The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
