Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has revealed he originally thought he might become a doctor before he had a fateful chance meeting at Microsoft where future CEO Steve Ballmer gave him some pointed advice.
Speaking to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (via PC Gamer), Newell said when he started programming in high school, it wasn’t necessarily thought to be a real career path. Video games didn’t exist at that time, either, he said. “So when I was a kid I thought I was going to be a doctor, and programming was what I did when I should have been doing something else,” he said. “It wasn’t a career path, you know, there were no classes in it, and my first programmable device was a calculator, a [Texas Instruments] calculator.”
Newell’s brother Dan worked at Microsoft and was an early hire for the company, which was founded in 1975. At the time, Microsoft wasn’t a big player in software development, with Newell saying it was only the third-largest software developer in Washington state. “So there was no notion of having any of the reputation that it would have, say, 10 years later,” he said.
