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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Reading both accounts of the story, it sounds like a small company bit off more than it could chew, couldn’t manage cost and schedule, and when it got to the drop-dead date, even though they say it was basically done (how many times did the client hear that one), the client pulled the plug and tried to salvage it some other way.

Y’all need project managers, at least someone with a plan! jeez.

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> Y’all need project managers, at least someone with a plan! jeez.

Or do what every other event does, and don't make your badges so complicated they need a project manager

Every other event has badges that look like they cost substantially less than $1. I'm not saying they have to go that cheap - but when you're hiring a project manager to coordinate the multiple teams, schedule challenges, and providers biting off more than they can chew? Maybe scale things back a bit.

They tried last year with the injection molded plastic part that you could mod and didn’t get enough of them shipped in time. To your point on $1 badges, they gave paper out and people complained (and still complain) for a long time. They felt they spent $300-400 plus travel expenses so they have this idea they should get a special badge. It has an entire culture around it.

Me and a partner designed an insert that fit into that injection molded part and it had games. You could even connect via RS232 if you had the right board and it would print out DEFCON in ASCII then it had whole menu of games.

We sold this add on for $20 at cost to recoup our costs. Sold about 100+ of these add ons.

DEFCON definitely bit off more than they could chew.

We designed our add on around a cheap STM32 series chip and wrote the code ourselves in C. It didn’t have an emulator like this as this is like an entire gaming platform that DEFCON created. But ours was more like DOS level game add on that took us a couple months to make and have produced. We made the stickers ourselves and cut acrylic ourselves.

If you take this situation and make the circuit boards not be the badge, it doesn't really change the situation much. There's a little bit less pressure if the badge is separate, but I'm sure an emergency backup badge could have been arranged.

If you're saying not to have a cool gizmo at all, I think that's too harsh of a lesson.

From what I understand, the DEFCON badges are a fun thing they like to do every year. I don't see this as a problem; what is a problem is deciding to try to create something so complicated in under eight months. I get that it might be a heavy lift for them to start planning and engaging companies to work on the DEFCON '24 badge before DEFCON '23 had even happened, but this particular badge warrants a year-plus of lead time.

If that's the case, a competent vendor should not have signed contracts committing themselves to deliver it.

It could even be that EE was not the first engineering firm contacted by Defcon. But they were the ones that said yes to this product.

I suspect that the comment implies the absence of project manager on the Entropic side of the deal.

As for the cost of the badge, sourcing even sub-$1 badge is still a project. And especially when your target audience is somewhat skilled at counterfeiting such things.

Is the badge the actual thing that lets you enter? Why don’t they just have digital tickets that get scanned at the entrance like everyone else? Does the badge need to be hard to counterfeit?

On what planet can you get ICs for less than a $1?

Here's not only the IC but an entire development board for $0.95: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805283269799.html

cool, I guess we can go make lightsabers instead of badges...

I mean, its defcon's money, if they want to spend it on fancy badges, that is there right. If someone offers to do something, knowing full well what the requirements are, but can't, that is not defcon's fault but the people who agreed to do the badges.

I think I agree with the assessment. Especially the part about PM hits close to home. It seems how a lot of projects I was involved lately lacked an actual project manager. Is the problem that it is a hard job to do right?

The thing is that people on here think project managers are evil incarnate and just useless middle management.

It requires a very specific skill set to be able to lead a technical project and cut through the bullshit on BOTH SIDES: the client asking for features and the team building the product.

Clients always either ask for stuff they don't really need or have vague requirements that crystallise only 3 days after the deadline. "Of course when we said it needs to do foo, it also MUST do bar, doh!"

And teams tend to overestimate their ability to deliver and underestimate the work needed to get to the finish. (Infinite coast problem).

There's also several more classes of B.S., for what it's worth.

An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"

...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.

Yea, I've had the privilege of working with a few _excellent_ project managers (or Producers as they're called in gaming) and they work literal magic.

I've studied project management, I've managed projects and lead teams, but holy crap those people are on a whole other level with how well they gather and disseminate information and communicate it effectively.

None of them could code themselves out of a wet paper bag, but that's not the skill they get hired for.

It's actually really hard to do well. Moreover, it suffers from "how hard could it really be" syndrome, especially when working with developers who think they're smarter than everybody. It's the kind of job that a software developer approches from first principals and does a terrible job at, because starting from first principals ignores all of humanity's experience and practice managing projects, and projects have existed since before the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

We have better tools today, but it takes a skilled practitioner to wield them well. Yes I'm talking about Jira and I hate sitting down and pointing things too, but managing a large complex project with a large number of humans is real actual work and a full time job in and of itself. sometimes even more than one person can handle. places that I've seen are successful are able to recognize that, and don't treat it as dead weight.

Good project managers are rare. They need to have some real experiences working on some projects and then some managing projects. It's rarer than good engineering managers IMO.

>bit off more than it could chew

The fact that Dmitry was still pushing changes on the aeroplane, although he seemed to frame this as a positive, doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in their professionalism, viewed from the outside.

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