Marc Brooker

Like we don't need to fix these root causes because our on-calls are superheroic and they're going to stay up all night and they're going to, you know, they're going to hack around things and they don't mind being paged a hundred times a week.

And

that can feel from the inside like it's a good culture, right?

Like, oh, wow, these people are super strong owners.

They're super engaged.

They really care.

They're really working hard on call.

And those are all good signals.

But then when you look at it from the outside, it's like, wow, we're not actually fixing the causes of things.

We're just doing this fantastically expensive investment of taking all of these people and their strong ownership and their expertise and spending them just on this break-fix cycle.

And that's where you need to kind of look at it from the outside and say, well, let's take this energy of this team, fantastic energy, and focus it on improving the service, getting out of the cycle, finding new things to fix, finding new things to build.

And that can be hard because it can be hard for those folks who've been in that mode to look at it and say, this feels so good.

It feels really like we're caring about our customers and caring about our product and caring about our business.

to realize that, oh no, we're actually caring about it at the wrong level and we're not serving our business in the best possible way by being so narrowly and tactically focused on this break-fix cycle.

And that's where you sort of need to pop them out and say, well, let's spend more time thinking about

Let's spend more time thinking about the causes of things.

Let's spend more time addressing these things in a more strategic way.

And wow, okay, now you've got so much more time to do that because you've broken the cycle and you can improve your product in different ways.

Yeah, so caching's good, right?

Like it's, hey, I'm going to take these core ideas from computer science of temporal and spatial locality, and I'm going to exploit those to make my system faster, scale better, et cetera.