Everyone keeps labelling GabeN as the only one holding VALVe to standards, but by his own admission he's more of the equivalent of a board member now, not deeply involved in the day to day anymore. I think the only ones that truly know his level of involvement would be people at VALVe.
What I'm getting at is that I have the same concerns about what will happen after he passes, but I don't think he's the only person standing in the way of VALVe going full corporate.
The examples I've seen are a year+ with no updates. Not definitive, but I highly doubt they're doing this for the cases you're talking about.
I wish I hadn't went straight in, personally. Wasted a lot of money and time before I got my shit together and went back for an associates a few years later.
My company doesn't even allow AI use, and the amount of times I've tried to help a junior diagnose an issue with a simple script they made, only to be told that they don't actually know what their code does to even begin troubleshooting...
"Why do you have this line here? Isn't that redundant?"
"Well it was in the example I found."
"Ok, what does the example do? What is this line for?"
Crickets.
I'm not trying to call them out, I'm just hoping that I won't need to familiarize myself with their whole project and every fucking line in their script to help them, because at that point it'd be easier to just write it myself than try to guide them.
Also: assuming you know what the easy bits are before you actually have experience doing them is a recipe to end up training incorrectly.
I use plenty of tools to assist my programming work. But I learn what I'm doing and why first. Then once I have that experience if there's a piece of code I find myself having to use frequently or having to look up frequently, I make myself a template (vscode's snippet features are fucking amazing when you build your own snips well, btw).
That was/is one of my biggest complaints about CS courses: the horrendous, uncontrolled, inconsistent-across-course/instructor/TA mixture of concept and implementation skills expected of the students.
Ultimately you need to develop both to be successful in a CS/Software Dev/Programming career, but I've watched so fucking many people fail to progress in courses and learning because they're trying to learn both the concept and how it needs to be formatted in the class specific language's syntax at the same time. They hit a roadblock in one and the whole thing comes tumbling down because if your code doesn't work you can't just work around it to get the other parts done and then come back later. Being able to stub something out to do that requires skills that they're taking the class to learn in the first place!
Minor mistakes with syntax creates a situation where they can't get a working example of the concept to play around with. So then they don't have something hands on to use to cement their conceptual understanding.
Minor mistakes with the conceptual understanding lead to a complete inability to understand why the syntax works (if it even does) to create an example of the concept, leaving them high and dry when the class asks them to think outside the box and make something new or modified based off what came before.
I've worked as a Lab Assistant (TA who doesn't grade) for intro to programming courses. Due to transfer credit shaningans, combined with a "soon to retire" professor getting saddled with the bueracratic duties for their whole department, I ended up running lectures for an intermediate course I effectively had to take twice. I regularly led study sessions in college for my friends in programming classes. Even now, I'm the most experienced programmer on my team of sysadmins/engineers at work and regularly assist co-workers with scripts when I'm not coding custom automations and system integrations.
So I have experience teaching and using this shit.
In my opinion, courses should be split into two repeatedly alternating parts: concept and implementation/syntax. They are separate skill sets.
You need a certain set of skills to be able to communicate. You need a different set of skills to do so in a specific language.
Plus, classwork needs to better mimic real world situations. Even crazy motherfuckers using sed or nano to code should be using linters in this day and age, and no one should be working in an environment where they only have one chance to get it 100% right with no means of testing.
Y'all are forgetting about all the developed post-post apocalypse stuff from Fallout 1 and (moreso) 2. The capital of NCR territory, Shady Sands, is a legitimate (not-bethesda modern fallout style) city with farms, factories, schools, hospitals, scientists researching and developing shit, local government, etc. Estimated population of 35,000 around the time of NV.
None of the 3D games have come remotely close to showing that type of post-post apoc civilization.
The area covered in New Vegas is effectively the frontier of their civilization. The unification monument is in honor of the over extended NCR rangers, too far from home and their government's resources, signing a peace treaty and making a strategic alliance with the existing Arizona Rangers. This extended NCR territory into Nevada as the additional AR troops were able to give them enough local manpower and supplies to just be able to barely hold the line against Caesar's legion at the first battle of the dam.
So the NCR territory shown in game is absolutely an American Western Frontier analogue complete with ~~cattle~~ brahmin barons, and ~~natives~~ Great Khans, but it's entirely possible for them to have brand new equipment being manufactured from new material "back home" so to speak. It would just be a logistics issue of getting all the way out to the front lines of the game.
Salad? Look at this dude and his bougie workplace. Due to budget cuts I only see coffee, tea, and depression as "fucking around accessories" at my workplace.
Might be because nearly my whole floor is tech workers though.
So it's not even a prototype, if it's legit then at best it's a design mockup.
This really comes across as if you just keep shifting so that you can continue finding something to complain about. It's ok to just not like having your camera on man. Not everything has to be the kicking off point for a sociological or anthropological study.
Backgrounds visible? It forces you to have your space display worthy!
Backgrounds blurred? Everyone knows your place isn't display worthy and thinks you're a disgusting pig!
Company provided background images? Corporate endorsed removal of individualism!
What you've touched on here is part of the intent. Not that they want to erase individuals, but that in general a more controlled corporate image is seen as more professional.
If you want to talk about how/why that's a thing, be my guest, but that has nothing to do with video conferencing. Work dress code and even work uniforms have existed for generations.
My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It's a complete game. It's in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don't release major updates without multiple ones being added.
Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I'm sure there was more, but those were the standout things.
The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that's only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn't find through internal testing. Once it's balanced and stable (maybe a year), they'll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).
Then they'll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.
Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn't have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.
But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.