2 posts tagged with "Game Theory"

A debate breaks out among leaders. The team just shipped something significant. Someone suggests giving "champion points" to the person who drove it. Someone else pushes back — "It was a team effort. Reward the whole team." A third person raises the obvious: "If we reward everyone equally, what's the incentive to go above and beyond?"

I've been in this room. It was equal parts funny and frustrating — everyone had a strong opinion, everyone had a good argument, and nobody was wrong. That's the problem.

This isn't a values debate. It's a design problem.

You send a Slack message to another team. It's a reasonable request — a small API change, maybe a code review, maybe just a question about how their service handles edge cases. You write it clearly. You tag the right person. You even add a polite emoji. And then... nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment. Just the quiet hum of a message marked as read and promptly ignored.

You're not being ghosted because they're bad people. You're being ghosted because the game they're playing rewards ignoring you.

This isn't a people problem. It's a math problem.