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by Spivak 1100 days ago
Because you're not talking about that thing that ops people are talking about. We build reliable systems. You're talking about reliable software. Ops people come from the perspective that all software is inherently unreliable including your app, especially your app and have to work within those constraints.

Terraform and Ansible look like gyroscopes compared to the build process of any modern software stack. We offered our dev teams a whole ass pizza party every time they had 10 green builds (on main) in a row. In three years we've paid it out once.
2 comments
hinkley 1100 days ago
The operational tools should be the most stable bits and instead they are janky as fuck and I’ve spent too much of my career smacking victim-blaming tennis balls back over the net. If you look at what Ansible replaces it’s a wonder production ever worked at all. If you have to baby your automation it’s not automation.

Ops people are not used to thinking in boundary conditions. Hell, devs forget half the time. That’s part of why people wanted to merge them in the first place. Get the right sorts of cynicism together in a room and make me something with a big green button an idiot can push while everyone is in a meeting.

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thezilch 1100 days ago
Oh boy, a whole pizza!
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hinkley 1100 days ago
Bad for both vegans and gluten intolerant people. Also pizza parties are sooo 2006.

Nothing demotivates people like a half assed reward. If you want something never to get done, offer a bad carrot. If you want only one thing to get done and nothing ever again, offer a good reward but then make the recipient fight you to get it. I thought pizza parties were the worst, and then I got an award that was announced but not delivered, and spent almost eight hours over the next month poking people to give me my goddamned prize. It became a second job and at the end I ended up resenting the entire experience.

Later at another job when we in theory had a generous reimbursement process that was actually a ton of red tape, I had flashbacks to that incident.

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Spivak 1100 days ago
No, a full on everyone take the afternoon off catered food drinks to watch movies and play video games in our offices's bar paid for by the ops team personally.

Also don't assume we don't know our coworkers, when they first got to 8 in a row the slack channel looked like the Twitch chat of a popular streamer.

We have the buy-in from management that if it happens every day then it happens every day.

We are planning to change up the food if it ever happens again, pizza party is just a good title

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