Originally posted by Metal_Man88

---

the policy of making contributors into admins is probably the worst succession policy imaginable.

---

You do need administrators though. When your regular administrator does not have time for the job, how do you suggest recruiting replacements should really go?

Originally posted by Metal_Man88

---

Pick your poison, I guess.

---

That is what I think too.

In retrospect, I cannot see much that I could have done differently.
Maybe I could have communicated better that my intention was not really to dump and cut everything immediately, the misunderstanding of which caused a lot of rushed decisions to be made without consulting me, and a lot of bitterness targeted at me.

And I did want the hosting burden out from my hands. Not that it was really a burden for me, but I figured that things may change in my life soon in such manner, that if the site is still in my hands that day, I cannot guarantee being able to keep the site online or functional.^*
For months, absolutely nothing was happening in the regard of the site not running in my kitchen, until I set a hard deadline.^†

And I did not have time to maintain the site beyond rudimentary tasks such as judging, editing and moderating. For a long time already, the lack of action from me had caused delays at many fronts, such as acceptance of new platforms or in adding features to the site. I really needed people to step up to it. Unfortunately, I did not have any framework that would faciliate partial migrations of responsibilities on certain areas, nor time to develop those, so I had to go for a full move.

Unfortunately the policy for the new guys seems to be that privileges that aren't getting utilized will lose their warranty, so there's not much that I can even do this day, given my lack of continuous commitment to the site today.

^*) So far though, things have not changed in such manner yet. I still have the same server running in my kitchen, with mostly the same hardware, and since the beginning of this month with even a better network connection than I had that day. But I am still perpetually two-three months away from everything changing in an unpredictable manner. Employedness is one of the biggest foreseeable factors. Back then, the two biggest foreseeable factors were the world economy coming crashing down, followed by famine and persecution (it happens, but at a slower pace than I expected) and God taking me around the world to do stuff (it also happens, but at a slower pace than I expected).

^†) There is a principle in scheduling, that every layer of scheduling adds some percentage to the estimated cost in time. For example, if the developer says it will take two hours, the manager will communicate that it will take four hours and the salesman will sell it as taking seven hours. If the developer ends up exceeding their initial budget of two hours, as often happens, there is still a buffer of five hours before the production cost exceeds the sales price. In the army, if the battalion commander says there is two hours until some event, the captain under him will communicate that there is 1,5 hours remaining, and the sargeant under him that there's just 1 hour. In the end, the mooks will scamper and hurry to get there in time, and after arriving, end up waiting idle for an hour. But at least they are there in time. And that is what was happening with the “deadline” that I gave.

Originally posted by Xkeeper

---

Originally posted by Bisqwit

---

There is a principle in scheduling, that every layer of scheduling adds some percentage to the estimated cost in time. For example, if the developer says it will take two hours, the manager will communicate that it will take four hours and the salesman will sell it as taking seven hours.

---

I wish I lived in your fantasy world. I have never seen anything but the opposite, where the developer says 5 hours and the sales team turns around and says one hour.

---

It is all too bad that you work in a stupidly managed company.

It is common knowledge in this profession that programmers are overly optimistic in their time estimates. Any manager worth their salt knows that unless they add some buffer to it, sooner or later they will end up with projects that exceed their budgets in both time and cost.

Programmers generally aren't in the habit of doing like Scotty, i.e. holding something back so they can satisfy inevitable and yet unreasonable "I need more" requests. Unless they're desperately in the need of vacation.