Principles of Technology Leadership

Bryan Cantrill talks principles and their value. His analogy to the United States constitution was quite inspiring — things we may not be living up to, but we aspire to.

Later on in the talk Bryan (a former employee at Sun) quotes Scott McNealy (former CEO at Sun) who is reflecting on his time at the company:

Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally […] I never had to hide the newspaper from my children.

Bryan’s reflection:

Wow! What a way to measure yourself. [That you can say] “No matter what happened, I can hold my chin high with my children. I did the right thing. Whether I succeeded or failed, I did what I thought was right. I was true to my integrity, my decency, my honesty. I didn’t lie. I didn’t cheat.” We need that now. We really need that now.

This was a talk from 2017!

Later Bryan is talking about the post-Google, post-Facebook services companies that have arisen — we’ll do your laundry, bring pizza to your door, etc. — and how they see themselves as disruptors, but they often rely on skirting (or deliberately violating) regulation and other social norms:

[these new companies] lack any inherited wisdom or humility, and by the way they view that as a strength. They are not burdened by the past.

But Bryan argues that just because software is eating the world doesn’t mean that societal rules and norms no longer apply.

Newsflash: What is right for software is not necessarily right for society.

His overacting point being: decency and integrity should be constraints on the problems we’re solving, not obstacles.