Valve fascinates me because the devs there occasionally seem to be simply the best on earth in a given field, but despite that, bizarre bugs will persist for a long time. My favorite was how steam in home streaming from a PC to a steam deck wouldn't work if the steam deck had an Ethernet and wifi connection - one of the connections had to be disabled or the stream would always crash.

Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.

The company is very small, and they're doing a lot with what they have. Steam alone is full of arcane features that I keep discovering. There's a lot of backend stuff. They're making games and hardware.

Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)

My favorite bug family, that somehow to sneak in every time, is how their react frontend (or whatever the store runs) manages to semi-crash and the controller inputs are no longer recognized.

I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.

Valve famously has a very flat org structure so it's possible that that problem just isn't sexy enough for someone to pick it up on their own, without being told by a higher-up.

I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.