We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 3rd, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 3rd included Ian, Dan, and Christopher. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- @02:30 Google Stadia
- Google Stadia to be shut down
- Incentivising new and grand over important and persistent
- @07:15 Eng incentives
- Is leveling (engineers) the original sin?
- People do whatever the culture rewards
- At Oxide, Demo Day drives behaviors.
- Adam posits that sales folks can be very driven toward maximizing their comp, engineers can be more complicated
- CEO pay and the outcomes that drives - they do what they're paid to do
- @011:45 Brian on the intrinsic motivation of being useful
- retention packages motivate not leaving, and that's it
- @014:45 metrics that drive poor behavior
- lines of code, bugs fixed
- Patents and disclosures, many of which were never "reduced to practice"
- @018:45 rewarding public heroism over private competence
- tying anything to comp makes this fraught because comp is seen as zero sum
- perverse incentives: size of org, the VP who loves to hire
- @023:30 extrinsic vs intrinsic motivators
- the pat on the head or the stranger using a crate you published - those are still extrinsic motivators
- that guy whose opinion you value calls your stuff "slick"
- Praise - the things you say cast a long shadow. The cheapest thing you have to give matters so much
- @028:20 respect
- Respect of your peers can become a currency of its own - the key driver in academia (it's not money)
- Academic motivation in general
- Computer Science academics churn earlier now when compared to 20 years ago
- financial incentives in industry is great and industry does not hold a monopoly on providing freedom to pursue research
- romanticism for teaching at the college level
- Industrial research at Bell Labs brough us Unix, C, the LASER
- @042:05 incentives at Google
- At Google you had to demonstrate impact. Easiest way was to launch
- Harder to demonstrate impact with maintenance
- The Master and Margarita
- some very small change can be preventative of a large impactful outage later
- Postulate: Maintenance work should be promotable work
- a small bug can demonsrate how impactful small changes and correctness are in systems
- xkcd Dependency comic
- It's important to fully understand failures
- Incentives and disincentives of technical post-mortems
- @054:30 Executive compensation
- Peoply vying to be the smartest person in the room breeds a culture of attacking others' ideas
- Adam's favorite psychology experiment involving fairness, monkeys, cucumber, and grapes
- Scarcity driving behavior
- @1:03:30 Cobra breeding
- The Cobra Effect
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!