Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has given a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). It’s a wide-ranging chat that covers everything from Newell’s earliest jobs to his current daily routine (“get up, work, go scuba diving”), and it turns out that the young Newell loved programming, but had no thoughts that it would ever lead to, y’know, a useful career.
“I started programming in high school,” says Newell. “At the time programming wasn’t really a career path. There were probably only a couple of thousand programmers in the United States, working on mainframe accounting software primarily, and maybe there were some people doing stuff at NASA, but it wasn’t like people said ‘Oh, you know, there’s this huge industry where software gets developed.’
“And videogames didn’t even exist. I was 10 before the first videogame came out, it was called Pong, so when I was a kid I thought I was going to be a doctor, and programming was what I did when I should have been doing something else, right? It wasn’t a career path, you know, there were no classes in it, and my first programmable device was a calculator, a [Texas Instruments] calculator.”
The medical world lost someone who would no doubt have been a spectacular doctor (can’t you just imagine Gaben in scrubs with a stethoscope?), but Newell’s love for programming would lead him to the University of California’s Raytheon 703, the first machine he coded on, before he won a place at Harvard and started to take programming classes.
“It still didn’t occur to me that programming was a career path,” says Newell. “I went out to visit my brother for Thanksgiving, and he’d just started a job at Microsoft, and at the time Microsoft wasn’t the largest software developer in the world. It wasn’t even the largest software developer in the US. It wasn’t the largest software developer in Washington State. It was the third largest software developer in the suburbs of Washington at the time, right? So there was no notion of having any of the reputation that it would have, say, 10 years later.
“I was visiting my brother, and I thought he and I were going to just hang out, [but I found out] that he was working on a C compiler, and so that’s what he did all this time. So I just hung out with him at work, and Steve Ballmer got mad because I was distracting Dan from doing his job and said, ‘If you’re going to be hanging out here, you know, why don’t you do something useful?’ So I said ‘fine, I’ll do a little work.’ And decided I’d take the quarter off and just work at Microsoft.”
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That quarter would become a year, which became two years, which… you see where this is going.
“I kept saying ‘I have to go back and finish my degree’ and, 13 years later, I still hadn’t gone back and finished my degree,” says Newell. “So that’s where I learned the profession of being a developer. And it was interesting how much faster I was learning by working at Microsoft, right? At the time it was the best place in the world to learn how to be a programmer. You know, there was a company that really prided itself on its ability to produce code faster and with higher quality and to solve programming problems that nobody else was solving. It was having lots of great people to learn from.
“It was pretty obvious when I got there that in terms of doing interesting work that was going to be valuable at the time, hundreds or thousands of people doing it at Microsoft was way better than going back and continuing my education at university. I was there for 13 years and then decided to start Valve.”
What is striking here is Newell’s clear respect for early Microsoft, and the elements of its culture he particularly admired: which would bleed into some of the Valve culture that the company is so well-known for. The ideas are simple—surrounding yourself with clever people, learning by doing, focusing on problems that others aren’t—but in the context of the growth of computers produced radical results for both companies.
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