Corporate Hot Potato Is Destroying Your Organization

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all right folks time to head back on Monday evening leaving a little I started late leaving early um I had a couple of weird like scheduling things that kind of sucked for today but whatever it's part of uh what I need to expect to have happen when I'm driving to the office but cuz it's it happens if I'm at the office or not but um my my day was planned out to basically account for the fact that I have this meeting it's like 6:00 to 7: or something or 5:30 to 6:30 and uh so I said okay like I have a gap and instead of getting stuck at the office until like super late I'm supposed to live stream tonight too I said okay like I'm going to plan to duck out early cuz I have this Gap and then so I plan my day

around that I move some 101s and stuff around and had conflicting meetings like every and then some of the meetings today like that were overlapping that I was trying to work around they got cancelled and then this meeting in the evening got canceled again it's no one's fault I'm not I'm not blaming anyone it's going to happen but um just kind of funny so basically I had planned all of this stuff to accommodate for this and it got moved so when you're at home doesn't matter um but like when it's physical it's kind kind of like okay like you have to you have to physically plan to be in different places at different times so anyway that's fine I'm heading home now so it's a little bit uh little bit earlier than I expected but that's okay um but I wanted to talk about uh

something that I don't know if I've talked about this before I feel like in different different capacities I have um and I've heard someone call it like it's not not just for for big Tech or for corporations but they call it like corporate hot potato and uh I want it to kind of layer in a few different things going on here so oh it's funny this person has an erc20 license plate nerd it's very nice okay so the idea with corporate Hot Potato is just this idea of like it's not our team right so whether it's a bug or requests like anything it's just like we're busy it seems like it's outside of the peripherals of our team enough to for us to just like kind of delegate it away not our team we don't want to worry about it Go Go bother someone else

and it's not unique to Big Tech or corporations I just feel like it's probably more common right there's other teams that could have that responsibility go deal with it um sorry yeah like go have you go deal with it with them and it's not our problem and I'm not like I'm still not used to this kind of thing cuz I don't like it and I think that it doesn't ultimately help a business uh and I want to want to clarify this a little bit I think that it's important to make sure that a team isn't just taking on literally everything and then being pulled in a million different directions nothing's ever getting done because you're just being overwhelmed with random stuff um so I'm not suggesting oh man oh no oh no oh no this person they they thought that a lane was a turning

lane except it's a turning lane for literally the other direction of traffic they quickly realized I wish I could turn this camera around easily for you guys but okay so what was I saying before this person almost had the worst Driving Experience of their life okay yeah it like startups I feel that at least like startups that have a chance of being successful you have this um like approach to developing things where you're like we all need to work together as a common goal right let me back up cuz I remember what I was trying to say um you you can't just take on everything for a team that's what I was trying to get at was like you need to have some boundaries um but as long as it's like funneled through like product owners and management like people can prioritize effectively um it

becomes problematic when like no one's kind of going outside of their comfort zone a little bit um ever going to move over some Lanes sorry and as soon as it's like yeah we could do that and we could it really wouldn't be an issue but you're just kind of like trying to pawn it off on other teams like that's where it starts to get kind of crappy and ultimately I think what ends up getting missed when you're in big companies especially is like we're so focused on our own group's priorities that we're missing the big picture so if the business as a whole would be better off if your team focused on this even if it's not you know your number one priority based on within your group if the business would be better off should it be done probably but it's just it's like

way easier set than done I'm not trying to like minimize that but in startups going back to this part in startups I feel like at a successful startup you have this conversation a lot where people talk about wearing different hats and stuff like even as individuals people are focused on like this is the right thing to be doing right now it's not maybe not my job title it's not my normal responsibility it's got to get done and the same thing can happen within teams where you're like look it's not our team's exact Charter but like we understand that like this is going to help move some things along um or it's close enough to our Charter that it makes sense that we do it and you know you have some amount of flexibility kind of faked into things so yeah I think what I wanted

to talk about was this as a concept right so hopefully that framing makes sense now I think I've talked before about platform teams and I can't recall if you never watch my other videos wouldn't matter if I talked about it or not would it so with platform teams I think I really I don't have stats or anything and keep that in mind if you're listening to any of my content and unless I'm specifically bringing up stats I don't got them and I need to acknowledge that but what I've noticed from being on at least two platform teams and big Tech and from observing some others is that it can be like a pretty uh thankless Place working on a platform team because when things are working you don't have people coming around and being like oh thank you thank you so much awesome work it's

just like when things aren't working that's when you hear from everyone else right kind of kind of sucks but it's kind of the name of the game as a platform team now when there are issues with platform teams or sorry perceived issues let me start with that because I'm already assuming too much when someone perceives that there's an issue the first thing that they do generally is like well it seems like it's related to this platform let me just let me just give it to them right so to give you an example when I worked on a deployment team uh in M365 it was very common and and I I should clarify I don't blame people for doing this but it was very common that you would have like someone experiences an issue so some service um a machine deploys and then their service isn't

working or they're getting signals being like are services are losing availability or crashing or having weird Behavior and the first thing they do is they reach out to the deployment team because they're like out of it seems like out of nowhere our services are starting to have some issues and sometimes they don't even literally they don't correlate a deployment event to their te uh their systems or services not working they just say it's not I don't like this already this is a bit of a nightmare I have to move over a couple Lanes here and my Lane is usually the one that's not backed up but it is today oh no oh yeah solid red hopefully it's just a little bit up ahead and we're good so it's hard to drive and talk I don't know if you've noticed that but I'm I'm not doing

a good job today so what would happen is yeah literally sometimes teams would not even check if there was a deployment event they would just say our service isn't working and deployment please investigate so immediately what happens is for a lot of these platform teams and this example the deployment team the onus is now on the deployment team to go basically try and prove it's not deployment and I'm framing it that way on purpose because there's enough requests that come into the team where it's like like if you haven't even done your homework to prove its deployment it's on the deployment team so a lot of the time the deployment team and this happens for other platform teams the first thing they do is they say like well why do you think this is related to deployment right or like for us we're on a

route like I manage a part of a routing team now like why do you think that this is misrouted or didn't get routed like what makes you think that right so the team like the platform team is constantly being bombarded with hey like this this is broken like please look into it and because there are so many examples of this type of requests that come in without people doing their homework the first response is almost always because people haven't provided evidence is almost always Pro to us that this is the case like prove to us this is related to deployment prove to us that your stuff's not getting routed because people would just like to give you an example on the routing side people would say well we're getting this um we're getting the status code back we're getting a 500 back right we're getting

we're getting an authentication issue like so like can you tell us why it's not being routed properly and we have to go like like is the 500 coming back from this the service that you're that we routed you to as you requested cuz if so go go talk to them right like it's we got you where you needed to go you're just unhappy with the result of it so there's this constant thing with platform teams where again we're being bombarded with hey please look into this and unfortunately not a lot of homework goes into it but it like I think it almost perpetuates the problem the other way right so yeah we don't as platform teams we don't like when people are doing this to us of course because it's distracting without a doubt right so I get the side from being on platform teams

now for four years at Microsoft totally get it it sucks it's distracting but we almost over index the other way and if you think about it like when we go back to a partner that's reaching out to for help and we're like prove to us it's prove to us it's our problem what we're doing now is we're saying like you go do your homework and it makes sense like you should go do your homework cuz why did you think it was us in the first place and not some other team but I think what ends up getting missed is like so this is the Hot Potato thing right like it's not our problem like go deal with go figure it out it's someone it's like it's your problem until it's our problem um but I think what's happening a lot of the time is that

it's like a it's just an overall like lack of visibility understanding lack of tooling like I think that people are just like I am I am operating with the what I know um like I have a service I'm not an expert in routing and it seems like what we're seeing is the result of something routing related like it and it could be networking they don't know if it's like what layer it's in so they're kind of guessing what the best information they have so we get frustrated and we go like go figure it out and then come back but you know what sucks about that is like they don't know how to go solve it that's why they're asking you in the first place most of the time right people that have been around for a long time and they've they've dealt with this kind

of stuff yeah they they understand how to go navigate this how to go uh maybe look for the right tools or to ask the right questions to go do some of their homework that they know about they know that that's great but there are so many people that don't and it's really hard to blame them and I'm saying this as someone who you know works on platform teams and has to deal with these types of requests it's really hard to blame people if they just don't know so what I'm trying to try to encourage a little bit more is like okay look so when people come to us and they're like we think whether it was a deployment issue or we think it's a routing issue the on call Engineers or whoever is responding to the email or the the message on teams or whatever

the en call engineer is going to go take some steps right they're going to go try to prove like is this this isn't us right like let's go prove that so like what are what steps are you taking like how are you as a on call like how are you proving that it is or is not us okay and from there do our partners have that same luxury because if they don't how would you ever expect that they would know how to answer this question so what I am trying to encourage more is like think about these instead of just getting frustrated from the request it's like how can you help the other people next time and it's going to take a long time it's going to take a long time but how can you help people for the next time have the resources they

need to answer this question before it comes to us nice we made it over I think there's an accident way back there and it's pretty light on the highway so I mean that's not good news if that's the case but it made getting over Lanes easy so yeah this is something I'm trying to encourage more and I'm trying to I'm not going to win the war on corporate Hot Potato but I'm I when I'm in these conversations at least I want to start trying to influence people's perspective on it which is look I get that it's frustrating and I know because I've lived with it for about 4 years now so I get it but like this kind of like a common thing that I talk about right you can and I'm bad at it so I'm not trying to be on a pedestal here

but we can't control everything right so instead of just being frustrated with things are outside of your control like what can we do you can't stop someone from reaching out to your team and saying hey can you help me you can't stop them from doing that so so don't be frustrated about that you can't be frustrated if they don't know like that's what are you going to take the time to go teach them like don't be frustrated about it or at least acknowledge where the frustration is coming from again I'm not good at this so acknowledge it don't ignore it and then try to move on from it and then think about what you can do because if you can't do anything then go you know invest your energy into something else that you can control but I think in in these circumstances I think

there is something we can do and that is looking at what tooling what dashboards what resources and information we have within our team that we are using to prove this stuff and put it in front of the other teams early so to give you an example it's not it's not quite the same thing but um on the deployment team people want to know like um like if if they had no visibility into where builds were and and different versions of things constantly they would have to ask the deployment team like Hey where's this at like I need to know and deployment has all the tools to know that so what do they do they built dashboards as a partner you can go check out this dashboard you can see a across all of the data centers where there's versions of things you know what's up

with it so that's a huge help it's a huge help of course but beyond that one of the most popular questions to a deployment team is when should we expect that this build will be in a certain spot makes sense okay so now they have visibility into where the versions are but they don't have an idea of pace so then the deployment team they hear this problem enough and they go okay great like we hear you now there's going to be things that are outside of the deployment team's control if a machine is literally broken it can't be deployed so like yeah that's going to that's going to be a machine that's not getting updates sorry but we can't do it anything about it on deployment I mean I'm I'm simplifying things here for the record but so deployment team is able to start introducing

things like etas for the rate of deployment so they can say here's the rate that we are deploying things so we should be able to project when you you should expect updates now is it a perfect science like absolutely not because something could come up and interrupt deployment slow things down but we can do some type of forecasting to give you a better idea and that's a huge help because now instead of people coming to the deployment team and saying hey deployment team when is this going to be ready when should I expect this amount of saturation now the deployment team can just say here's a dashboard so it's a in my opinion it's about giving teams the um the resource that's the best way to put it I think is resources give them CU if it's education if it's tools if it's dashboards give

other teams resources and they don't have to be the same things that you're using internally cuz maybe the the domain expertise is uh you can't expect them to have but give them the resources that they can leverage to answer some of these questions so they don't have to bother your team so that they can say look I use the these resources and they do suggest this is a deployment or is a routing issue is a network issue um and then that way you're you're kind of short circuiting some of these other conversations where you're like this is frustrating for our team to deal with um so this is something I'm trying to encourage a little bit more but this is kind of like one one aspect of this corporate Hot Potato thing um specifically around like incidents and things like that help us investigate this

problem but it's very common and and it is frustrating and I'm not I'm not speaking about this as in like a this is just me personally I feel frustrated by this I literally see other people getting frustrated by this all the time I see it for the people asking for help because they're like I don't know what to do I just need help we're we're blocked we have an issue and I see the frustration from the people that are answering the questions because they're like oh my God no one even bothered to go check no one bothered to do their homework so I see it from both sides um now a little call out cuz people I don't think like to acknowledge like how important soft skills and stuff are for software engineering this is literally what we call a communication problem and it's not

solved directly by writing lead code so um you need to be thinking about this as a skill this is literally something that can be improved by better communication so I think the I think that this one is um I don't want to say more easily solved because I don't think even what I'm proposing is a solution I think it's just a step in the right direction so I think this one is more easily improved maybe um by doing what I'm suggesting which is like how can you start providing the resources to partner teams the one version of this that I think is not as easily solved is like this like whose responsibility is it kind of thing I don't have a I don't even know where to start with this one because it's like I I actually I had this conversation recently uh with a

friend and there's some things that we've talked about from like startup life where it's it's hard to say like you either have it or you don't cuz I don't think that we necessarily believe in that um it's not like like I think everyone can change uh even for like soft skills and things like that personality things but I think it's hard in this case so the idea here is like some and we've we've observed this which is why it's uh we have again it's not evidence like stats but anecdotally we've seen that some people let's take startups for example right some people join startups and when you're working with them they have that sense of Pride that sense of ownership like they're like hell yeah we know that we got to get stuff done because it's important for the business like yeah it's outside of

our team's boundaries maybe that's not the Hat I wear but like I'm here to help make sure we can get this thing done because I acknowledge it's important I understand why and like ultimately I want this thing to succeed like it's bigger than me and it's bigger than just our immediate team and some people seem to grasp this very easily and other people really resist it really really resist it like it's like it's number one that's not my job description number two that's not what our team does and number three like basically if the business needs this so badly it just seems like they've Mis prioritize things then so like I'm frustrated by it and I don't want to do it I'm exaggerating a little bit here right but it seems like there's a lot of people in this Camp as well and I don't

know I think I'm I'm definitely in the former category where I'm like hey like if this is what's most important then let's talk about what other things aren't as important that we go park right like let's zoom out from just our own responsibility zoom out from just our team if this is truly what's most important let's get it done now where this has gotten me into a gotten me into I don't want to say trouble uh not like I was being scolded but I'll say trouble um is that if you over index into this for too long what happens is that your team can start to lose their Identity or their Charter okay so what I mean by that is like say you have a team that's respons responsible for I'm just making things up um metrics and observability on services in general like you're

making a platform for metrics and observability okay and your teams focus on this they have their Charter that's like we want to make sure that we can enable all of these services to have this degree of observability and like dashboards and things like that great okay so your team understands the charter the values of the team awesome and then you have someone like me that's going okay I get it but this other thing for the business came up that's critical and when we look across the board um I'm just again making this up security and performance are the two most critical things and on the observability team since we're in this example we're not contributing to those things there's actually this opportunity where we could be helping out for those two things that are more critical and again from my belief I would say well

we should pivot from a business perspective if we're not helping deliver that value that is like the most important thing we should pivot and I will stand by that like I think that makes sense to me but I think like I said where it gets me into trouble is like if we don't return back to normaly then it's really hard to keep a team like understanding what the heck we're responsible for because it's like we have this team we said we're responsible for metrics and observability okay but the last year of work we haven't done that right so so what is our team even for and it's interesting because when I've had conversations with people on teams where this has happened every time that this has happened because it's happened more than once every time people aren't mad they're not mad about the work they're

doing because I think what's happened is that they've understood the value right it's been communicated they're like we get it we agree this is most important makes sense so they're not mad but they're confused and they start to question and I and I feel like rightfully so I'm not saying like it's wrong of them to do so I think it's totally fair where they're going like well what is our team now like are we are we changing what our team is or is this like a new responsibility we're permanently supposed to have like genuinely what's up so I think some of my experience in the past like I I wrote about this recently in a newsletter where and I I totally even forgot that I managed a team literally called The Expendables and the way that our team operated was I'm laughing because it's the

the name's kind of funny but um our team worked together as a close group and we would basically get dropped into different areas of the code base and different parts of the product to go do stuff that like seemed like it was impossible or no one wanted to do it and like a lot of the time we didn't want to do it either but we knew we could get it done we knew we could so we were a small team called The Expendables and it was just like this is the business has deemed that this is the most valuable thing to get done and it's not or and sure sorry let me rephrase that our work wasn't necessarily the highest value out of the company but the businesses deem this area is important to get prioritize and we can't seem to find the resources to

prioritize it like we're basically trying to solve the corporate Hot Potato thing right everyone's saying oh not our team we're not responsible for that or we're too busy with this other stuff but the business as a whole is going yeah but like we really really really need people on this and that's where they would drop us in and go look like no one else is able to go do it because either they're saying it's infeasible or they can't prioritize it or no one seems to own it so like can you guys go do it and we did and it was frustrating but it worked like it was effective it was frustrating because you're constantly you're constantly being brought into like an environment an interaction with a team where they might not be receptive to you being there or they have their own patterns their own

practices their own their own ways of doing things which is totally fine right it's not for us to to say no but now we're being put into their code base and going give you an example like we'd go make changes to go introduce a feature so like we have to make sure we're working within their architectural boundaries and things like that but we go introduce a feature and then like we would break some other feature in their code and then they'd be mad they'd be pissed off at us and like hey you guys like you're just coming in here like messing things up and we would be like well we only added this thing like it's completely unrelated to this area of code you're talking about and well no no no it's actually like you you didn't see but it's actually we reused this here

it's connected and then we're going okay well like how would we ever know that and like you guys maybe you reviewed our code and stuff too like how what's going on like why why so hostile right like we get it's frustrating your stuff broke but what the heck and honestly at one point in time this this literally was a forcing function where we started writing uh more tests and tests in different ways so that people would never be blaming us and we would go write test on our feature because what would happen in in this example that I was just explaining is that people would go revert our change or say they would go try and fix it and then they would just break our stuff so their scenario would get fixed and ours would be broken so we were literally just going like every

week or every two weeks like not making progress forward because we were always just undoing each other's stuff so we said okay screw that we're putting tests in and like basically we're we're giving you code that tells what the expected behavior is supposed to be so when you go to undo our stuff because it happened to break your your your scenario you're going to quickly know if you broke our scenario before we have to yell at you for it and we started doing that and yeah we kept breaking their stuff but they weren't breaking our stuff anymore and then we started to say hey you know what helps you see what we're doing here you're not breaking our stuff anymore it's because you already know if it's broken you already know if it's broken before you go push it through so like we're help we're

writing tests to help you we put the tests in you're going to know when you break our stuff if you do the same thing if you do the same thing then we'll be breaking your stuff a lot less often because we'll know there's tests that tell us we broke the behavior so anyway it was a forcing function and it helped us a lot but going back to the corporate Hot Potato thing like I think it's a I I don't have a solution for this because I think sometimes it's about like truly what people prioritize and if you if you're in teams where there's a big priority around like protecting the team sort of from a overall business perspective being complacent with like this is what the team does and protect what that is at all costs like I don't like the idea bothers me a

lot but uh I think if you have a lot of teams like that like good luck solving the the corporate Hot Potato thing you're constantly going to have teams going like we see that you have a challenge here or you need some help with something you need help getting something delivered but like it's literally just not our problem because our problem is defined by this Charter that we have and if your thing doesn't fit within that like tough luck like go find someone else to bother I just think that that literally causes stagnation right because you have real scenarios that come up with real business value and people are like well I just can't progress because teams aren't bought into helping me do it so I'm not a yeah like it's a it's a thing that happens and uh I don't know if you're watching

this if you've made it this far in the Vlog if this has happened to you it' be really cool to hear your perspectives on like do you see this happen or are you like Nick this is all bull crap you're making it all up like tell me I don't think it's made up but I'd be curious to hear your uh your experiences with it have you have you had scenarios where you've had other teams understand like hey we get that this isn't like maybe not your core priority but this would be a really helpful thing for the business or you totally against that are you of the of the mindset too where you're like shelter the team at all costs curious i' be curious how you have found that been like successful because my goal is is not to and everything I talk about I'm

not trying to tell you like there's only one right way to do things right these are the things that I'm thinking about like the challenges I'm trying to solve and if you've had success in ways that are either aligned with me or completely different then I want to hear them right I'm not uh I'm not the kind of person that just likes to I don't like debating if your perspective is different like that that's cool that you have a different perspective but what doesn't work for me is when people are just like no like your perspective is like outright wrong um there's a couple things where I have opinions like that where I'm like your perspectives out right wrong um but it's mostly when people take an absolute stance on things so if you're like my perspective is is X and it's so far to

one end of of a spectrum either way that you're like this is the only way it can be I'm like well I think that almost by definition has to be wrong because there's people on the complete opposite end of the spectrum that completely disagree with you and have success so by definition doesn't that mean that there's somewhere in the middle that's also okay maybe yeah let me know be curious so I'm almost home here my priorities for the evening I got to eat I'm starving I don't know why I'm so hungry today but today I'm starving uh I want to double check a potential brand ghost bug so I'm going to look at that and then I got to get into recording YouTube videos and I have a live stream so live stream I'm doing at 7 so I might eat I might try to

fix that bug or even see if it is a bug and then maybe get through one YouTube video oh and I have to man I forgot I have to get a have a podcast I should have done this this morning but I was too tired should have done it last night but I was too tired I got to get a thumbnail and stuff done for a podcast so it might be too late to post that today I don't know maybe I'll post it tomorrow and then I'll buy myself some time with my my YouTube videos for the week got some good yawns um and then after after that like this evening is course material so start recording I think I can get through I don't know depending how much time I have I think I can get through 4 that would be an awesome start

and then I got to get into writing more um more slides and stuff there's going to be I want to think through there might be some sections that I don't want to do slides for I feel slides are valuable for like listing out information but I find personally once I start using slides I'm not talking naturally because I don't have regular conversations with slides so it's a bit of a tradeoff right I feel like if I have slides up on screen you get to see things that are there you have a list of stuff like cool at the expense that now it's a little bit more artificial from me so I'll see there might be some stuff that I can kind of script out some some notes and then just talk through it and it might be more effective than that way but I I

got to I got to do a little little read through on the sections I got to make and see if anything stands out um but yeah I think that's that's my priority for the evening the coding I'm going to do a coding live stream tomorrow for sure so no CrossFit tomorrow be coding live stream um and the focus of that I actually don't know I got to be able to write some code but um I'm going to be moving my blog because it's on WordPress and light sale light sales like an Amazon service um I feel like they try to like package up some of the containerization for you and just make it like almost like oneclick containers for popular apps like WordPress and stuff like that and I think the concept's really cool like that's worked really well but WordPress in combination with light

sell and I think honestly it's probably just WordPress and the plugins has made it such an absolute nightmare uh running my blog like my blog goes down every couple of days just the whole whole thing crashes or it's like because it's like chewing up CPU like crazy it spikes up to like 100% CPU usage and then gets nuked and then doesn't recover and a lot of the time it's not even sufficient for me to go like restart the the services I have to go like sometimes I can't even communicate with uh with the container like the VM and uh and then I have to reboot the whole VM so I'm like this is it's not okay and I've been doing this for like well over a year now and I'm like this is it so I'm going to be trying to move over to of

course a Blazer net based uh blog engine which will be cool so be one of those guys that has uh has the codee for his blog but no this is I can't say his last name properly Steven uh gel I butchered that I'm sorry um but he's a he's a net Creator um but this is his blog engine so I'm going to try that out in the live stream tomorrow but I'm home dogs are barking so thanks for tuning in I'll see you next time