Daniel Compton

Bryan Cantrill on integrity. Edited slightly for clarity:

We are on a collision course with the Amazon Principles […] What is going on? I’m losing my mind. The wheels are off, everyone has to get out of the car and this is why. All of these fucking leadership principles, from all these organisations, where is integrity? Damn it where’s integrity? Amazon has 14 leadership principles and integrity is not on it. [That’s] inexcusable. I’m sorry, if you’ve got one principle in your organisation, its integrity? Right? […] No we’re living in a world that has lost it’s fucking mind, I don’t understand it. Why the appetite for territory? Do you not know where your next meal is coming from? Do you not have a roof over your head? I mean I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. We have got an incredible luxury. There’s never been a labour market like this one. Where have we so screwed up with a generation, if not a society where we’ve got people who are so extrinsically motivated? What the [expletive] is wrong with us? I mean its like how is integrity not the only thing you have?

[Andrew Clay Shafer]: Are we doing the full critique of capitalism today?

No it’s not. Bullshit, it’s not capitalism. The finest capitalist is Scott McNealy, a capitalist so pure that when he was being devoured by Oracle he believed that it was his duty to capitalism to die, and I admire that. There is no purer a capitalist than Scott McNealy. And read McNealy’s final email to Sun employees, and it’s almost prescient, McNealy says: “You know what, in 30 years I never had to hide the newspaper from my children.” An achievement that Uber violated on like month two? Where are Travis’ parents? Are you not humiliated? How did you raise him to be so divorced from what really, actually, truly matters? What the living fuck is wrong with us? Maybe it’s me?

I continue to be impressed by Joyent, and Bryan Cantrill’s engineering principles. It sounds like a great place to do your best work.

Recorded at GOTO 2017 for an Arrested Devops episode: Old Geeks Yell At Cloud