Railway treats public incident reports as part of reliability

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 44:56

   it's just tradeoffs. Everything is everything is tradeoffs, you know. So in your values, they spell hard. So honor, acceleration, reliability, directness. How did those come about? Oh, that was like three or four years and like hires that didn't work out and like, you know, stuff where I was just like, I'm trying to teach people these things that like they matter a lot in terms of, you know, like make honorable decisions, right?

2. 45:19

   We don't want to be the company that's like with dark patterns everywhere and the stuff, right? We want to like be accelerating. Like this is why we've shipped on Fridays and we've shipped a changelog for every week on Fridays since like 2021, right? You want to be reliable, right? Like you don't want to be the coworker that's like, oh, I got paged. And it's like, oh, it is what it is, man. Right?

3. 45:37

   It's like, no, you want to be reliable. And then you want to be direct too. Because like people waste so much time like holding in feedback, emotion, like whatever, all of those other things. Like if you're direct and you just like cut to the 10% of the problem that matters. If you're just basically like, hey, listen, you know, feeling these things that we need to move this part forward. Why is it not moving forward?

4. 45:56

   Let's talk about those things. Right? And the nice thing about the values in my mind is that like they're complimentary. if that makes sense, right? And so let's say you were going to go in and give feedback to somebody, right? Like you'd be like, hey, like you suck and here's why, right? Like it's very direct, right? Is it honorable, like even close or whatever, right? Absolutely not, right? And so you have to kind of move with each one of these values, right?

5. 46:16

   You know, if you're, you know, okay, you're working on feedback forever or whatever, right? And then you like don't go in and give it, you know, it's like, is it accelerating, right? And so each one of these things is a balancing engine, right? And when you hit those things like perfectly, it allows you to kind of like move a lot of this stuff forward, right? Which one is the hardest to live up to?

6. 46:33

   Like, as an example, has honor cost you something? Yeah, I was going to say it's honor, I would say, for sure. It's really, really, really hard to go in and do that. Like, right. There are things that like other people are doing. There are things that like, you know, like I think we probably could have like probably got to raise more money if we wanted to like oversell like the vision for all of these other things.

7. 46:52

   Right. And then it's like a delicate balance, too, because you want to go in and sell the vision, all this other stuff. Right. But I think honor is probably the one where it's cost, you know, the most, you know. An example of that is like, you don't oversell. Yeah, we just don't oversell, right? Like we're just like, you know, we don't want to put ourselves into a spot where like we're saying, yeah, the product is going to do all these things.

8. 47:10

   Like it's going to, you know, it's going to wash your car. It's going to do all this other stuff, right? Like just trust us like all of a sudden and then you violate that trust, right? Like, you know, it's just not a way that we want to kind of like conduct business, right? And that goes to, you know, how we purport our brand. It goes down to like, you know, how we call incidents, right? Like we, you know, we had some reliability issues earlier in the year, right?

9. 47:30

   And we're calling every one of these issues. We're saying, here's what's happened. You know, we turn around the incident response in like, you know, less than 24 hours earlier in the year when we were growing, like when that step function had kind of changed and we were like, oh, hey, listen, like some of our engineering things, you know, normally in engineering, you build essentially for about 18 months and you start to replace it around a year, right?

10. 47:50

    Like because of the like jagged frontier and the lurch forward, we had some reliability issues, right? And, you know, we're out here, we're calling every single incident. We're putting it out on Twitter. We're going to say, hey, here's what happened, you know, within 24 hours, like every single step like goes out, right? Because, you know, you can go and you can, you know, pull away from that. But then, you know, you're leaving your customers hanging, right? And so you have to kind of like, take it on the chin, eat that. And then and then, you know, you can't avoid it. From a company perspective, it's like, reliability has to be the number one thing we have to go in and do it. It's a value. It's a thing. Like, there's no way to go in and avoid it, right? And so we went like heads down and drilled all those things out, right? And now we're in such a better spot. And it was like, pretty quick to like go in and resolve a bunch of those things.

11. 48:26

    So again, it's on directness. It's on reliability. It's on honor. And then you want an acceleration. You want to do it today. Don't do it tomorrow. Like ship it, ship the thing today, right? You might break something. You might page somebody, right? Okay, what happens in that situation? Well, you know, you rely on your coworkers and then also you can maybe build a better system that says like, hey, when you merge a pull request, maybe you're automatically taking the pager for 30 minutes.

12. 48:47

    That's the thing we do, right? And one of your mantras is go hard, go home, which is go hard Monday to Friday and then communications,