Psychopaths at work • Michael Wood • PlatformCon 2022
Summary
TLDRIn this insightful talk, Michael Wood, a Field CTO at HashiCorp, discusses the impact of organizational culture on individual behaviors, particularly focusing on psychopathy in the workplace. He explores how hierarchical, siloed environments can inadvertently foster psychopathic traits, and contrasts this with cultures that encourage empathy and collaboration. Wood suggests that by adopting developer platforms, automation, and open communication, organizations can reduce spaces for such behaviors to thrive. He emphasizes the importance of aligning organizational structures and incentives with desired cultural outcomes, advocating for a balance between empathy and the drive for excellence.
Takeaways
- 🌟 Culture plays a pivotal role in shaping an organization's productivity and behaviors, with a focus on reducing spaces for psychopathic behaviors to flourish.
- 📚 Reading books like 'Snakes and Suits' provides insights into psychopathy and its manifestations in siloed and hierarchical organizations.
- 🔍 The speaker emphasizes not to hunt for psychopaths but to understand the organizational incentives that may inadvertently support such behaviors.
- 🧐 Personality types like empathy and sociopathy are discussed, with the aim to leverage them appropriately within an organization.
- 🤝 Empathy is linked to positive behaviors, while sociopathy and psychopathy can be detrimental, with the latter treating others as prey for personal gain.
- 🛠 The importance of aligning organizational structure, incentives, and team collaboration with the desired culture and outcomes is highlighted.
- 🔑 Terms like 'anchor' are suggested to promote sharing and context passing within teams, rather than creating hierarchical power structures.
- 🔄 The shift to DevOps and test-driven design is presented as a way to reduce counter-incentives and promote balanced teams focused on value delivery.
- 🚀 The speaker advocates for innovation through empowered teams that can question decisions and experiment, contrasting with a focus on strict delivery timelines.
- 🛡 The use of platforms and automation to manage complexity and cognitive load, allowing developers to focus on value-adding tasks, is discussed.
- 🌐 The myth of the 'unicorn' developer is debunked, with a call for specialization, sharing, and systems of coordination to manage diverse technological demands.
Q & A
What is the main topic of Michael Wood's talk?
-The main topic of Michael Wood's talk is the impact of organizational culture on the flourishing of psychopathic behaviors within a company and how to cultivate a culture that promotes productive and positive behaviors.
What does Michael Wood suggest can be learned from the book 'Snakes in Suits'?
-Michael Wood suggests that 'Snakes in Suits' provides insights into psychopathy, how to identify it, and how it can manifest in organizational settings, particularly in siloed and hierarchical structures.
What are the key elements that Michael Wood believes allow psychopathic behaviors to flourish in enterprises?
-The key elements that allow psychopathic behaviors to flourish in enterprises include siloed organizations, extreme hierarchy, opportunities to manipulate teams for personal gain, and environments where individuals can hide and not produce actual results.
What is the purpose of discussing psychopathy in the context of organizational culture?
-The purpose of discussing psychopathy in the context of organizational culture is to examine the incentives created by organizational structures that may inadvertently support or reduce psychopathic behaviors, and to explore ways to cultivate a more positive and productive organizational culture.
What does Michael Wood define as the difference between empathy and sociopathy?
-Empathy is the ability to feel deeply for other people and understand their emotions and experiences. Sociopathy, on the other hand, is characterized by a lack of connection to others' feelings, viewing individuals as abstract and detached, often leading to a lack of emotional investment in others' situations.
How does Michael Wood describe the behavior of a psychopath in a human environment?
-Michael Wood describes a psychopath in a human environment as someone who treats others as prey, to be manipulated for personal gain, and who may engage in deceitful behaviors such as playing both sides against the middle to gain power or resources.
What is the role of an 'anchor' in a team according to Michael Wood?
-The role of an 'anchor' in a team is to share the context and knowledge they have gained from being with the project or product the longest. The anchor is responsible for grooming a future anchor and is encouraged to move between teams, sharing ideas and contributing to the development of others.
What does Michael Wood suggest as an alternative to traditional team lead roles to encourage a more empathetic culture?
-Michael Wood suggests using the term 'anchor' instead of 'team lead' to establish roles that are more focused on sharing knowledge and context rather than establishing authority or hierarchy within the team.
How does Michael Wood relate the concepts of empathy and sociopathy to incentives within an organization?
-Michael Wood relates empathy to incentives that promote transparency, sharing, and collaboration, while sociopathy is linked to incentives that encourage individual excellence, competition, and a focus on personal achievement and recognition.
What is the significance of the 'build it, you build it, you run it' mantra in the context of DevOps according to Michael Wood?
-The 'build it, you build it, you run it' mantra signifies the DevOps approach where development and operations teams are merged, and individuals are responsible for the full lifecycle of the application, from development to deployment and maintenance, promoting a more balanced and collaborative team dynamic.
What does Michael Wood propose to reduce the cognitive load on developers and encourage a culture of innovation?
-Michael Wood proposes the use of a developer platform that abstracts developers from the complexity of downstream automation, allowing them to focus on value-adding tasks at the application tier, while other teams handle compliance, governance, and other complexities through systems of coordination.
Outlines
🧐 Cultivating Organizational Culture and Addressing Psychopathy
Michael Wood, a Field CTO at HashiCorp, introduces the topic of organizational culture and its cultivation. He discusses the impact of culture on behavior within an organization and the conditions that can foster psychopathic behavior, such as siloed and hierarchical structures. Drawing from literature like 'Snakes and Suits,' he examines the traits of psychopathy and how they can manifest in the workplace. Wood emphasizes that the goal is not to identify psychopaths but to understand the organizational incentives that may inadvertently support such behavior. He sets the stage for a deeper dive into how developer platforms, automation, and openness can mitigate the negative aspects of certain personality types.
🔍 Understanding Personality Types: Empathy, Sociopathy, and Psychopathy
The speaker delves into the definitions and distinctions between different personality types, focusing on empathy, sociopathy, and psychopathy. Empathy is characterized by a deep understanding and sharing of others' feelings, whereas sociopathy involves a detached, observer-like stance. Psychopathy is portrayed as predatory, with individuals viewing others as prey to be manipulated for personal gain. Wood provides examples from popular culture, such as the BBC's 'Sherlock,' to illustrate these traits. He also discusses the importance of balancing empathy and detachment in a work environment, suggesting that a balance is necessary for effective team dynamics and avoiding the negative impacts of extreme personality traits.
🛠️ Incentives and Organizational Structures that Shape Personality Expression
Wood explores how organizational structures and incentives can either encourage or discourage certain personality traits. He contrasts transparent, empathetic team environments with competitive, siloed ones that may foster sociopathic or psychopathic behaviors. The speaker advocates for a balance between empathy and the drive for excellence, using terms like 'anchor' instead of 'team lead' to promote sharing and context passing within teams. He also discusses the negative aspects of hero culture and the importance of reducing silos to promote a more balanced and cooperative team dynamic.
🤝 The Impact of Workflow and Incentives on Team Dynamics
This paragraph examines how traditional waterfall workflows can create counterproductive incentives, leading to a siloed and somewhat sociopathic approach among teams. Wood describes the conflict between development teams focused on rapid change and operations teams incentivized to maintain stability. He discusses the benefits of adopting DevOps practices, such as test-driven development, to align teams around value production and reduce the potential for personality traits that could be detrimental to the organization's goals.
🚀 Balancing Innovation and Delivery in Organizational Culture
The speaker addresses the challenge of balancing innovation with the need for timely delivery in an organization's culture. He emphasizes the importance of clear communication about the organization's priorities and the impact this has on hiring and team structure. Wood also touches on the dangers of overcomplicating roles by adding too many responsibilities, leading to cognitive overload and hindering innovation. The goal is to empower developers to focus on solving business problems without being overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems they interact with.
🛡️ Encouraging Empathy and Transparency through Intent-Driven Approaches
In this paragraph, Wood discusses the importance of intent-driven approaches and automation in reducing the opportunity for psychopathic behavior in organizations. He advocates for a system of coordination where changes are declared, vetted, and implemented transparently, allowing for immediate feedback and reducing the potential for hidden agendas or 'off-book' changes. The speaker also highlights the need for specialized labor and the importance of not expecting developers to be experts in every aspect of technology, promoting instead a culture of sharing and collaboration.
🌐 Creating a Culture of Inclusivity and Reducing Cognitive Load
The final paragraph wraps up the discussion by emphasizing the importance of building a culture of inclusivity where ideas are challenged and different perspectives are welcomed. Wood stresses the need to reduce cognitive load by specializing and sharing knowledge across teams, rather than expecting individuals to be experts in every area. He envisions a workflow where developers are abstracted from much of the downstream automation, allowing them to focus on value-adding tasks at the application tier, while compliance and governance are handled by other specialized teams.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Culture
💡Psychopathy
💡Empathy
💡Sociopathy
💡Organizational Structure
💡Incentives
💡DevOps
💡Intent-Driven Approaches
💡Cognitive Load
💡Governance
💡Systems of Coordination
Highlights
Michael Wood discusses the cultivation of organizational culture and its impact on productivity.
The influence of psychopathy in siloed and hierarchical organizations where manipulation can thrive.
The importance of understanding personality types such as empathy, sociopathy, and psychopathy in the workplace.
Strategies to minimize psychopathic behavior in organizations through structural and incentive changes.
The role of developer platforms, automation, and openness in reducing spaces for psychopathic behavior to flourish.
Defining empathy and sociopathy, and their implications in team dynamics and organizational outcomes.
The potential dark side of empathy, referred to as 'dark empathy', and its consequences.
Balancing empathy and sociopathy to drive desired behaviors in a team setting.
The impact of organizational structure on the flourishing of certain personality traits.
Incentives that drive meritocracy and the potential for a blend of empathy and sociopathy in team environments.
The concept of 'hero culture' and its relation to sociopathic incentives in organizations.
The shift to DevOps and test-driven design to align teams with value production and reduce counter-incentives.
The importance of aligning team incentives with the desired culture and outcomes of the organization.
The challenges of cognitive load in organizations and the need for intent-driven approaches to reduce it.
The myth of the 'unicorn developer' and the need for specialized labor and systems of coordination.
Encouraging innovation by empowering teams to question decisions and take ownership of outcomes.
The role of governance and automation in creating a transparent and collaborative development environment.
Wood's final thoughts on building a culture of inclusivity and challenge to combat psychopathic tendencies in organizations.
Transcripts
[Music]
hello everyone my name is michael wood i
am a field cto here with hashicorp and
i'm here to talk to you today about some
interesting and hopefully very
provocative things
namely culture and how we cultivate it
how we build it up how we
uh ensure that we're seeing
wonderful behaviors across
our organization at least the things
that are going to prove to be productive
in our overall mission
uh a lot of what i'm going to talk about
today is driven out of a little bit of
information that i learned
in reading through books like snakes and
suits where we take a look at
what is psychopathy how hard is it to
determine and where we see it manifest
a lot of what the research
that comes out and emerges in this
theater starts to look like is
anytime that i'm dealing with very
siloed organizations extremely
hierarchical
where it's very easy to hide and not
actually produce
if i can
manipulate teams to work against each
other account of purposes
these are all elements that exist within
enterprises
that allow things like psychopaths to
flourish or at least to
find a place and and work their magic a
little bit i'll give a little bit more
detail on the psychological side before
we jump into organization
how developer platforms abstractions and
automation and openness can help us
reduce the number of spaces for
psychopaths to flourish
but i want to lay out a few ground rules
before we get started first
i'm not on a manhunt i'm not on a hunt
for
psychopaths uh this is not about helping
you to identify which ones of your
friends are psychopathic this is not
about
creating fear that you might be working
in an environment that has this type of
an individual in it
i'm simply looking at the research in
and around these types of
personality types
and the incentives that we create from
an organizational standpoint
to either help them to flourish
or to
reduce the number of ways that they can
actually
use that negative aspect of their
personality to our detriment or the
detriment of our customers so i am
considering things like organizational
structure i'm looking at
the incentives that exist the way that
our teams collaborate
and i also want to take into account
what type of outcome we're looking to
drive
because that goes to the types of
personalities that we want to hire and
how we want to make get them to team
with each other
so first let me set a couple of
definitions i think we're all pretty
good here but it always
makes a lot of sense for us to establish
a little bit of common ground on the
terminology before we dig in deeper
first uh there's a personality type
which focuses more on empathy
empathy is where i feel very very deeply
for other people if someone hurts i hurt
i can i can empathize i can understand
what they're going through
like all of these types
there are positive and negative aspects
to any of these we typically think of
things like a very empathetic person as
being a good person and a sociopath
being sort of a bad person
that's too broad of a brush to paint
with
the reason i can say that isn't is
someone who is very very empathetic
could be like
a mother bear with her cubs she's very
very empathetic to her cubs
but if those cubs are ever threatened
she's very psychopathic
to
the ones that she is not
empathetic about around i should say
this is something that we might refer to
as like a dark empath somebody who takes
empathy and turns it into a weapon or a
negative outcome
so just as we go through this just
understand i'm not saying any of these
are wildly awesome or wildly terrible
they're personality types and we want to
make sure that we leverage them
appropriately to get the most out of
their skills and abilities now granted
psychopathy is a little bit harder for
us to work with but i'll i'll get into a
little bit of why we're looking to sort
of minimize this
but empathy at a high level is i can
identify with someone else's pain
emotions uh
what they're going through
a sociopathy is really a
an ab
sort of a
oh
you're abstracted from individuals you
don't feel what they feel you're sort of
an observer um
in the uh wonderful bbc show sherlock
starring benedict cumberbatch
as uh sherlock holmes he describes
himself as a highly functioning
sociopath when he sees pain and he goes
out to solve murders he's detached he
doesn't feel anything for the victims
he's kind of fascinated by the
perpetrator and he's interested in the
puzzle but he's not emotionally invested
in the scenario which which is more of a
sociopathic response
psychopathic is really where you look at
the other as if they are prey they're
somebody you may toy with
uh but they are sort of beneath you
they're they're something that you can
manipulate for your own gain and so one
of the examples that's typically used
there is a cat with a mouse there's not
a lot of empathy between
uh
from the cat to the mouse
and so a psychopath in a human
environment is going to be someone who
treats someone else as prey or something
to be used and thrown away
the
there are several other characteristics
that come into this a psychopath can
hide they pretend to be something that's
very important to you they'll pretend to
they're your best friend while they talk
trash about someone else and then
they'll meet with that other person and
tell them their they will convince them
that they're their best friend and talk
trash about you
and they play the two sides against the
middle in order to gain maybe political
power
maybe funding for project work all of
these types of things but this is a
psychopathic
behavior and we're looking to
minimize that bring about a bit more
empathy
so for this session it's not who's who
but what are we calling for out of the
organization as we build the cultures
that we that we're trying to take
forward as we move into devops as we're
trying to drive
innovative more you know smaller agile
teams will say
what are the type of personality traits
that we want to call for do i need some
empathy with a little bit of sociopathy
meaning
i need you to care about patient
outcomes but i don't need to do to get
so wrapped up that you can't move
because you're so emotionally invested
right i need to be able to move so i'm
going to be empathy but with a little
bit of detachment so that i can actually
treat patients that would be an example
of trying to find a good balance between
empathy and sociopathy
so some example incentives if we're
calling for something like empathy we
want to be completely transparent we
want our incentives to be geared around
sharing
as an example if
i'm really driving an empathetic team i
may not use terms like
technical lead
because i'm not trying to establish
stratification i'm not saying that
because you are
uh the most senior uh developer that you
have authority over the other developers
that that is sort of a will to power
sort of thing it leads us more into
a little bit more sociopathic um
incentive which i'll get into around
like hero culture like i want to be the
lead i want to have the widest
scope of responsibility i want to have
the widest purview i want to have the
most influence
those are incentives that are a bit
sociopathic it's you're trying to set
yourself above others you're not
necessarily trying to hurt anybody but
you want to excel and that that leads us
more into sociopathy so
what i'm looking here is i may instead
of using terms like
team lead i may use terms like anchor
and the goal of an anchor is because
you're an anchor because you've been
here the longest you have the widest
amount of
context for the project the product
itself the code base
the architectural approaches that we're
taking to solve these problems you have
a lot of context and the job of an
anchor is to share that context it is to
drive that down into the rest of the dev
team and to groom
a coming anchor because your goal is to
be able to move between teams and bring
your ideas to other groups so you're
constantly
helping others
achieve that anchor status so that you
can move on and do other other bits of
work which increases your skill set
increases your purview more visibility
but the point is is i've structured in
effect that particular job set
to be more empathetic to me more sharing
and the incentives align to that so i
want to reduce silos this is more
balanced team style work everybody is
there working on the backlog they
understand the pluses and minuses of all
the features they understand the user
stories these are all discussed together
uh with the pm and maybe the designer
but the idea is that i have a real open
format for sharing
understanding maybe i'm even bringing
engineers into user interviews because i
want them to hear firsthand
what the users are saying etc so think
of it that way this is a more empathetic
setup
if i start looking at a more of a
sociopathic or a more competitive this
is where we get into sort of market
forces
in a law firm as an example and you're
competing for a partner
it's not it really
stratifies against individual excellence
or in in a developable developer circle
it might be more technical excellence
you're going to publish more patents
than somebody else you're looking for
awards you're looking for scope of
responsibility
um it's it's more of what i would call
hero ball to a certain extent
now often we want to drive and this is
why i say that there's no real cut and
drive between these different outcomes
that we're shooting for
because in some cases i want to have
strong empathy but i still want you to
strive for excellence in your skill set
so that maybe you stand a little bit
apart from you're always looking to
differentiate you're always looking to
become better at what you do that's the
meritocracy i i don't necessarily want
to do away with meritocracy because it
helps in terms of the competence of the
whole team it gives people things to
sort of strive for
but i don't want too much sociopathy
because then i end up stepping on other
other folks in order to get what i want
out of the out of the deal
and so i'm i may be looking at a bit of
a blend and we'll talk about some of the
trade-offs as we go forward
but typically this is going to breed
more toughness in individuals a lot of
times you'll see this in sales orgs
will have more individual excellence
increased toughness it's really about
winners and losers
if you see somebody that that doesn't
make the cut you're you're not
necessarily super concerned with it in
in this type of a structure and so this
these are incentives that i would sort
of categorize a little bit more into the
sociopathy sort of realm
and then finally in the psychopathy
realm
very siloed uh information is need to
know basis
and so in these types of scenarios
people who are looking to manipulate
flex that psychopathy sort of bent that
they have where they're looking to play
the game it's a dog eat dog world i'm
gonna play the game it's highly
political
highly charged conversations
people are talking behind people's backs
very matrixed organization a lot of
strong top down command and control when
there's very strong top down command and
control
this leads lends itself to
some of those psychopathic personality
traits folks that really want to try to
climb that ladder and manipulate and
cajole and maneuver in order to achieve
those higher and higher uh positions and
so a lot of times we're talking about
like a hardened hierarchy
it gets very politicized
a lot of backstabby type stuff a lot of
high pressure meetings
so these are kind of the different
environments that we're talking about
and kind of the incentives that begin to
drive
those types of personality traits to
excel so when i talk about as we look at
our overarching cultures and what we're
trying to call forth
we want to structure the teams we want
to structure information sharing the
tools that we use to collaborate we want
those to align to the the style of
culture that we want to that we want to
call forth
i think a lot of organizations actually
err on the side of going overly
empathetic
and and we don't end up with quite as
much competence out of the organization
maybe as we want so we need to think in
terms of like yes i want to have very
very strong empathy
lots of wide open balance teams lots of
information sharing i'm not looking for
that necessarily a whole lot of that
psychopathic
uh incentive
but i also want to have some things in
place
you know career progressions etc that
call for people to say look if you want
more here's here's how you can go to get
more
uh but a lot of the measures that we
want to put in place are going to be
those sharing empathetic measures uh to
look towards success
now the the way that we organize the
teams and the way that we work will also
introduce some of those incentives and
so just as a quick example
one of the reasons why we moved to
devops and things like test driven
design
was actually to bring people like
operations and the testing group
more in line with production of value
so if i look at a typical waterfall sort
of workflow
the uh operations team is incented to
prevent change and the reason they're
incented to prevent change is they're
measured by up time
mean time to resolution so they don't
want they do not want to you know
create
or deal with a lot of bugs and the best
way to reduce
the possibility of failure is to
maintain a static
uh operational environment if they can
and so they're at complete odds with the
dev team who is trying and they are
they're incented and paid and bonused
and et cetera on delivering code as fast
as possible or we could call it
introducing change as quickly as
possible so one team is introducing
change as quickly as possible another
team is there to prevent change
change from taking place another team
might be
quality assurance if i'm not finding
bugs if i'm not sending you back to the
lab to keep working on your code i'm not
sure what value i'm bringing so i'm sort
of incented to stop the role into
production by finding bugs and proving
my value to the organization
these incentives in a typical waterfall
sort of
layout
drive us to be at cross purposes with
each other it causes us to at least be
somewhat sociopathic to the other team i
don't really care what this does to the
developers bonuses because it's my job
to catch the bug and send you back to
back to formula
you know go back and rework this go
rework it again until until it looks
clean that's my job that's what i'm
supposed to do and so those would be
more in that kind of sociopathic
incentives now we try to drive a lot of
that out through ticketing systems and
automation and things like that which
we'll get into a little bit further to
reduce the sting if you will of the
counter incentives that we've introduced
into the
development plans
and this is why devops becomes very
interesting
build it you build it you run it kind of
mantra that we would hear out of
somebody like netflix and then moving
testing into the development
organization to where when i bring down
a story off the backlog maybe i write my
test harness first and then i write my
code to meet the test harness
this way
automated testing quality controls are
baked into what i'm doing from a devops
standpoint and these teams become more
balanced teams where that testing skill
set is present on the core bonus team
that operational talent is also embedded
in that in that team and we'll talk a
little bit about how that can become
overwhelming at scale and so we have to
think about ways to mitigate that
so what does this have to do with
platforms well we have to determine what
it is that we want as an organization do
we want innovation
if we want innovation we're going to
have much more open dynamic teams and
power down to the dev teams now not a
lot of companies will say they want
innovation and then they get a little
bit i had a really good friend of mine i
was talking to who said i'm building a
team of leaders and i'm frustrated
because on conference calls they're
pushing back on the strategy and i said
well then you don't want leaders right
you you want followers you want people
who will deliver against the timeline
so am i looking for innovation or am i
looking for delivery against a timeline
because sometimes those are going to be
opposed to each other and i'm going to
build or i'm going to optimize for one
or the other
if i'm looking for innovation i'm going
to empower them to question my decisions
if i'm the executive leader
and i want them to question my decisions
because if you really value what we're
doing as a business you're going to tell
me when my ideas are terrible
and as an executive leader i'm removed
enough from the details that i have to
trust that they're closer to the problem
often than i am
where i would issue a correction if i'm
the executive leader
is strategically that's not the
direction the product is going right
you're out of sync with where
we're running to the white space these
are the areas that we need to be playing
in these clouds at this scale and so on
so as long as you're within these
parameters right of the strategic vision
then be creative right build something
new
if if the the feature set that we
suggested in the last conference call
doesn't meet muster with customers we
have to make a determination of whether
it's more important to err on the side
of the strategic outcome versus the the
near-term results for an individual user
but these are things that we get into as
we're trying to drive innovation i
expect people to push back against me
uh if i am the leader and i'm taking
this from a leadership perspective if
i'm the leader and i
really have a committed set of outcomes
that we've already told the street that
we're going to go deliver
i'm not looking for as many leaders
right i'm not looking for as many people
to kick back against the feature set i'm
looking for delivery and i'm just the
reason i'm i want us to be clear up
front is it's going to make us happier
with what gets delivered it's going to
make us happier and the role that we're
driving and we'll hire the right people
for the right outcomes
i'm going to get real solid pro project
management teams
and
maybe i'll outsource some of the
development but i'm saying here here's
the features and these are the dates and
times in which i need them to be
delivered
now i i think a lot of us really favor
the innovation piece if we're really
going to respond in this digital age
we're going to need to be able to turn
experiments over very very quickly
some of what i've seen emerge from the
clouds is is very interesting and very
heavy weight in terms of what i would
consider cognitive load
uh there was one blog
that you know i want
one of the clouds published that was
saying you know devops isn't enough it
needs to be devsecops and and even
that's not enough it needs to be devsec
finn ops and devsec biz ops and
and we just keep adding acronyms to that
because we're forcing all of the
company's problems on individual
balanced teams to deal with all of that
well you basically built a company from
the ground up and that's a ton of
cognitive load and this networking
diagram
you know it's just basically
illustrative of the fact that your hum
the human mind can't you can't fathom
all of the various complexity and so
what i'm looking to do is empower
developers to focus in on the business
problem that they need to solve and not
necessarily every conceivable problem
that the problem that they're solving
could cause in any other system right i
i want to find a way to encapsulate
their work and automate as much as i can
around them so they can focus on the
things that are truly differentiating
and so
i'm really looking to and this is kind
of one of those things that we can talk
about as it comes to
the type of culture that we're building
if we have people who are hands on
keyboard making discrete changes to
discrete systems
there's a significant opportunity for a
lot of these things to go uh without
being in without introspection
right somebody can go and get on a cloud
ui make a few changes to the
infrastructure when it comes to things
like audit or understanding what changes
were introduced or even understanding
that the additional complexity or risk
that was introduced
very very difficult for me to handle and
so if we're in more if we're trying to
encourage more of a an empathetic open
sharing we're all trying to hit all of
our best practices kind of environment i
may want to move more towards
intent-driven approaches where i declare
what i want to see happen
i pass it through governance checks i'm
collaborating with security and testing
and so on i want to pass it through all
of that in a very clean and audible
auditable fashion because we're all on
the same team you need to see all the
changes that i'm introducing i need to
see the changes that your policies are
having on the code that i'm looking to
roll out
so how do i get to where i'm
collaborative i'm declarative there's no
hiding and again if i'm if i'm combating
that psychopathy sort of mindset they
there needs to be no opportunity to hide
the where where changes are happening
off book or one team is changing
something off in the corner and
everybody else in the organization is
having to respond to it which you see a
lot with sort of the hero ball kind of
approach where
a glorified architect or a tech lead has
the ability to break all of the
processes and then everybody else is
subsequently less performant because
they have to respond to the changes that
are happening
out of the normal orchestration so if
everybody can follow this the the
pattern of declaring what they want to
see happen
vetting that declaration and then
hitting system
then i'm able to move closer to a system
of coordination
right everything is very open the
policies that get published from grc are
available for me to see as i'm passing
my work through i'm getting immediate
feedback rather than six months later
after a after an audit i get a i get a
dump of all the libraries that are out
of out of step or whatever that i have
to address and i'm doing support on
something that maybe isn't even into
production yet
so these types of things i don't want to
i don't want to hate another team
because they're throwing bricks at my
work what i want to have is i want to
have this centralized system
that i can pass my work through and i
can get immediate feedback from the
teams that i'm tasked with collaborating
with and all of it is above board we can
see what everybody needs
and and part of this is there's really
this kind of myth that we're going to
have these unicorn style developer
operators that know everything about
everything
it's just not possible you know i was
out i was on
i think it was the aws
marketplace and there were some 170
pages of networking controls that the
very idea that i would even know what to
do with 170 networking controls alone
and that's not getting into
the container topologies and ingresses
on you know on the kubernetes clusters
and so on if i had to understand all of
it end to end and apply exactly the best
pieces i i'm just
there's not enough time in the day week
year month lifetime to learn everything
that's happening in the cloud so we sort
of have to put away this idea of the
unicorn and get into and understand that
yes we are going to have specialized
labor i don't want to go all the way
back to itsm and waterfall where i'm
passing tickets between all these teams
i may be doing that for a while but my
goal is to
re-skill them towards
automation and service and openness and
sharing with the other teams through
systems of coordination
and the way that this might look and
i'll and i'll wrap
uh wrap right here is i i would have the
developers perhaps abstracted
from a lot of the downstream automation
via you know a developer platform and so
i give them
a bit of a working environment which is
acting a bit as a facade for a lot of
the complexity that's happening
downstream
but all of that other complexity while
it's still going to exist is being
handled by multiple teams so i'm not
having this huge cognitive load where
the core balance team has to know
everything about everything at all times
it's good that they have a wider purview
and context because they're going to
write better code by doing so so i don't
want to take all of that pressure off
them but i do want to take things like
compliance and governance and you know
maybe i'm a pci shop or i'm dealing with
a nist cyber security framework i would
prefer that you inherit a lot of these
things so that you don't have to become
a world breaking expert in every
conceivable
you know security standard that we might
have to meet for federal audit i'd like
those to be inherited and so this gives
you a little bit of a sense of a
workflow of provisioning of
infrastructure
behind the scenes here we could be doing
things like assigning identity managing
credentials
role role-based authentication so that i
know what developers can do what they
can ask for they're not going to be able
to touch the networking controls but
they can create or size their their you
know development environments
maybe manage some aspects of the
kubernetes clusters and so on
the idea though is i want to make sure
that they're focused on things that are
value adding at the application tier so
that they're building business logic and
releasing on a consistent basis
especially around features that are
making a difference for our end users
they're spending all their time wrapped
up in
mutual tls
uh and and trying to work it across a
heterogeneous environment where they're
using kind of some istio and then
bridging over into other technologies
uh where their workloads go a little bit
heterogeneous
i'm not sure i i feel like that may end
up being wasted effort or
or too much spinning on something that
is not necessarily differentiating
having said that i'll just leave it
there i
thank you so much for the time
uh the the whole point that i was
getting at here is is psychopathy
thrives where i have teams that are at
odds with each other and if i'm really
looking to build a culture
of inclusivity where where different
ideas are welcome and we're not afraid
of having our ideas challenged
it's going to be an environment that's
going to be much more open
collaborative but not so cognitively
overloaded
that nobody can move because we're
trying to understand every bit and piece
of technology everywhere specialize
share
build your incentives out so that we're
making sure that people are incented
to enable others and make others
successful with that i thank you very
much for your time and i hope you have a
great rest of the conference
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