Yahoo accidentally created an internal “black market” for servers. Will Larson @lethain, 3x CTO and 4x book author, recalls: "One quick Yahoo story that I loved: David Filo famously approved every server that was allocated in the company. The theory was this would drive accountability. You had to prove you needed more servers. What it actually did is it created a black market of servers. On my team, there was one engineer that had 30 servers from a prior canceled project he never gave back. He would basically sell them to you, effectively, if you couldn't get approval. And so it actually meant they had massive numbers of outdated servers that were using inefficient power wattage, because people would never give servers back. And so you had to find someone who liked you with servers to loan for your projects to launch. It's fascinating how these incentives drive just wild, wild situations.” Full conversation with Will Larson on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast: https://t.co/UnVVB1aUY3