We discuss compensation, particularly how people in the IT department ("developers," etc.) are so disconnected from the actual business that compensating them based on business performance is near impossible. Not good if you're an IT person and like money. There's other types of comp. then money, obviously, and those are fine too. In particular, we discuss participation in open source and more recognition. But, still: money is the best.

Misaligned Incentives

Episode 4: You get what you pay for - compensating tech staff is often done poorly

People in large organizations avoid improving for improving's sake. They're very rarely proactive in transforming. Instead, it seems that management in most large organizations only act, and change, when they fear competition and failure. "Everyone" knows this is a bad strategy, and yet "everyone" does it. Perhaps we should embrace that behavior, or at least be empathetic, and figure out how to work with it. We discuss this problem and things to do in this episode. Also, we find out why Coté always has bad breath. Mood board: (6:30) - The daily, normal fears are going to drive what a business does more than large, one-off crises. If your inventory is on an AS/400, then you're in trouble. A chaos monkey for business, or, training for the unexpected. "When there's not a crisis, every penny is squeezed out of technology." Outsourcing, but the harmful type. Hold your customers close, know your evolving storefront. Now, software is the primary storefront. To improve, you must have an enemy. (20:51) "If you're trying to modernize, do this 'digital transformation,' it has to come from a place of an existential problem." (21:26) To prepare for a major disruption, you have to prepare for a bunch of minor, incremental disruptions. You have to sell [the return] on paying for change. (25:51) If you want to justify paying for continuous delivery, you have to find a problem to solve. (27:41) They're bean counters, so just count the beans for them - just give them some beans and they're happy. (28:58) As technologist, our views on revenue are not considered important or valid. (29:21) Fear and loss are often easier to quantify, e.g., "if the database goes down, the business halts, and we loose millions a minute." Growth potential is harder to quantify and pitch, so we often ask for money based on fear and loss. (29:36) "Even though I think about revenue streams, I've never been taken as seriously when I talk about them, as when I talk about fear." Finding people outside of IT that care about software, like, in "the business." (32:55) The only reason for technical agility, is business agility. (33:44) If you do live through a crisis, try to internalize your failure to prepare so you only learn once from crisis, not again and again. (35:33) The Business needs the fear, and then needs to ask IT to help with some optimistic technology action...cause no one's gonna believe IT.

Episode 3: Improvement requires fear, or, digital transformation by crisis and fear

The anti-racsim list: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1BRlF2_zhNe86SGgHa6-VlBO-QgirITwCTugSfKie5Fs/mobilebasic Donate: The NAACP: https://www.naacpldf.org/ How to Make Sure You’re Donating Effectively: https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/how-to-donate-effectively-to-fight-police-brutality.html Sign the petition for Breonna: https://justiceforbreonna.org/ How To Be An Antiracist — Ibram X. Kendi: https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist-1 Learn more here https://www.thecut.com/article/george-floyd-protests-how-to-help-where-to-donate.html Camping Wordplay in the Jewish culture Goya Protests around the world Broberg in Minneapolis Paul in Austin JJ in Austin How can we help?

Camping, OODA and Observing Racism

History of Tirefi.re Immutable OSs, is that really something that’s worth looking into for servers? Could you use ChromeOS’s philosophy on servers? Flatpak! Love or hate? CoreOS go boom boom Fedora coreos silverblue vs flatcar container linux Breakfast. How do you do it? Eggs or no eggs? “Balanced breakfast” - is that still a thing? Books vs ebooks vs audiobooks Has the boom boom times changed how you consume? When do you listen to podcasts now ? Special Guest: Shaun Mouton.

tirefi.re burns brightly in our hearts

Paul’s dev.to homework - Broberg’s a Dev.to noob. Broberg buys a grill Matty’s wacky wheels devop gameshow (https://irreverentdevops.com) Favorite website from the late 1900’s Homestarrunner The one the the metallica napster video (Camp Chaos) Ytmnd E/N blogs … the original microblogging ? Ebaumsworld the original viral video copiers Todo-ist and other things that will fail to cure our procrastination top 30 origami blogs of 2020 (https://blog.feedspot.com/origami_blogs/). link to tabletop simulator matty’s github stars (https://github.com/mattstratton?tab=stars) (where projects go that he never looks at again) gmailctl (https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl)

noobs, grills, and ytmnd

Salt stack bug, what is it, wait what is zeroMQ? https://www.zdnet.com/article/saltstack-salt-critical-bugs-allow-data-center-cloud-server-hijacking-as-root/ https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/57057 https://labs.f-secure.com/advisories/saltstack-authorization-bypass Didn’t they write their own secure transport library? Who got hacked? Ghost, LineageOS, https://saltexploit.com It’s also a simple index.html file with a gist. It’s actually really clever to deploy something so simple. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-work-with-the-zeromq-messaging-library Dev.to (https://dev.to) for life of tech nerds Daniel J Lewis (The Audacity to Podcast (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/)/SEO for Podcasters (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/store/seo-for-podcasters/)) Podcasters Roundtable (https://podcastersroundtable.com/) podcast

Paper Plates vs China, instead of Pets vs Cattle

Lists are cool, TweetDeck is pretty powerful, how to wrangle that crazy firehose of information. The fine art of shitposting.

Using Twitter without losing your mind, and, shit posting versus punching up

JJ, Matt Broberg, and Paul go deep into hot sauces and wonder why pipelines do what they do. * Live streaming - pros and cons and why? Ribs Names Sriracha, is it the best or is there better? 3 batches and even played with the recipe, with these end times, everyone should make this at least once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL8UJPQ_zoU Matt is obsessing over Hot Ones hot sauces https://heathotsauce.com/collections/hot-ones Happy to talk more on general fermentation! Matt is happy to learn What’s a supply chain? Is that another tekton thing? Speaking of, what’s tekton? Is that a supply chain thing? Fancy new word for CI/CD or something different? See https://twitter.com/ibuildthecloud/status/1252268240492834816

Hot sauce, pipelines and fermentation

Managing configuration, watching people eat, app launcher, animal crossing, and vim jokes.

dot files, Mukbang, and Tom Nook

We're learning more about doing conferences and events online, instead of in-person. Basically, how do you make webinars better and re-create the "hallway track." Also, we talk about the mess in the US and ICQ. ICQ? Wait, what it’s back (https://icq.com/desktop/en#mac)? Lessons learned about ATX DevOps has a virtual meetup. Lessons learned: - Compresses 90 minutes back to back. - Hunting and hiring. Frequent travel status furloughed (https://twitter.com/AmericanAir/status/1249765252943826946?s=20).

Thus Spoke Zarathustra for Webinars

If there was ever an appropriate drunk and retired topic, it’s surely the need for Cobol programmers to come out of retirement. - Barry Hobbs Conferences - Useless or Useful? Turning on your camera is the new open floor plans. How are you making up for the lack - Podcasting? Streaming? Crying? How do you get your news?

All your conferences belong to online, Peloton Zoom

Trolling google docs for fun and profit Are you for or against “suggestion mode” ? Can we talk about how ironic it is that Google Drive is impossible to find information in? Zoom … good or bad? Paul’s hottake - "if you think devops is telling developers to understand operations then you're a bad operator" Reducing cognitive load. Not increasing it. https://lobste.rs/ vs https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

For or Against Suggestion Mode

Big issue confronted this week: how many screens is too many screens? Also: JJ doesn't know his USB cables and green screen redecorating.

Screen Boss

Strong focus on bread. Stretch and fold. Bread life style. Sweet and cakey. Pulling on Paul. Something you'd like to stop or start doing. Dog walking.

Bread

DrunkAndRetired.com Podcast Reboot Preview

We all want to improve, especially businesses. Knowing what we should be doing is easy, knowing how to change is the hard part. This podcast is a wunderkammer of discussions, interviews, talks, and other recordings trying to figure out how organizations can actually improve. For the most part this is the story of organizations trying to become "tech companies," to do "digital transformation." It's a companion to a book in progress, The Business Bottleneck (https://cote.io/bottleneck/).

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Misaligned Incentives

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