Question about perception of people based on stated skills

[SvenTheViking]

More or less, as the title says, I have a question about how you perceive someone based on what skills they tell you that they have. For example, if you're recruiting and I say I can do programming, writing, and music, how does that affect how you view what I could contribute to your project? Is there something about finding out that someone has technical abilities that makes you doubt their creative abilities, particularly writing; is it so rare that one is good at multiple things that one must be bad at everything but the one thing at which they are best? Is it just that people with technical abilities are just so rare that they're always assigned technical roles?

I kind of need to know what to tell people for non-VN projects (not so much a VN problem as I really can't do everything on a VN like I can on most of the other projects on which I work) so I can stop being stuck as the go-to guy when everything goes boom and you need someone to fix just about everything.

[Auro-Cyanide]

I assume it isn't really true until the show me proof. Not that they may always be lying, but I have found people's own preception of their skills is greatly effected by how much expereince they have. I don't assume anything such as whether one skill cancels out another because I know that isn't true. While there is a tendency towards some things, say, artists aren't usually very good at maths, it doesn't always hold true. But yeah, I'm going to judge on proof rather than what someone says. That said, I'm not sure that helps with your problem?

[DaFool]

Nobody wanted me on their team until I started cranking out projects by myself. And that's also the yardstick I use to evaluate whether I want to work with a person or not.

Usually someone's skill level can already be estimated by their latest output (+ an allowance for some improvement since that time). As is often the case, a person is usually more skilled than than the quality of the project shows. However, there is no better barometer at measuring reliability than somebody's output.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

What Auro-Cyanide said. You require proof. If you are recruiting team members, demand evidence of their skills before taking them on. Ask to see a link to their previous work. Refuse to work with them if you aren't satisfied with said proof.

I've been in team situations like you talk about where it seems all the work is falling on you, and here is what I did. I refused to do any more work until the other team members caught up to me with their own work, and I let them know it. They turned in a milestone, so would I. They didn't, I wouldn't either. Basically you have to threaten to let the ship go down and let it happen if they call your bluff. It saved one project I was on, but sunk another. Either way the stress was gone.

Depending on how much work some team members have done compared to others, there have also been a few projects where we threatened to "fire" a team member and then did so when they didn't come through - striking their name from the project and stripping out their contributions. I don't know how well this would work over the internet, but it was a tremendously successful shaming action in a university setting where that person then was in danger of being blackballed from all future teams.

The big thing is this: Stop being a nice guy. Tell it like it is and stop volunteering yourself to make everything better. If they are taking advantage, let them know in no uncertain terms that you don't appreciate it.

And no, I wouldn't doubt someone's creative skills just because they have good technical skills. It is true the two usually don't go hand in hand, but people do often have multiple skill sets. I have 3 skill sets myself - art, writing, and programming. I'm very strong in art and writing, but below average in programming. I think a person is naturally going to be weaker or stronger in some skills, but you can't judge anything without proof.

[SvenTheViking]

I assume it isn't really true until the show me proof.

In most cases, I have shown proof, which is how I got on the team anyway. But your input does help, at the very least in helping to give possibility to my hope that I've just had a bunch of really bad project managers in the past.

I've been in team situations like you talk about where it seems all the work is falling on you, and here is what I did.

Well, you see... That's not exactly my problem. Honestly, that's the OPPOSITE of my problem; I'm not being given ENOUGH work, and projects are failing because nobody's doing anything, including me. See, I'm usually given the relatively easy task (at least to me) of making an existing engine work how we want it to, which is usually little more than changing colors and locations of things in the window.

That leaves usually four other people to work on the plot and story, which is where it always dies. I wish I could say that it's because of disagreement, but honestly, I've found out that people stop talking about it when I enter the (chat) room (the chat room was hosted on my server, so I checked the logs; don't think that anyone respected me enough to tell me the truth about it). Why this is, I do not know, as many members of the teams have on more than one occasion said that they enjoy reading my writing, and most are signed up for automatic updates when I put something out. Maybe I'm just a bad luck charm, or, as I said above, maybe my managers all just sucked (I know that at least one did; she brought on someone she knows I hate with every ounce of my being, to do my job because "I wasn't doing it", when I was doing everything she asked, and the real problem was that she wasn't telling me what to do because I wasn't staying up until 3AM every night when she decided to go online).

So, I guess the solution is, I need to find more professional teams. While I don't think I'll have this problem with VNs (you all seem to be quite a bit more serious about getting things done), I do wonder if it's going to be a problem finding a team for other sorts of projects, like Source mods.