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.

 

[Dausuul]

Note that the VTT failure in 4e's case is unlikely to repeat in the same way. Now that was some soap-opera scale insanity. "Learning from mistakes" there is sort of not a real thing. I mean, other than baking in "something will happen that makes our plans useless, so plan for that".

If you're referring to the murder-suicide, that happened shortly after the Gleemax project had been canceled.

But even if that were not the case, there is absolutely a lesson to take away from that: "If suddenly losing one person will cause your big expensive project to fail, you have a serious problem." Most sudden departures are more along the lines of "quit without notice" than "murder-suicide," but either way, you should be able to hire a replacement, give them some time to get up to speed, and carry on.

 

[Alzrius]

If you're referring to the murder-suicide, that happened shortly after the Gleemax project had been canceled.

But even if that were not the case, there is absolutely a lesson to take away from that: "If suddenly losing one person will cause your big expensive project to fail, you have a serious problem." Most sudden departures are more along the lines of "quit without notice" than "murder-suicide," but either way, you should be able to hire a replacement, give them some time to get up to speed, and carry on.

A friend of mine works in the IT department of a large company, and was recently telling me about how he was temporarily moved over to a project that another individual was working on when said individual went on vacation for a week. Because they hadn't left any notes, my friend spent four days figuring out what it was they'd been doing, one day actually making progress, and then went back to their normal work the next week when the other person's vacation ended and they came back to work.

That strikes me as the sort of thing that's not uncommon, at least when individuals with specialized knowledge are working on various endeavors on their own, rather than as part of a team.

 

[nevin]

Problem is if there isn't enough work to keep two or more people busy a lot of companies cut down to one and it's great till that guy goes on vacation or get's a new job. Pretty common situation in IT at least.

 

[Dausuul]

A friend of mine works in the IT department of a large company, and was recently telling me about how he was temporarily moved over to a project that another individual was working on when said individual went on vacation for a week. Because they hadn't left any notes, my friend spent four days figuring out what it was they'd been doing, one day actually making progress, and then went back to their normal work the next week when the other person's vacation ended and they came back to work.

That strikes me as the sort of thing that's not uncommon, at least when individuals with specialized knowledge are working on various endeavors on their own, rather than as part of a team.

Sure. As I said, there's a ramp-up time. But if the coworker had decided never to come back from vacation, your friend could have continued to make progress. The project would not have been doomed to failure by the loss of that person.

Now, if the coworker had taken their company laptop on vacation (or left it locked with no one else able to get into it), and hadn't checked any of their code into source control, your friend would have been unable to do anything at all until the coworker got back. If they never came back, that project could have been set back to square one.

That's the kind of situation I'm talking about. There are fairly basic practices that protect against one person being indispensable to a project... but just because they're basic doesn't mean everyone follows them.

 

[Dausuul]

Problem is if there isn't enough work to keep two or more people busy a lot of companies cut down to one and it's great till that guy goes on vacation or get's a new job. Pretty common situation in IT at least.

Building a VTT is more than enough work to keep multiple people busy for an extended period. If WotC thought they could have one guy build the whole thing, that was their problem right there.

 

[mamba]

Problem is if there isn't enough work to keep two or more people busy a lot of companies cut down to one and it's great till that guy goes on vacation or get's a new job. Pretty common situation in IT at least.

I feel like building the 4e VTT is not really a one person job however

 

[nevin]

I feel like building the 4e VTT is not really a one person job however

Definitely not a project that was important to the executives.

 

[jasper]

That's income tax. When you're rich, it's pretty easy to get money in ways that aren't "income", such as capital investments, and/or shuffle your income around in ways that makes the taxman ignore it.

Yes and those accountants you PAY to get around the taxman are worth their pay. Plus you do pay taxes on finance thingys too.

 

[jasper]

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.

My shop is down to 10% cobol but it been over 15 years to modernize it to dot Net. I and one of the two Cobol programmers left standing. And the boss of my boss has never mention the cost of modernization.