Menu
Sign In Search Podcasts Libraries Charts People & Topics Add Podcast API Blog Pricing

Ryan Peterman

👤 Speaker
2443 total appearances
Voice ID

Voice Profile Active

This person's voice can be automatically recognized across podcast episodes using AI voice matching.

Voice samples: 1
Confidence: Medium

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

I wanted to know what you thought about that.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

This really reminds me of something you had written.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

I thought it was really good writing.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And you have this quote you're writing.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

It says, here's some examples.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

Or the team is riding their outdated system to the grave, like the captain going down on the Titanic.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

Yeah.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

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?

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And I feel like it frames exactly what you just described really cleanly.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel all use this product to make their lives better.