computers. The downside is that it might go nowhere, the upside is
that you might end up with everyone in the world using steam and paying for
groceries through steam wallet.

------
dmishe
Interesting that subdomain is "blogs" and still it redirects to /abrash/

~~~
bvdbijl
This one also exists: <http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/design/> but it is empty

------
stashdot
"I had a great year or two learning about natural language before figuring out
that it wasn’t a problem likely to be solved within my lifetime."

That' s a bit disheartening.

------
drieddust
Ycombinator came to my mind when I was reading about their work style.

It is hard to believe this model is not adopted by more companies.

------
surrealize
The reason for the Half Life gap is a little clearer, now. :)

Valve does sound like an awesome place to work, though.

------
sp332
I wonder if this is the secret hardware that everyone's been speculating about
recently?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
From the article: "To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a
product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no
rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3."

------
ZiadHilal
heh, read all about this dude back when I read Masters of Doom.

------
benihana
> _To be clear, this is R &D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this
> point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumors about
> Steam glasses being announced at E3._

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-
secr...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-secret-
hardware-project-wearable-computing)

Sigh...

~~~
haasted
Also, [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04/14/that-was-easy-
val...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04/14/that-was-easy-valves-
hardware-is-wearable-computing/)

------
mkramlich
What Abrash described as Valve's management style sounds very much like
'adhocracy'. The simplest definition of it is that it is a system which is the
opposite of bureaucracy.

