Principles of Technology Leadership | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2017

No discussion of company values would be complete without a link to Bryan Cantrill’s classic talk, “Principles of Technology Leadership”. ▶ this video Uber once had a stated company value of “Always be hustling”. Really.

I love Bryan Cantrill for being that classy bad-ass engineer with so much integrity. His talk on companies principles is a must-watch: ▶ this video

Before we get to the list: if you only watch one talk of mine, please watch Principles of Technology Leadership (slides) presented at Monktoberfest 2017. This is the only talk that I have asked family and friends to watch, as it represents my truest self — or what I aspire that self to be, anyway. Let me just say, this is an extremely good talk[1]. Very uplifting and depressing at different times. It goes through serious turns, and very funny periods. Ultimately though, the message is very important and worth hearing. I highly recommend it. 1: ▶ this video

Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle "Leadership Principles" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: ▶ this video Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like "Be right a lot" or "Frugality." Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.

There's a great talk by Brian Cantrill about Leadership principles [0] which also includes a discussion of the Amazon Leadership principles. He argues that Amazon's leadership principles actually aren't helpful and don't make much sense and I tend to agree. [0] ▶ this video (The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)

This subject and the utter vagueness of the values presented here require me to bring up Bryan Cantrill's talk, 'Principles of Technology Leadership'.[1] He gives Amazon a lambasting over their core principles, and Uber even moreso. It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague enough. [1] ▶ this video

Is the Key:Values team (nice choice of name by the way!) familiar with Bryan Cantrill's talk on 'Principles of Technology Leadership'? ▶ this video It seems to resonate pretty closely with what you're building, so if it helps align or educate anyone (candidates, recruiters, or the team) that'd be neat. Edit: FWIW, the talk uses the term 'principle' to indicate what your site calls a 'value'; in practice I've seen tech companies talk about their 'core values' and so I think yours is very valid.

> Supposedly, every employee should be guided by the leadership principles during their day-to-day routine. The principles actually make a lot of sense, when used appropriately. As time went, I discovered that the most common application of the principles was to creatively find a leadership principle that best supports the situation. Bryan Cantrill has a sometimes hilarious takedown of Amazon's "leadership principles" here, which definitely corroborates this blog post: ▶ this video

Related talk by Bryan Cantrill (Principles of Technology Leadership) Watch the whole video, it's good! ▶ this video

I am glad to see that many people are being correcting you, but just to put a sharp point on it: I am using that metaphor to condemn Ellison, not to condone or accept him. Unfortunately, since that talk in 2011, what was an aberration (albeit a broadly unspoken one) has since -- tragically -- become the norm. I refuse to accept this, however: I will continue to speak my truth about the moral decay in tech, and why we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.[0][1][2][3][4] And I obviously agree with your indignation that poor corporate behavior should not be the status quo! [0] Principles of Technology Leadership , ▶ this video (2017) [1] Andreessen's Corollary: Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering , link (2019) [2] (Anti-)application Video for YC120 , link (2019) [3] Coming Of Age , link (2022) [4] Intelligence is not Enough , link (2023)

I think I would point you instead to my beliefs about principles[0], values[1], and (because you are young), the promise and peril of youth[2]. [0] ▶ this video [1] link [2] link

The problem is that they are bromides and claptrap, not principles. There is an important distinction to be made here between principles and values, which they are not making in part because Amazon themselves do not understand the difference.[0] Having a community define its values is important[1], but this is emphatically not the way to do it -- and these are not it besides. [0] ▶ this video [1] link