D&D General WotC Founder Peter Adkison On Hasbro's Layoffs

Peter Adkison, who owned Wizards of the Coast until it was sold to Hasbro in 1999, oversaw the relaunch of Dungeons & Dragons with D&D 3rd Edition. Today, he commented on this week's round of Hasbro layoffs, which have ripped through WotC. Adkison left WotC in 2000 and currently runs a production company called Hostile Work Environment.

Like many of you, I'm saddened to learn about the layoffs at Hasbro.

Caveat: I have no idea of what’s happening behind the scenes at WotC. If you’re asking who’s at fault, or to what extent it was or was not justified, that’s outside the scope of my knowledge. This post is about my own reflections.

When I read about the layoffs at Hasbro my immediate feeling was shame. Shame for when I did the same thing, at the same company (WotC, before we sold it to Hasbro).

I have made lots of mistakes, tons of them, more than I can even remember. And while I regret those mistakes, and I’m sad for those hurt, I realize it’s part of learning and it’s part of being human.

But layoffs, when handed poorly, or when they are unnecessary, aren’t just mistakes. They are failings of character. Those times when I had a failure of character, those are the moments that haunt me.

 

[nevin]

Oh my god, you have never ever run an IT project of any size.

"We could build it ourselves" -- are you a professional software development firm with a recent, proven and repeated history of developing projects of similar scope and size all the way to completion (done done, not done) with correctly predicted budgets from day 1?

If not, then no, you aren't going to be able to build their own version for less than that.

I've worked at two companies where A CIO got some crazy idea in his head about how we were going to modernize everthing and they knew it could be done for XXX dollars because they were IT savvy. Both projects started with laying off all the old unnecessary legacy people, hiring new young people with "SKILLS" and then a few million dollars over budget, not even a year later, trying to hire back all the stupid people with legacy skills because it turned out they actually knew what they were doing when they tried to stop the madness the morons were starting.

The worst thing for IT about the GOOGLE age is everyone thinks they are IT savvy enough to do anything. If you want to go bankrupt try to more efficiently create an entire system from scratch because you know you can do it better than someone else who screwed it up.

 

[Von Ether]

I've worked at two companies where A CIO got some crazy idea in his head about how we were going to modernize everthing and they knew it could be done for XXX dollars because they were IT savvy. Both projects started with laying off all the old unnecessary legacy people, hiring new young people with "SKILLS" and then a few million dollars over budget, not even a year later, trying to hire back all the stupid people with legacy skills because it turned out they actually knew what they were doing when they tried to stop the madness the morons were starting.

The worst thing for IT about the GOOGLE age is everyone thinks they are IT savvy enough to do anything. If you want to go bankrupt try to more efficiently create an entire system from scratch because you know you can do it better than someone else who screwed it up.

My brother worked in his company's IT department for almost two decades and it was the same story. A new VP comes and they try to razzle dazzle and use IT phrases in all the wrong ways to "trick" the legacy people into coding themselves out of a job. His opinion about it was "you assume we have a lack of integrity if you think we are milking the legacy system for a paycheck. If we could have coded out the legacy-ware, we would already done that."

Eventually the tech did catch up and he was put on the coding team to put the legacy stuff to bed. He now no longer works in IT - sort of. The company's finance department hired him to do the same job - just only for them. And yet because his title is different and he is in a different department, he makes 10K more.

 

[nevin]

True story. Sat in a big All Hands Briefing for one of the product launches. The CIO knew morale was low so he'd come up with all these training opportunities and spend almost an hour laying them out. Our Senior network architect raises his hand. "What about the rest of the IT department. You know the majority of us? " CIO stood there like he'd been gut punched. Then started to rattle off all the training. Then got hammered for 45 minutes by everyone in the IT department explaining to him that most people in IT aren't programmers. The guy was completely flumoxed by the idea that most people in IT don't program and a lot of the ones that do just do simple kiddy scripts to automate stuff.. This is a real problem in the executive ranks at most companies.

He thought he was being slick and was going to train us all in new programming languages and upskill his entire team. Instead he pissed off the programmers who didn't need those languages for the job he had them doing, because it had turned into mandatory training for them because the CIO wanted it and everyone else just got left out in the cold.

 

[nevin]

My brother worked in his company's IT department for almost two decades and it was the same story. A new VP comes and they try to razzle dazzle and use IT phrases in all the wrong ways to "trick" the legacy people into coding themselves out of a job. His opinion about it was "you assume we have a lack of integrity if you think we are milking the legacy system for a paycheck. If we could have coded out the legacy-ware, we would already done that."

Eventually the tech did catch up and he was put on the coding team to put the legacy stuff to bed. He now no longer works in IT - sort of. The company's finance department hired him to do the same job - just only for them. And yet because his title is different and he is in a different department, he makes 10K more.

3/4 of all IT systems are still running major parts of thier infrastructure on COBOL. I've worked at places that are running virtualized 1970's systems that have been rewritten and patched with so much functionality that it will take 6 or 7 complete systems to replace them. Imagine that cost? IT in the real world is like D&D. All that 1E stuff is alive and well, All the 2e, 3rdE, 4thE 5th E and all the open source stuff has all been done in many ways but all the executives seem to think they are just running amazon cloud services and can flip a switch and change systems in a few months.

 

[Von Ether]

3/4 of all IT systems are still running major parts of thier infrastructure on COBOL. I've worked at places that are running virtualized 1970's systems that have been rewritten and patched with so much functionality that it will take 6 or 7 complete systems to replace them. Imagine that cost? IT in the real world is like D&D. All that 1E stuff is alive and well, All the 2e, 3rdE, 4thE 5th E and all the open source stuff has all been done in many ways but all the executives seem to think they are just running amazon cloud services and can flip a switch and change systems in a few months.

Of course we are talking about stuff that has been going on in IT for forever, but it reminds me of de-evolution a career in graphic design. When things were in the black box of Quark Express and few people were tech savvy, graphic designers could command a great wage for the time.

Now that everyone has a graphic designer in their family, you are lucky to find a living wage AND every suit thinks everything is just one button. -- or worse yet, they just handwave at their brochure mock up done in Power Point.

 

[nevin]

Of course we are talking about stuff that has been going on in IT for forever, but it reminds me of de-evolution a career in graphic design. When things were in the black box of Quark Express and few people were tech savvy, graphic designers could command a great wage for the time.

Now that everyone has a graphic designer in their family, you are lucky to find a living wage AND every suit thinks everything is just one button. -- or worse yet, they just handwave at their brochure mock up done in Power Point.

till they need something they can't do and then start screaming "why doesn't anyone want to work?" (for nothing)

 

[Von Ether]

till they need something they can't do and then start screaming "why doesn't anyone want to work?" (for nothing)

Brutal truth. It's not for nothing, it's for far less than what they are making. Because:

• Everyone feels that their job is the hardest one in the department and anyone getting paid close to their compensation for "just" graphic design or "just" art, or "just" writing.*
• For very small companies it can be humbling for the owner to learn their personal take home is less than someone they are using as consultant

But yeah, more than once I heard someone be shocked that I paid $20/hr for writing ad copy. But that well dried up and now I am nurse (and do you honestly want an MBA poking you with a needle?)

*And that's a whole mess of passive aggressive attitudes. Like an MBA seeing someone who "only" got an undergrad could command more cash or even just the idea that someone is getting paid to do a job they have a passion vs mentally punching in every day.

There's also the whole vibe that "life is not fair," but that's okay because you put in the work and were savvy enough to end up where you ended up. Anyone else was just poor planners/lazy -- until that you learn that "just a writer" can make as much as you.

 

[nevin]

Brutal truth. It's not for nothing, it's for far less than what they are making. Because:

• Everyone feels that their job is the hardest one in the department and anyone getting paid close to their compensation for "just" graphic design or "just" art, or "just" writing.*
• For very small companies it can be humbling for the owner to learn their personal take home is less than someone they are using as consultant

But yeah, more than once I heard someone be shocked that I paid $20/hr for writing ad copy. But that well dried up and now I am nurse (and do you honestly want an MBA poking you with a needle?)

*And that's a whole mess of passive aggressive attitudes. Like an MBA seeing someone who "only" got an undergrad could command more cash or even just the idea that someone is getting paid to do a job they have a passion vs mentally punching in every day.

no that's the reality of the internet connecting everyone and people in wealthy nations having to compete with people in poor nations for jobs. Hard to compete with some hungry person in china who'll write that ad copy for 3 bucks an hour or a flat fee. We all want fair pay but we all want cheaper rates to make that pay go further. But far too many people don't pay attention and then they are those people screaming about well Whatever they decide to scream about. And Google makes "Groupthink" a near god far too often trying to sell us some idiotic thought like the idea that Current AI in any way resembles what an actual AI will look like when we get there.

 

[haakon1]

The only reason I can think of is because he has a higher salary from all his years of solid work for the company. He was probably "worth" the equivalent of firing five to ten other people.

Maybe? Once during a layoff, a friend who was a director “volunteered“ to be cut to protect his team - maybe that?

In any case, Homer Simpson’s complaint to the deprogrammer who bragged about “getting Paul McCartney out of Wings” perhaps applies: “But he’s the best one!”

 

[Parmandur]

Maybe? Once during a layoff, a friend who was a director “volunteered“ to be cut to protect his team - maybe that?

In any case, Homer Simpson’s complaint to the deprogrammer who bragged about “getting Paul McCartney out of Wings” perhaps applies: “But he’s the best one!”

Hasbro was apparently offering some sweetheart early retirement program to incentivize some senior personnel to let their roles be sunset, and based on LinkedIn at least Liz Schu appears to have been one of the people to take up the retirement offer.