Ryan Peterman

One unusual thing, though, in the industry that I've seen is the incentive system for engineers is actually, I mean, you mentioned the desire for an engineer to want to be seen that they can do something difficult.

There's that, but there's also the incentive system of promotions.

And I've had many friends whose promotions were rejected because their work wasn't complex enough.

And so that kind of forces complexity, which is kind of unusual.

I wanted to know what you thought about that.

This really reminds me of something you had written.

I thought it was really good writing.

And in the writing, there was this idea of system bias.

And you have this quote you're writing.

It says, here's some examples.

It says, the team is spending six months to improve performance by 10% when it was completely fine to begin with.

Or the team is trying desperately to force their tooling on clients who don't need it.

Or the team is riding their outdated system to the grave, like the captain going down on the Titanic.

Yeah.

I've definitely seen examples of all those types of things in industry.

And so, yeah, I think it was in the context of your writing about what you should orient your team around, not systems, but actually missions.

And maybe that's a way to fight system bias.

If inertia is so strong, how did you fight it and close down all those projects?

From that article, you had a great quote, or I guess a great question to think through this.

It said, you went to everyone or a bunch of people and you would say, if we could be spending these resources working on any project at the company right now, would this still be the best use of time?