Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.

Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.

They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…

… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.’

And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.

… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.

I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.

EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.

… What?

It… it goes into the company.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

They run an absurdly profitable business.

They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.

That’s after wages.

Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.

The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.

Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?

Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?

… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?

… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…

Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.

Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.

Valve’s position allows them to do this.

Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.

As a certain wise old man once said:

“These things, they take time.”

Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…

This actually is basically how Valve works.

They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.

They are a private company, not public.

That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’

(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)

(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)

…

They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.

Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over ‘its the same game in a new setting’, as well as not rushing anything.

A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.

People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.