| curl-6 said: An individual programmer on their own bears little responsibility, but in a larger sense members of the development team who make these calls and over-promise in the first place do. |
If the systematic incentives of the organizations you are part of are designed that way, then one's capacity to push back is very limited. If the decision makers (mostly executives) are saying "do x" you're not going to get very far in saying "we can't do x." That's a quick path to unemployment. Your best bet is to say "in order to do x we need n resources" and the response would be one of the following: "oh then don't do x, it's not worth the cost of n resources", "oh then we will provide n resources", or most likely "why can't you do x without n resources? Why isn't n-m resources enough?" In organizations that fail at achieving their goals, usually it is the third response. The developers in this situation are making a rational decision, "save my job for now, maybe be able to achieve x without n resources, and if not -- deal with that when we get there."
This is how software engineering in a for-profit system works in almost any organization, but its very much exacerbated in video game software companies.
