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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.