HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

No discussion of company values would be complete without a link to Bryan Cantrill’s classic talk, “Principles of Technology Leadership”. https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc

Uber once had a stated company value of “Always be hustling”. Really.

⬐ uptownfunk

Such a great talk.

Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle "Leadership Principles" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc

Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like "Be right a lot" or "Frugality."

Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.

⬐ tandymodel100

> Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There

Still making more money than GCP and Azure (both of which are worse to use, IMHO) so...who cares?

⬐ Throwawayaerlei

When you're running a world wide service with lots of moving and connected parts this dramatically increases the danger you'll have catastrophes that will cost much or most of that market share.

As a thought experiment, suppose all of AWS was down for a full week? What would happen after that?

More realistically, how many times can us-east-chaos-monkey bring down various global services before a lot of its users start making moves to mitigate or eliminate their exposure to AWS?

For a more concrete example, I'm working on a project that has an easy but critical use of cloud services. The more I read about Amazon following Microsoft into Ballmer era stack ranking madness, and the most AWS fails objectively fails, the lower the priority it gets for which cloud platform to support first and best.

⬐ tobinfekkes

I logged in simply to comment a huge "thumbs-up" to any Brian Cantrill reference. I've got an entire playlist of all his various talks around the interwebs, just to listen (and re-listen) in the background while coding. It checks off all the education, tech, history and, critically, humor boxes.

Bryan Cantrill did an interesting deconstruction on Amazon leadership principles.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc&t=26m42s

⬐ goldenkey

That was amazingly on point and had me laughing hysterically. Thank you.

The problem is that they are bromides and claptrap, not principles. There is an important distinction to be made here between principles and values, which they are not making in part because Amazon themselves do not understand the difference.[0] Having a community define its values is important[1], but this is emphatically not the way to do it -- and these are not it besides.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

[1] https://vimeo.com/230142234

⬐ dochtman

I for one would be interested in a worked example for how you think this could be better, maybe as part of the internals thread?

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/blog-post-rustacean-princi...

⬐ benatkin

Yes, also known as platitudes.

However, "if it compiles, it works" is a bit more in line with Rust's unique ambitions. The rest are quite generic.

⬐ bcantrill

Honestly, I take issue with all of them -- including that one. "If it compiles, it works" is demonstrably false, and pernicious in perhaps surprising ways. As a concrete example, I believe the DWARF support for Rust to be extremely important -- but why would one invest in improving that if "it compiles, it works"? I know that undermining debugging infrastructure is not the intent here, but that's kind of the point: words are important, and the ones that have been chosen for these are exceedingly sloppy.

⬐ lolllllll

Steve's boss to the rescue, another noted SJW twitter personality.

Hey Bryan, next time you fund a bunch of criminals to loot and burn down Emeryville - I hope they burn down Oxide Computing as well.

⬐ refenestrator

Sure, but is this existential? The CoC has platitudes, too. Why is this some scary takeover?

There's a great talk by Brian Cantrill about Leadership principles [0] which also includes a discussion of the Amazon Leadership principles. He argues that Amazon's leadership principles actually aren't helpful and don't make much sense and I tend to agree.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

(The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)

⬐ nonfamous

The section on Uber, starting at 36:30, is also well worth watching. This was the talk that made me realize that a company’s principles, as shared, aren’t just PR bullshit. They really do have a profound effect on the culture and behavior of companies.

Tim O'Reilly's blog post (before this announcement, which likely comes on back of Bezos' final annual letter to shareholders [0]) contrasting Ingram's and Amazon's approach towards the marketplaces they operate in sheds light on why the inclusion of these principles is substantial [1].

Leadership principles, though in tension with each other (and so, some argue they really shouldn't be classified as "principles" but rather "values" [2]), permeates the culture of performance and team building at Amazon; and that makes me think this is not only a welcome but potentially a company-defining change.

[0] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2020-letter-to...

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tale-two-platforms-tim-o-reil...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

For whatever it's worth, the only (real) difference between the blog entry and the op-ed that Business Insider asked to run is this closing paragraph that I added at their suggestion:

Some of the specifics of our model may or may not be a fit — we appreciate that uniform compensation is an unusual luxury, and we know that transparency of compensation can be a painful change to effect in an organization that has no history of it (or worse, has secretly been rewarding similar work vastly inequitably). But we do believe — fervently — that compensation reflects a company's values, and that it's absolutely essential that companies elucidate those values. If your company has no formal values, there's a tremendous opportunity to define them. This opportunity is not without peril, however, as my Monktoberfest 2017 talk on "Principles of Technology Leadership"[0] describes: Mistaken or crooked organizational values can be more damaging than absent or implicit ones. Don't define your values in terms of aspirations, aphorisms, slogans, or (because it apparently has to be said!) memes. Rather, they should be an honest expression of the shared values that bind the organization. Once your true values are elucidated, reevaluate your compensation in light of them. This isn't easy to do (especially because it will be a foregone conclusion that any reexamination will not result in the reduction of anyone's compensation), but your employees — current and future — will thank you for it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

Edit: formatting because HN (still!) doesn't support any kind of real block quoting.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162599

This subject and the utter vagueness of the values presented here require me to bring up Bryan Cantrill's talk, 'Principles of Technology Leadership'.[1] He gives Amazon a lambasting over their core principles, and Uber even moreso.

It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

Bryan Cantrill - Principles of Technology Leadership https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

Is the Key:Values team (nice choice of name by the way!) familiar with Bryan Cantrill's talk on 'Principles of Technology Leadership'?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

It seems to resonate pretty closely with what you're building, so if it helps align or educate anyone (candidates, recruiters, or the team) that'd be neat.

Edit: FWIW, the talk uses the term 'principle' to indicate what your site calls a 'value'; in practice I've seen tech companies talk about their 'core values' and so I think yours is very valid.

⬐ jka

Ah, I read that the team is you at the moment :) Either way, hope it might help!

I love Bryan Cantrill for being that classy bad-ass engineer with so much integrity.

His talk on companies principles is a must-watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=9QMGAtxUlAc

⬐ None

None

⬐ dm3730

> I love Bryan Cantrill for being that classy bad-ass engineer with so much integrity.

I have never worked with Bryan. What's the general opinion about Valerie's statements about working with him.

https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-atte...

https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2018/07/01/bryan-cantrill-has...

⬐ trymas

Also this drama by Bryan seemed over the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845351, http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

⬐ eurticket

Misdirected, not over the top, it's very appropriate especially when it was a sponsored project and they were getting called out as if Ben was their employee and they were cosigning whatever Ben's views were.

Regardless how you feel on gendered pronouns, if you're writing documentation regarding all users it seems like a no brainier to actually involve all users in the language, something which Bryan puts great significance into. Bryan's talks[0] usually involve tone and messaging (as well as being triggered and raged) as key points.

But back to the drama issue. The problem about this whole thing isn't about the pronouns really, it was the actions that Ben took even after it was explained and the hard stance Joyent felt it needed to take on the issue in the aftermath.

Ben, if we're giving him the benefit of the doubt (because he isn't a native English speaker) to word something 'wrong', is a simple fix, who cares.

- The real part of this whole mess was because he tried reversing a commit that was made by the project lead after it was worded to include more users. Ben was the main agitator in this almost 6 year old mess regardless of his amount of contributions.

[0] https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc

⬐ PavlovsCat

The acceptance of this declaring people as "horrible human beings" by mostly anonymous decree, and then creating a fashion where "the worst thing this did/said" is brought up by people who are X degrees removed from even that, every time the unperson does or say anything, I find much worse than being a caustic prick, which at least is hard limited to the actions of one person. Even if the person should be really bad every now and then, they're already sometimes just kinda-bad-mumble-mumble -- and the habit that is being formed here is just waiting on being used on all sorts of people.

That I know, the rest I can't speak on. I wasn't asked to work with him or be his friend, I find his talks valuable, very lucid and much surprisingly easy to follow even with subjects I don't know much about, and in that way they feel much more respectful to me as "the" audience than a lot of the material out there.

⬐ kazagistar

So because someone is privileging you over others, you find it easy to forgive harms they might have committed against others.

I see reasons why there might be value in a more nuanced approach then erasing all work of someone who unrepentantly behaves poorly, but this doesn't seem like it is the right reasoning.

⬐ PavlovsCat

> So because someone is privileging you over others,

What? What does this have to do with anything I wrote?

> this doesn't seem like it is the right reasoning.

Then simply quote me, instead of totally butchering what I said and then calling that not right.

⬐ None

None

⬐ mcny

I'm not trying to defend Bryan Cantrill. Far from it.

I think people in silicon valley often forget how privileged they are. The application question is basically asking

What have you personally done in your life? Why should we give you a chance? I think Bryan Cantrill suffers from a lack of perspective. Like if you ask Taylor Swift about how to be a successful artist and she says just follow your dreams and everything will fall into place, I imagine Bryan hasn't had to justify his personal contributions anywhere in a long time likely because they are just obvious and do easy to see. Now compare that to someone like me who has only worked on line of business applications. I try to be honest which in my mind sounds like I'm being humble but from the other side it just sounds like I'm unaccomplished and have poor listening/comprehension skills.

In any case, I think this thread needs to be less about Bryan Cantrill and more about YC.

Bryan Cantrill's Wikipedia page says he asked a kernel developer if he had ever kissed a girl as a one line reply to a technical discussion. My instinct whenever I hear accusations like those by Valerie is to say maybe there's a different perspective but I don't think there is one in this case. Regardless of all this (and his association with a company that stupidly offers lifetime hosting to paying members and later yanks it which is essentially fraud), I think the arguments he makes stand on their own. These aren't arguments I could make because I'm a nobody but I'm glad someone is making regardless of how flawed they are.

⬐ eurticket

> if you ask Taylor Swift about how to be a successful artist and she says

Just have your father buy a record label.

> I think Bryan Cantrill suffers from a lack of perspective.

I think it could be interpreted in a lot of ways, god forbid anyone criticize the language and connotations in YCs questions. The questions asked so broadly/abstractly open them up for this type of thing and if there are problems more people should speak up, until there are better questions being asked. This can all still happen while also still loving what YC can provide.

> These aren't arguments I could make because I'm a nobody

This is exactly why you should express how you feel about these things, as much as you also want the conversation to be less about Bryan and more about YC, you're basically saying you have the same passionate nature but choose to be silent. And if you did speak up, it would be without the bulk amount of negative attention if you were wrong, but all the benefit if you provide something of value and were right.

> Supposedly, every employee should be guided by the leadership principles during their day-to-day routine. The principles actually make a lot of sense, when used appropriately. As time went, I discovered that the most common application of the principles was to creatively find a leadership principle that best supports the situation.

Bryan Cantrill has a sometimes hilarious takedown of Amazon's "leadership principles" here, which definitely corroborates this blog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

⬐ joffotron

Honestly, everyone needs to watch this. It's not just Amazon, but so many companies have these absolutely toxic and ridiculous "principles"

Related talk by Bryan Cantrill (Principles of Technology Leadership) Watch the whole video, it's good!

https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc?t=43m46s

Before we get to the list: if you only watch one talk of mine, please watch Principles of Technology Leadership (slides) presented at Monktoberfest 2017. This is the only talk that I have asked family and friends to watch, as it represents my truest self — or what I aspire that self to be, anyway.

Let me just say, this is an extremely good talk[1]. Very uplifting and depressing at different times. It goes through serious turns, and very funny periods. Ultimately though, the message is very important and worth hearing. I highly recommend it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

Bryan Cantrill, Principles of Technology Leadership

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

I highly recommend his recent talk on technology leadership:

https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc