> Also, I suspect that everyone at Valve puts effort into minimizing the grunt work as much as possible, meaning they probably have far less really boring things to do than most other companies. So a bit of cleverness and forethought combined with a passion of creating something of quality can get good programmers to do the grunt work.
This is a big difference between big and small organizations. People will sit in a big org chart and do the same maintenance code-monkeying for a paycheck, but people on small passionate teams have the freedom and motivation to automate their way out of mindless code-monkeying.
This is a big difference between big and small organizations. People will sit in a big org chart and do the same maintenance code-monkeying for a paycheck, but people on small passionate teams have the freedom and motivation to automate their way out of mindless code-monkeying.