There are no bosses at Valve and they have a stack ranking system deciding how much money you make.
This means people there don't do unglamorous things like maintenance and stability fixes.
How to create an incentive for this kind of work is an interesting problem, and I don't know enough about Valve to know if they've solved it.
I will say that the alternative is more dysfunctional. Closed-allocation, corporate alternative: some number of people are staffed on the ugly, career-damaging maintenance projects. The good ones either find a way to play the politics and move, or they quit, the bad ones stay. The end result is that the maintenance work is done by incompetents who don't care. This is a big part of why most legacy code only gets worse over time: the maintenance work is given to people who don't have the clout to do anything else, not to people who care enough about the health of the project to do it well.
This means people there don't do unglamorous things like maintenance and stability fixes.
How to create an incentive for this kind of work is an interesting problem, and I don't know enough about Valve to know if they've solved it.
I will say that the alternative is more dysfunctional. Closed-allocation, corporate alternative: some number of people are staffed on the ugly, career-damaging maintenance projects. The good ones either find a way to play the politics and move, or they quit, the bad ones stay. The end result is that the maintenance work is done by incompetents who don't care. This is a big part of why most legacy code only gets worse over time: the maintenance work is given to people who don't have the clout to do anything else, not to people who care enough about the health of the project to do it well.