i really hope your work gets more exposure. it's incredible to me how few people, relatively speaking, even use your mastercomfig presets. tons of pubbers still complain about their networking, their FPS, hitches, and various other bugs that have been known about & worked around for years by the competitive scene. this custom build would exactly solve these problems, and would objectively translate to more money to valve through, simply enough, longer play sessions without the game catastrophically failing because someone played too long & ran "out of memory" on a modern computer, didn't reload their custom HUD elements, gave up from dealing with chronic hit registration problems, etc. literal no brainer given that you've done all this hard work basically for them (barring whatever trivial merge conflicts that have arisen since your custom game build). wish you nothing but the best.

https://imgur.com/l1sjbQe

it's so over

Surely valve would implement this at some point. Its free fixes.

also seems insane that Valve isn't begging to hire you by now

Incoming nerd essay:

I mean, there are a lot of factors to hiring someone and going out of their way to seek a candidate would be highly unusual, especially when I am very much mediocre in the grand scheme of things. Specialization within a body of technical work that doesn't raise the bar isn't exactly something Valve looks for often. It may have been something they were open to at one point, but I don't think that's the case anymore due to past experiences. This is in addition to my generally uncolored experience. I don't think I have enough experience in game design and shipping games to create enough multi-disciplinary value at Valve. Valve ultimately aims to make things valuable to gamers, and you need domain-specific knowledge for that. Systems and general software engineers are great, but they need the specific context and means to traverse the games market efficiently to make good decisions.

There are also personal factors. I am not very interested in uprooting my life to work for Valve proper, at least currently. I would possibly be interested in some specialized contract work for them, but ultimately, I don't see how that would work if the specialization in this kind of systems work is only proven in Team Fortress 2. Sure, I could also work on Dota, Steam, and other systems, but will I be creating that much interesting content vs. hiring/contracting someone with either much higher abilities than me or unique talent/knowledge not presently found at Valve (for example like what they did for Vulkan/SteamOS/dxvk). Sure, the opportunity cost of a Valve employee working on a lower-value product instead of a higher-value one is large, but that is only one dimension of it. There is also an opportunity cost for Valve as a company in the labor market, onboarding, training, and staffing a lower-value employee whose outcomes are inherently limited vs. another more seasoned engineer.

I don't really have any problems with the current arrangement of things, besides maybe the slow interest in delivering this content to you all. I am very happy with my own life right now, and I don't mind not making money from this. I get work on something that I very much enjoy.

TLDR: I'm not experienced enough to have my full potential to be qualified to work my best at Valve, and I am not in a spot in my life at the moment where I would want to move to Seattle and work in-office. I am very happy with my life, and don't have any problems doing this kind of volunteer work. I just wish the value would be delivered to players at some point soon.

A genuine, true hero of the scene. Inspiring stuff!!

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You need to get the youtubers on this. This is game changing.