I'm sure this article resonated with many engineers, not just from the game industry. What resonated with me the most, was the part about hiring a consultant, only to tell management what their employees have been telling them all along (for a ridiculous hourly rate of course). The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We do not take advice from our employees. We hired them for grunt work and we only expect them to follow orders. What could they possibly know that could benefit our high-level decision making. Afterall we pay them so little".

I consider the case, which the author describes, where the consultant actually talks to engineers, a happy day scenario. I was witness to a fast growing startup hiring a well known global consulting firm to help them set up company structure and processes. The startup was unable to do this on its own because of lack of leadership and unwillingness of the owners to empower their own people. The consulting firm sent over a couple of their junior consultants who consulted their 3-ring binder of best practices for the nearest matching industry category and gave their recommendations, which were followed quite strictly by a newly hired junior management. All without talking to a single engineer.

More often than not, employees are considered a necessary means to an end and treated as such, with the least amount of reward and care for which they are willing to work. Their sense of professional honor, responsibility and guilt is often exploited in an attempt to achieve higher output. Does the company's products or services suffer because of this? Of course, but nobody at the top cares as long as there is a metric that tells a good story. And when not, the lowest ranks are the first to be pruned and restructured.