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Yes, and? Cloudflare themselves are the ones pushing their own company as "leaders" in this field, and being a "leader" does not mean "pointing fingers and tryi

Yes, and? Cloudflare themselves are the ones pushing their own company as "leaders" in this field, and being a "leader" does not mean "pointing fingers and trying to avoid blame whenever something bad happens". If they fancy themselves leaders regarding BGP, as said on their website, then they need to actually act like leaders. And as I've said multiple times now, Cloudflare was in a great position here to stand themselves up as a strong leader on this topic to start working together with other companies (a la Verizon) to start to make real headway to fix the BGP problem. As other commenters have noted, the internet is entirely built on multiple organizations acting in good faith towards one another. Verizon failed to do that, and Cloudflare's response also failed to do that. I said it in another comment, but I'll also say it here: publicly berating the people that you are supposedly taking a leadership position over is not good leadership. This entire episode is going to do nothing to encourage Verizon to work closely with CF to fix this issue. In fact, I imagine it will do the exact opposite. Today was a display of incompetence from Verizon, and a display of bad leadership by Cloudflare. I have no idea why any objective-minded person would be applauding Cloudflare for this. As I mentioned elsewhere, I would normally love a good public bashing of Verizon, but not when it comes at the cost of professionalism and progress.

Dylan16807 7y ago
Companies respond just fine to public scrutiny, caused by them being rightfully and loudly blamed. The way you lead people isn't the same as the way you lead companies. Verizon was acting so badly that it's clear the pure friendly approach was doing absolutely nothing. And I'm sure Cloudflare is willing to give very real and pleasant engineering help if desired. If Verizon doesn't want to talk to Cloudflare, that's fine too. This is not a problem that requires active cooperation. They just have to do their job.
- txcwpalpha 7y ago
  >rightfully and loudly blamed There is an enormous difference between assigning fault in a good faith attempt to find a root cause/solution, and casting unnecessary, unprofessional insults such as "Verizon's team should be ashamed of themselves". One is productive, and the other is just being a dick. >The way you lead people isn't the same as the way you lead companies. Yes, it certainly is. A company is an organization of people, after all. You don't get to eschew professionalism and start throwing around insults just because a group of people has decided to attach an additional label over their heads. And just to put an even finer point on it, Matthew Prince's tweets about the issue were not targeted at Verizon "the company". He specifically attacked Verizon's NOC and its team members. Despite everything, this isn't a faceless, soulless corporation that's having insults hurled at them. He specifically went after a specific group of people and publicly shamed them. And then he has the gall to shame them even more for not immediately chomping at the bit to help someone who just aggressively insulted them. Ask yourself: if Matthew Prince had sent a tweet berating team members from his own company, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves, and spent the rest of the day commenting on the internet insulting their competence, would you still be saying he is a good leader? Or even a good CEO? Of course not. It's Leadership 101 that insulting your team members isn't a good leadership style. And that doesn't change just because Prince isn't the one signing the Verizon team's paychecks. > This is not a problem that requires active cooperation. This is clearly not the opinion of those at Cloudflare that are loudly kicking their feet and whining that Verizon didn't devote enough resources to actively cooperate with Cloudflare's troubleshooting today.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > A company is an organization of people Blaming a specific team can get too personal. Blaming an entire company is more about the decision-making structure, and is close to as impersonal as you can get. It's really not the same as blaming a person. > This is clearly not the opinion of those at Cloudflare that are loudly kicking their feet and whining that Verizon didn't devote enough resources to actively cooperate with Cloudflare's troubleshooting today. They didn't notice, acknowledge, or fix the problem. That's different from a lack of resources devoted to active cooperation. Heck, two messages of "on it" and "it's fixed" would be a pleasant level of "active cooperation", and that takes only a minute or two.
    - txcwpalpha 7y ago
      > Blaming a specific team can get too personal. And yet blaming a specific team is exactly what they did. >They didn't notice, acknowledge, or fix the problem. That's different from a lack of resources devoted to active cooperation. Heck, two messages of "on it" and "it's fixed" would be a pleasant level of "active cooperation", and that takes only a minute or two. Sure, I'm not defending Verizon's inaction. My point is that regardless of the level of the cooperation, some cooperation is clearly still required. And now because of Cloudflare's hostility towards Verizon after this incident, I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon is much less inclined to participate in any cooperation. That not only seems counterproductive to Cloudflare's goal, it's also bad for all of us that use the internet.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        > And yet blaming a specific team is exactly what they did. In this specific case, just blaming "Verizon", it was not personal. (There are a variety of things that can be classified under "blaming a team" so I can't give it a blanket okay/not okay.) Knowing it's the NOC team, as an amorphous blob of nameless people, is not getting too personal. Just because something can be traced to a team doesn't mean that shaming the company is the same as shaming specific people from that team. Going down that road would declare everything as personal, and that's really not how things work. > I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon is much less inclined to participate in any cooperation. The public pressure should be stronger than any pettiness, and if it's not then the solution is to let even more people know it was Verizon's fault.

Dylan16807 7y ago

Companies respond just fine to public scrutiny, caused by them being rightfully and loudly blamed. The way you lead people isn't the same as the way you lead companies. Verizon was acting so badly that it's clear the pure friendly approach was doing absolutely nothing. And I'm sure Cloudflare is willing to give very real and pleasant engineering help if desired. If Verizon doesn't want to talk to Cloudflare, that's fine too. This is not a problem that requires active cooperation. They just have to do their job.

txcwpalpha 7y ago
>rightfully and loudly blamed There is an enormous difference between assigning fault in a good faith attempt to find a root cause/solution, and casting unnecessary, unprofessional insults such as "Verizon's team should be ashamed of themselves". One is productive, and the other is just being a dick. >The way you lead people isn't the same as the way you lead companies. Yes, it certainly is. A company is an organization of people, after all. You don't get to eschew professionalism and start throwing around insults just because a group of people has decided to attach an additional label over their heads. And just to put an even finer point on it, Matthew Prince's tweets about the issue were not targeted at Verizon "the company". He specifically attacked Verizon's NOC and its team members. Despite everything, this isn't a faceless, soulless corporation that's having insults hurled at them. He specifically went after a specific group of people and publicly shamed them. And then he has the gall to shame them even more for not immediately chomping at the bit to help someone who just aggressively insulted them. Ask yourself: if Matthew Prince had sent a tweet berating team members from his own company, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves, and spent the rest of the day commenting on the internet insulting their competence, would you still be saying he is a good leader? Or even a good CEO? Of course not. It's Leadership 101 that insulting your team members isn't a good leadership style. And that doesn't change just because Prince isn't the one signing the Verizon team's paychecks. > This is not a problem that requires active cooperation. This is clearly not the opinion of those at Cloudflare that are loudly kicking their feet and whining that Verizon didn't devote enough resources to actively cooperate with Cloudflare's troubleshooting today.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > A company is an organization of people Blaming a specific team can get too personal. Blaming an entire company is more about the decision-making structure, and is close to as impersonal as you can get. It's really not the same as blaming a person. > This is clearly not the opinion of those at Cloudflare that are loudly kicking their feet and whining that Verizon didn't devote enough resources to actively cooperate with Cloudflare's troubleshooting today. They didn't notice, acknowledge, or fix the problem. That's different from a lack of resources devoted to active cooperation. Heck, two messages of "on it" and "it's fixed" would be a pleasant level of "active cooperation", and that takes only a minute or two.
  - txcwpalpha 7y ago
    > Blaming a specific team can get too personal. And yet blaming a specific team is exactly what they did. >They didn't notice, acknowledge, or fix the problem. That's different from a lack of resources devoted to active cooperation. Heck, two messages of "on it" and "it's fixed" would be a pleasant level of "active cooperation", and that takes only a minute or two. Sure, I'm not defending Verizon's inaction. My point is that regardless of the level of the cooperation, some cooperation is clearly still required. And now because of Cloudflare's hostility towards Verizon after this incident, I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon is much less inclined to participate in any cooperation. That not only seems counterproductive to Cloudflare's goal, it's also bad for all of us that use the internet.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > And yet blaming a specific team is exactly what they did. In this specific case, just blaming "Verizon", it was not personal. (There are a variety of things that can be classified under "blaming a team" so I can't give it a blanket okay/not okay.) Knowing it's the NOC team, as an amorphous blob of nameless people, is not getting too personal. Just because something can be traced to a team doesn't mean that shaming the company is the same as shaming specific people from that team. Going down that road would declare everything as personal, and that's really not how things work. > I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon is much less inclined to participate in any cooperation. The public pressure should be stronger than any pettiness, and if it's not then the solution is to let even more people know it was Verizon's fault.