Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money.

by Kris Nóva

If someone can identify a problem, design a solution, build the solution, and apply the solution to the problem using nothing more than harvested resources from previously broken systems, they’re demonstrating expert-level mastery of their environment.

Part of success in business is often very unfair, and often unrewarding.

Amid the debris there’s likely to be plenty of scared, hurt, or angry engineers who feel deceived by the company. By collaborating with them, you may be able to gain influence within the organization.

Even if you might not be able to get promoted, it can be worth pursuing a strong relationship with the leadership team even just to watch and learn.

Hyperfocusing on your career growth can make what would otherwise be an extremely unlucky career move one of the fastest escalations in your lifetime.

Learn to embrace chaos. Where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity. Where there’s a problem, there’s deviation. Where there’s an emergency, there’s disruption.

After every catastrophic forest fire comes a lush new undergrowth in the coming years.

For every build cycle there’s an equally relevant breaking cycle. Similar to a sine wave phasing in and out of harmony, cycles will tune themselves over time.

The same is true for technology, and a career path. The likelihood of blazing a truly new and pristine path is highly unlikely.

When a system begins to swing too far to one side, you can disrupt the system by introducing an abundance of its antisystem. Observing and predicting this pendulum-like motion can be useful in micro- and macroeconomics.

I think that cooperation is a hybrid tactic that uses only the bare minimum of collaborative techniques to achieve an independent goal.

In my opinion, Kubernetes found success because of the way that it fostered collaboration at scale.

A certain amount of leadership is needed to identify a decision, drive consensus, and then communicate the decision to the group.

Putting a group behind a decision can be an easy way to mask the fact that the decision was made by someone who wouldn’t have otherwise been respected.

Kubernetes and Linux both leverage cooperative extensibility. These projects are extensible, and they allow for cooperative usage of the broader tool. These projects embrace this idea, and companies leverage this.

While open source certainly perfected extensibility, it took capitalism’s hyperfocus on self-interest to perfectly apply extensibility to cooperation.

Projects like Kubernetes and Linux have shown that with thoughtful top-down architecture, you can build large cohesive distributed systems through cooperation.

This approach is exactly what you need if you want to apply cooperation in your company. Because you can achieve independent goals wh...

Architecture is what allows for this layered approach to cohesive systems...

Kubernetes was able to show that prioritizing contributors' experiences with tools that support transparency can effectively engender cooperation with immediate upsides.

Therefore, I believe that transparency can be directly linked to economic value with cooperative systems.

Encourage the application team and the security team to work transparently, and use a high-context communication style.

Transparency creates value for the group that’s being transparent and for anyone who’s observing the group’s actions. It’s often said that if you build for a stranger, your future self will appreciate your efforts just as much.

So when you’re operating openly, take advantage of a platform that lets you tell a compelling story about your work. Advocating for your story will be easier if your story’s artifacts are more visible!

Part of escalating toward the elite will involve gaining trust, and working closer to the inner circles. The ability to structure your work for recognition is an effective tactic in pushing someone closer to the elite.

One tactic that you can apply is to tell a detailed story of your actions.

A highly visible artifact of your work A highly visible relationship and communication trail

Look at this example journal of someone’s work at a tech organization. Notice how they called out specific names and relationships.

If there were a single word that I wish that I had paid more attention to earlier in my career, that word would be influence.

So the better you are at influencing, the better you can harness the many benefits of collaboration.

Your ability to influence can be the difference between an introductory-level position and an executive-level position in a tech company.

If you plan to escalate toward the elite in tech, you’re going to want to be a champion influencer.

Find the sentiments that align with your goals and reinforce those. And ignore the sentiments that conflict with your goals.

Inspiring others to work toward goals is a substantial part of leadership.

Many times, inspiration can come in the form of ideas or helpful suggestions.

Influence is giving your ideas away to others. If you have a good idea, just give it to someone else and let them run with i...

But concealing ideas is counterproductive to your ability to influence.

The social element and general hype that comes with adoption is extremely real (and somewhat deceptive).

Ideas gain validation the more that they’re perceived to be embraced and taken advantage of.

Those that communicate, are those that influence the message.

My preferred method of presenting is similar to a breadth-first search algorithm, if you might be familiar with that.

You can increase your influence by finding good ideas, giving them away, encouraging adoption, and presenting your work.

Being a part of leadership means repeating yourself. A lot. It will also mean being deliberate about how, where, when, and with who you share your message.

Microsoft similarly internally has "Embrace, extend, extinguish."

You can use tools like broadcasting to reinforce messages to privilege-escalate to the top of the industry.

But empathy is critical to leadership. And leadership is critical to cracking the code of the tech industry.

Showing empathy to others is an effective way to influence them and to improve existing plans and designs.

I look at a well-orchestrated social-media campaign as a collaborative sanction that society can impose on bad actors.

Ultimately, social media is your main artery for economic influence. If you plan to go big in tech, social media is going to be where you exercise your influence.

Traditionally, you would influence others to inspire work and mindshare across a group on behalf.