The discussion of the 80% manager, 20% developer problem wouldn’t look at all out of place in my autobiography, only my version would have more agonized whining in it. It’s like a lot of other jobs, I guess — you work your way up until you’re not doing much of the thing that drew you to the job in the first place. And once “making video games” goes from being a “holy crap, how did I get this awesome job” thing to a “yeah, this is my job” thing, everything sort of changes.

We’re lucky, because as a free web-based game, we’re pretty much expected to be fast, loose, and chaotic with releases and fixes. But I can definitely see how easy it’d be to run into this kind of thing if we decided we wanted to try to develop a commercial project, where the end-user has a legitimate sense of entitlement.

I think people in this industry are often smart people who come from jobs where poor management engendered poor morale, and they know that people work more and better when they’re happy. And I think that makes it hard to crack the whip, and to have the whip cracked on you. I’m guessing the mere utterance of the word “meeting” has a higher cringe-factor among game developers than among the population at large.

I picked up the job of project manager in mid-stride. Developers hated to give me hard fast deadlines, I couldn’t get Operations to even give me a reasonable time line and I couldn’t even start on end-user docs, release notes, or marketing until I knew when other things would be getting done. Status meetings became a nightmare because trying to get people to nail down deadlines and actually stick with them because the equivilant of pulling blood from stone I personally don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense to me and ended up causing me hours of stress. We did end up releasing, 2 months late, but we released and I only had a few death threats.

Part of the issue is if those in manager positions don’t show a respect to those who are doing project management, it’s handed down. A project manager isn’t a glorified secretary, they are a coordinator, organizer, task driver, bad guy, cheerleader, meeting planner, and communicator.

The more I hear about what happened with Sigil the more frustrated I become because it was something that was so preventable. It was something that never had to happen if there were strong minded and vocal project managers on staff to keep things moving.

Oh yes, they also need to be able to say no to upper management. They need to be able to defend their reasonings and they need to stand by their guns.