Authority Without Responsibility

I talk about people who like to use their authority to get features into games, but who then avoid any responsibility if those features cause issues.

Videos I reference:

[LPetal]

Worked in the service/retail industry for 15 years, can confirm this sort of issue is a human nature problem in general. Authority figures who can't stand to be held accountable for THEIR mistakes, bad ideas, etc. are absolute _nightmares_ to work with. I witnessed new ideas being implemented at companies I worked with where things started off so well, and then these types of people would come in and RUIN these ideas by turning people against each other, all so they could have "their personal say". They were often delusional. This is why we can't have nice things.

[Murihey]

You basically described in detail why developers have excessive caution now 😅When you are on the receiving end, not being a lead, having no authority and all the responsibility - you learn to pad estimates, sink any idea that seems even remotely risky, safeguard yourself in any way possible. And it gets worse as the team size goes up, because you get detached from the end state of the game, but you're judged based on how many bugs you produced, how many build you've broken etc.

[bruceschlickbernd]

Variation of a classic: success has a thousand fathers, failure? None.

[thatsagoodone]

I have worked 12 years in a big company on the assisting management level. It is not a videogame industry issue. It is a modern management issue that comes with the certain size of a company. I have always considered this with hierarchy without responsibility. The moment a company is not any longer owned by its founder, this goes to the extreme.
We track so many criteria of common workers from time on the clock, extra hours, how fast or how much gets achieved in the time on the clock.
However, when a vaguely defined and illogical sounding strategy turns out to be a mistake or the manager are unable to follow through with it: there is never a consequence.

Please keep in mind, that the argument for the higher pay of management is always, that they carry more responsibility.
But with responsibility, there must come accountability.

[r.g.thesecond]

Related: copied from Jeff Atwood's "New Programming Jargon" Blogpost (2012):

5- A Duck: A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. [...]


This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck."

[SaberRiko]

Very first job I ever had back in highschool, working at McDonald's, I learned this lesson. Manager A told me to clean the grill in a different way they'd thought up from now on and pushed through anything I said about how I was originally trained to do it. Later on the general manager sees me doing it that new way and I get in trouble, I say "Manager A told me to do it this way instead." Manager A denies it and says they told me to do it the right way, I'm just lazy/argumentative.

Sometimes responsibility is only taken by those without the authority to shove it off on someone else. Wasn't any different when I worked at Walmart after highschool, or other jobs since, but now at least I know never to rely on people taking responsibility if they tell me to bend the rules.

[harrisonb]

Tim. Love your games and your life lessons. I’m an Officer in the United States Marine Corps and your leadership advice is sound. From one leader to another, thank you for your wisdom.

[thescatologistcopromancer]

I work manufacturing QC as an inspector and trainer. We always have "Continuous Improvement" projects, pitched by anyone across the company. When your project is selected, your group leader and manager both have to sign their names on the paperwork. It really helps

[PanEtRosa]

this is making me feel *so* validated right now. I'm dealing with a major health issue, with doctors demanding various things while ignoring the impact of their demands on me. I've been feeling like they're all treating me like I'm being difficult, when really, I'm making myself more sick pushing to meet their demands and they're not meeting me halfway.

[beastdrummer]

Tim, I love the way you frame your experiences and your pieces of advice. I am a call center manager, not a game developer, but ALOT of what you have to say ABSOLUTLEY applies to areas outside of game development... You should write a book!

[drew_echo]

There was once this PM on another team who came to our PM to ask about adding a feature. Our PM said no, so the other PM went to a different PM who just joined on our team who didn't own the part of the product the feature would land in, and the new PM said oh yeah that sounds like it could be an interesting idea, so the new PM went to the previous PM on our team and got told the external PM was shopping around. When the feature didn't get worked on, the external PM started making a fuss about YOUR TEAM PROMISED ME! Didn't even need to wait until after the feature shipped to see if he would take accountability -- obviously deviant behavior in the open from the beginning -- but upper leadership didn't see it as a problem.

I imagine part of the issue is that a lot of leaders don't study leadership scientifically, so we get lots of gut-based decisions informed by motivational speakers instead, or were just kicked out of the nest and left to figure things out on their own.

[mncraftPCtutral]

The phrase they used in my business class was “a leader takes credit for success but also takes responsibility for failures”

[TonkarzOfSolSystem]

One thing I've learnt from playing and reading about video games for 20+ years is that you can never know who, why, when or how a particular feature or bug made it into a game.

[fixpontt]

_"Respect my Authoritah!!!!"_

Executive Cartman, probably

[Vanity]

This is one of my most passionate topics, and I had my own term for it "Responsibility shifting" because you take your responsibilities and shift them onto someone else.

It's a skill thats exclusive to the Manager class.

[RebornBlueHaze]

Make and keep a paper trail. Be specific. Make copies. Save emails. Get meeting recaps with specific details.
This is one way to help mitigate it.

[domperry]

This sort of narcissism/ego ruined one of my favourite jobs and contributed to me quitting because I was tired of arguing against random ideas getting pushed onto the team. IMO another instance of this is when e.g. mass lay-offs happen. The execs very rarely are the ones that get affected (in fact, probably rewarded) even though their decisions most likely contributed heavily to the outcome.

[sunsetsoverlavenderfields]

i worked on a game where we were told to implement a feature that we knew people would hate. my leads pushed back on it, to no avail. we were told to do it anyway because the feature was intended to boost a specific metric. when the game shipped, it was clowned on for having the feature, and then the publisher released a statement saying that the developers went rogue and it wasn't supposed to be like that. then we had to crunch to get a patch out to remove the feature.

[grimjaw]

I've never been a developer but did work as an implementer and general troubleshooter on development teams. I've been in meetings that are reminiscent of this. Some important things I learned were:

1) get as many directives as possible in writing; managers who want to constantly go off the record with these kinds of things are not your friends
2) if you are working for a place where this is happening and people might get hung out to dry, make sure your resume is up to date and you've got a clean exit plan and some savings

My experience was over 15 years ago, but it's even more applicable today.

[ListerTunes]

One of my first cubicles was opposite the team's meeting room. I will never forget hearing the quick programming team meeting where the tech director said: "I want to be very clear about this. [Designer] is not your boss. I am your boss. If [designer] is asking you directly to do something, tell them to ask me to schedule it. If you aren't working on what I put on your schedule, you are not working for me." [Designer] wasn't necessarily a bad person, but they would sneak in features by asking around until someone caved, and a lot of our instability at the time could be traced to that.

Of course, there's also the QA manager who would order QA teams to enter his ideas as showstopper bugs. Going through a layoff was traumatic, but knowing that manager got fired made it a little more palatable.