Darkened Software

The Peter Principle states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence”, and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

Which brings us to The Game Developers Dilemma:

Do you do someone else’s work to try to keep the project going or do you let the person fail so things will reset and not harm the company long term.

We have all worked our asses off to cover for someones incompetence only to see that incompetent person get promoted to a position were they can and quite often do take down the entire company.  It has happened so often I now cringe when I get introduced to someone and they say “this is bob, he just got promoted to position of high importance“.  There is a 65% chance they do not even have close to enough training to be in that position and will likely fail within 1 project.  The game industry is notoriously bad at mentoring people and often does promotions strictly based on time at the company instead of proven skill sets.

Once upon a time my answered to the game developers dilemma is that the project was the most important thing and everyone should step up to do whatever work is needed to make sure it never fails.  I would kill myself to make sure it succeed.  But most of the time it only prolonged the inevitable crash from too many bad process, scheduling and money decisions.  I now realize that learning is the most important thing and every time you stop someone from failing you stop them from learning as well.   Very few people learn enough from close calls but everyone learns from failing so let the people fail.  Far fewer projects get canceled than management would lead you to believe.  If the right people are held responsible they will learn their lessons and the company will be orders of magnitude stronger in the long term.

Not taking the high road here, for every person I have helped prop up in the past I know someone has helped prop me up when I made bad decisions.  I am also not saying we should never try to help people avoid making bad decisions.  Anyone willing to learn should be taught everything they can so they can avoid as many mistakes as possible and get to a higher level of productivity.  All I am saying is after someone makes a bad decision they need to experience the consequences of it even if it means failing.

You can not make a sword without a lot of hard blows.