Rich Geldreich parted ways from Valve back in June of 2013. He was one of the forces driving the future of OpenGL and Steam Linux at Valve before he said his goodbyes. Even then, Geldreich made it clear that he wasn't too thrilled with how business was conducted at the company. Yesterday, he wrote up a blog entry detailing why the experience left a sour taste in his mouth.

In his blog, entitled Open Office Spaces and Cabal Rooms Suck, Geldreich details why he and the environment at Valve were never going to work out.
In case it wasn't clear: I really dislike large open office spaces. (Not 2-3 person offices, but large industrial scale 20-100 person open office spaces of doom.) Valve's was absolutely the worst expression of the concept I've ever experienced. I can understand doing the open office thing for a while at a startup, where every dollar counts, but at an established company I just won't tolerate this craziness anymore. (See the scientific research below if you think I feel too strongly about this trend.)

As an engineer I can force myself to function in them, but only with large headphones on and a couple huge monitors to block visual noise. I do my best to mentally block out the constant audio/visual (and sometimes olfactory!) interruptions, but it's tough. It's not rocket science people: engineers cannot function at peak efficiency in Romper Room-like environments.

In case you've never seen or worked in one of these horrible office spaces before, here's a public shot showing a small fraction of the Dota 2 cabal room:


I heard the desks got packed in so tightly that occasionally a person would lower or raise their desks and it would get caught against other nearby desks.

He continues on to note some of the issues he ran into while working in a cabal room. You can find a more detailed explanation of the following points over at his blog.
  1. North Korea-like atmosphere of self-censorship.
  2. Constant background noise: visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.
  3. Bad physical cabal room placement: Don't put a cabal room next to the barber or day care rooms people (!).
  4. Constant random/unstructured interruptions.
  5. Hyper-proximity to sick co-workers.
  6. Noise spike in the afternoon in one cabal room, as everyone all the sudden decides to start chatting (usually about inane crap honestly) for 30-60 minutes.
  7. Environmental issues: Temperature either too high or too low, lighting either too bright, too dark, or wrong color spectrum. Nobody is ever really happy with this arrangement except the locally optimizing bean counters.
  8. Power issues or fire hazards due to extreme desk density.
  9. Mixing electrical or mechanical engineers (who operate power tools, solder, destruct shit, etc.) next to developers trying their best to concentrate on code.
  10. Guest developers causing trouble.
  11. No (or bad access to) white boards.

Others have voiced similar complaints in the Twitter replies to Geldreich. When asked about how working for Valve compared to other AAA studios, Geldreich replied with the following:
Well, I didn't realize how awesome it actually was to work for Microsoft or DICE until I had the pleasure of working at Valve.

Ouch.