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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

"I would intercept these rewards and put them in my backpack for the bus ride home, in order to avoid creating perverse incentives for the operations team. But did anyone call me 'hero'?"

Wait so you stole rewards for a team that was spending time (I assume extra or stressful) on something you didn't do or have any part in. And you want a cookie?

I mean I get it, the company was probably not great in it's infancy. But what?

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I think OP is saying the rewards were confiscated so the team wouldn't begin breaking things on purpose to get a reward when they fixed it.

Yeah but does anybody believe that the engineers would deliberately break things so they could have to work in a stressful environment bringing things back up just to get some free beer?

If your incentives are aligned w/firefighting as opposed to fire prevention b/c management is not motivating and rewarding the extra work that goes into avoiding these scenarios in the first place, you're encouraging fire.

Indeed, the usual motivation to try and be called a hero for putting out the fire you started is much more valuable than free booze: a title promotion with a pay bump.

I don't want a cookie; I want more $24/bottle Belgian beer.

You should submit a request to the Pinboard CEO...

That's usually called stealing, or something a little softer than that. It's interesting that you shared that experience expected for us to laugh at it. The rest of the comment was hilarious and I'm happy you shared it, but that bit is very odd. I also see where you're coming from. But your act was ethically questionable.

Wouldn't that have made you the one with a "perverse incentive"?

That explains why he walked over to the DB guy and asked him to run an expensive query on the life system ;)

Just wanted to say that I enjoy reading your blog.

It's a joke. Laugh, it's funny.

Having worked on a lot of ops teams in unstable environments, it's just really dickish.

I also have. idlewords' post is one of the funniest things I've read this week.

It's one of those jokes where if the story isn't true then the entire basis for it being funny disappears. (And if it is true then the joke isn't good enough to make up for the actions.)

yea as an ops engineer that's probably the worst violation of trust i've ever heard of.

Wait so you stole rewards for a team that was spending time (I assume extra or stressful) on something you didn't do or have any part in.

The HR department in my company does this, and then redistributes the gifts to everyone in a random drawing at the Christmas party.

One year some department got a bunch of PlayStations, and a couple of them ended up in my department. The only thing my department contributed to the kitty was candy. I bet some people in that other department were disappointed.

Finally we get the long awaited sequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

One flew over the dubcanada's head.

Wait what did I miss something? lol

The joke.

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