Both Chris Parker and Feargus have a wonderful habit of giving you room to come to a solution, and then when you when you present the solution, they tell you “it wasn’t the solution they hoped you would choose” (they already had one in mind), and then tell you to go with their decision.
Here’s the thing – I don’t even care about that, but in a company where there’s never enough time and never enough money, you can’t waste so much as a day on dithering bullshit – just tell me what you want, if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you, but chances are, I’ll agree and find a way to make it work and we won’t spend even more time arguing about how we got to this in the first place. We had this happen on KOTOR2 (I finally had to give up and give Chris the interface, which he wasted months of developer time on – and the programmers we needed - for almost no result). Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.” There were tons of things like this where I wish they’d just cut to the chase, because it made you hesitant to make a call because there was always that lurking feeling it had already been decided. And it’s time you don’t get back in a company where again, there’s never enough time.
Part of my extensive post-mortem of Chris Parker (I had pages, since I was trying to learn how to be a better manager by what not to do) was at his best, he would only waste two people's time - yours and his. At worst, he would waste entire department's time or even the whole team's time with feature shifts. Worse, he'd throw tantrums about his own schedules – often trashing them and throwing away promises of personnel and resources in defense of something he was doing. I don’t care about someone wanting to change the schedule, but again, that time was never given back, and the sudden nature of these changes would waste even more time and more planning that had been done with the expectation of promises to be fulfilled.
Another issue was not stopping to think before launching an action. As an example, Parker and other employees spent months trying to help someone get their immigration settled. It cost a lot of time, was distracting, and was a time sensitive matter. But as we were nearing the finish line of a months-long process, Chris Parker suddenly asked, “do we even want to keep her?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – you’re saying this now? Didn't you think this through? This was typical, but it’s worse when you’re playing with people’s futures here, and carelessly. On the plus side (but also echoes “repeating mistakes”) is when one of our games has gone to shit, Chris Parker is often sent in to rescue it, and it is in better shape after, even if it's not going to be destined for the quality bin. However, it would be nice if the games hadn’t been bleeding internally in the first place (usually management-wise and staffing-wise). And it would be nice if we had someone consistent to be there who wasn’t Parker, since Parker has owner duties as well. There was one telling meeting where Chris Parker told the company they were hiring someone to replace him for his position "to do what he did", and someone raised their hand and said, “but Chris, we don’t know what it is you do.”"