Gabe Newell says that Microsoft is a great place to learn new things

Dec 12, 2013 09:08 GMT  ·  By
Newell says that Microsoft is the right place to be if you want to learn new things
   Newell says that Microsoft is the right place to be if you want to learn new things

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, who previously blasted Windows 8 with several occasions, said in an interview on Google Hangouts that Microsoft is indeed a great company to work for, as it allows everyone to learn lots of new things.

Newell said in a statement that Microsoft actually helped him prepare for a long career in the IT sector, explaining that Steve Ballmer is actually the one who gave him a chance to make himself noticed within the Redmond giant.

“The most valuable educational experience for me was sort of the nontraditional one. I was going to university and went out to visit my brother – he just started at this new software company, which was the third-largest software company on the east side of Lake Washington, and I was going out to visit him, and all of a sudden he was working all the time. So rather than hanging out with me and seeing the Space Needle, I was just hanging out with him at work,” he said.

“Steve Ballmer, who's currently the president, got mad that I was distracting him and said, ‘Well, if you're going to be spending all your time hanging out here, you need to do something useful.’”

Newell then went on to praise some of his former colleagues, saying that they all helped him gain experience and prepare to become a professional software developer.

“Those first three months when I was working with people like Tom Corbett and Neil Konzen and Steve Wood, was probably the most intense and valuable educational experience I've ever had. They sort of showed me how to be a professional software developer, you know, [so] it was an incredibly vast and really significant set of lessons that I learned,” Newell added.

Valve’s co-founder said earlier this year that Windows 8 was actually an “unusable operating system,” calling Microsoft modern platform a “giant sadness.”