Best and Worst Ways to Incentivize Teams

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Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Catchpoint. Look, 80 percent of performance and availability issues don’t occur within your application code in your data center itself. It occurs well outside those boundaries, so it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening. What Catchpoint does is makes it easier for enterprises to detect, identify, and of course, validate how reachable their application is, and of course, how happy their users are. It helps you get visibility into reachability, availability, performance, reliability, and of course, absorbency, because we’ll throw that one in, too. And it’s used by a bunch of interesting companies you may have heard of, like, you know, Google, Verizon, Oracle—but don’t hold that against them—and many more. To learn more, visit www.catchpoint.com, and tell them Corey sent you; wait for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I’m Pete Cheslock. I'm still here; Corey is still not. I'm sorry. But don't worry, I'm here again with Jesse DeRose. Welcome back yet again, Jesse.

Jesse: Thank you for having me back. I have to say for all our listeners, I'm sorry I have not watched the entire Step Up trilogy and all the other breakdancing movies we talked about last time. It is still on my todo list. But fear not, it will happen. We will talk about this again.

Pete: Well, that actually brings a really good point, which is we need to make a correction from our last podcast. We talked about how Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo was the sequel for Breakin’, and I had incorrectly thought that Breakin’—the first one—also had ‘Electric Boogaloo’ in the name. It turns out I lack the ability to read an article on Wikipedia. There was a very carefully placed period in that sentence which, as our listeners probably know, delineates one sentence from another. So, no: Breakin' one, it was just called Breakin’. It was not Breakin’: Electric Boogaloo. I’m—just have no ability to read anything on Wikipedia, apparently.

Jesse: I still feel like this is a missed opportunity for the first one in the franchise to be Breakin’: Electric Boogalone.

Pete: [laughs]. Almost as bad as Electric Boogalee, but—

Jesse: It's up there.

Pete: —that's for another podcast. Anyway, we are talking today, not about breakdancing movies from the 1980s, we are actually talking about a little bit of a different change in our normal conversation, not necessarily around Amazon-specific technologies, but around fostering change within an organization, and some of the worst ways that we have seen change kind of implemented into an organization. Fostering change, it's important in any organization in general—and maybe we're a little biased; we spend so much of our time dealing with cost savings and cost optimization, but it really is so much more important when you deal with over-reaching cost optimization and, kind of, management strategy within a company.

Jesse: Yeah, I feel like there's this massive disconnect between a lot of companies, where leadership has this really, really heavy incentive—or really, really heavy goal to better understand and manage cloud costs, and the individual contributors or the underlying engineering teams just don't have the same focus. And that's not to say that they don't care about costs, so much as maybe they have other roadmap items that they're working on or other tasks that have been prioritized before cost optimization projects. So, there really seems to be this disconnect to think about cost optimization more thoroughly throughout all levels of an organization. And it ultimately makes us think about how do you go about making that change because it seems like the best way to instill the importance of cloud cost optimization and management across a company is by instilling it in the company's culture. So, today, I really want to focus on what are some of the ways that we can get the entire company to care about cost optimization and management, the same way that leadership might care about cost optimization and management. Or alternatively, if this is an individual contributor that cares, how they can get the rest of the company to care about these things and vice versa.

Pete: Yeah, that's a really good point. And we deal with a whole swath of different companies and different people at those companies, where it's kind of amazing to see how some people just inherently really care about what's being spent. And it could be for various reasons. Maybe these are people that may not have any connection to the bill or paying the bill, but more just—they just—I mean, myself, I am this person. I just hate waste. I hate waste in all parts of my life, but I really hate waste in my Amazon bill because finding out that I didn't have to spend $10,000 last month on all of those API list requests on S3 due to that bug, it just—it cuts up my soul.

Jesse: And it's really rare to find people in any organization, whether it's a client that we're working with or an organization that you work in, that are super, super invested in that kind of cost optimization work. But when you find them—I was working with one recently at one of our clients who described themselves as a super nerd about cost optimization work. And that's perfect. That's what we want. We want somebody who nerds out over this stuff, and really passionately cares about, what's it going to cost for us to make changes?

Pete: Yeah. I mean, we are two people who have focused our careers on caring about how much people spend on their bill. We're cost nerds. It's fine. It's okay to say it.

Jesse: I accept this term. I accept.

Pete: [laughs]. So, before we get to some of the good ways that we've seen to get people to care about this stuff, we want to talk about some of the worst practices we've seen. And this is broader than just cost management. This really is, what are some of the worst ways that we have been a part of seeing a company just try to affect change, whether you're a startup that's trying to pivot to the next thing, make it to the next funding round; or maybe you're an enterprise and you're just trying to go digitally native, cloud-native, multi-cloud, or something like that. The technology is not your challenge. It's not the technology is the reason why you're not going to accomplish your goal. It's always going to be the people and getting them to care about it. So, what are some ways, Jessie, that you've seen that have been particularly grinding to you?

Jesse: Yeah, if we're going to talk about incentivizing practices, I think that the big one that we need to talk about is gamifying the system where the leadership or management sets some kind of goal to say, “We want all of our IT team’s support tickets to be closed within 48 hours.” So, that's a great goal to set; that's a lovely SLA goal to work towards, but if you just set that goal blanketly, for your team, they're going to gamify the system hard. They are going to end up closing tickets as soon as they send a response, rather than waiting for the issue to be resolved or not. I've experienced this multiple times, and it driv...