Dave Dickerson
Dec 24, 2025 - Sep 23, 2026
13
Decisions
0
Active Todos
17
Patterns
Categories
Decisions (13)
Treat every RCA as a legal document - Legal review plus Peter personal clearance before it goes to a customer
Peter and Arthur Tyde issued a standing rule to all department heads: unless a customer contract specifically addresses liability, fault and the delivery of a Root Cause Analysis, an RCA is to be treated as an internal document. Before any RCA is shared externally, Legal must review it and confirm it is appropriate to provide, and it must be cleared with Peter personally. The stated reason is that an RCA is a legal document that can unintentionally create legal exposure through statements about fault, causation, or obligations beyond what CIQ has agreed to contractually. Arthur posted the note to #department-heads under a joint Peter-and-I attribution while Peter was in a critical meeting, at Peter request that it be posted with his agreement on the record.
Adopt Bjorn no-US-eyes-only call as the operating assumption - and force the principle question to be settled separately from its effects
Bjorn declared in #department-heads that CIQ has no contractual US-eyes-only obligations, that undocumented verbal commitments are not valid, that any future US-eyes-only deals route through CIQ Federal, and that the call and its risk sit with him. Ryan Smith pushed back that customers were given verbal commitments and should be spoken to first. Peter took two positions: he has no horse in the race on whether CIQ supports eyes-only obligations and a huge horse in the race that everyone marches with the same constraints against the same goals; and that whoever meets on it must COMPLETELY separate are we agreeing to act as if we have no US eyes only obligations from what are we doing. Pending that meeting he told the org he will act as if the answer to the first is no until told otherwise, and warned Dave Dickerson not to let CIQ Federal business-model decisions be made that force Bjorn call to change.
Refuse the Veeam rollback and the never-again promise - fix forward and hold the response until the RCA is understood
Veeam escalated for the third time after a CIQ portal output change broke their CVE scraping script. Melissa Kivisto asked for a rollback and, failing that, a call from Peter explaining a path forward that ensures this absolutely will not happen again. Peter rejected both halves in #department-heads: there is no world where we promise that something will not happen in the future, rolling back is not the right solution at all, we help them move forward and doing so is not complicated. A day later a second breaking change took down their rsync; Peter told the channel there is an RCA in progress and he wants the team to fully understand what happened before responding to the customer.
Set a floor on personal data CIQ staff hand Core42 - passport yes, property deed no, and demand the required list
Core42 sent a request for personal information as part of background checks for site access ahead of the Sept 18 hardware access date. In #core-42-escalation-members Peter answered with his own position first, tagging Adam Jackson: he will give them a passport, not a deed. In the eight-person Core42 group DM he told Adam there is going to be a problem with that request for info, that he will not give them the deed to his house, that he is confident the bulk of the people on the Linux team will not either, that passports are fine, and that CIQ should be super clear about exactly what information is required. In the DM with Nathan Blackham he repeated that CIQ needs clarity on what info is absolutely required and that he has no interest in giving them his address either. He then tested the requirement himself - he submitted his address, judging it enough for a background check and public record anyway, and reported back that Core42 had emailed asking for additional info including a proof of residency document, for which they accept a utility bill.
Refuse to green-light the HPE indemnity escalation - this is a Bjorn call, not an Engineering call
HPE was blocking the Core42 Stargate deal on the grounds that Rocky is not a certified OS on the GB300s, against a contract where HPE has guaranteed 99.999 percent uptime with penalties. On 9/1 Adam Jackson proposed that CIQ absorb HPEs support penalties for the first cluster and contract the risk out to an insurer, laid out a six-step plan starting with an immediate call to HPEs Russ Fromkin, and asked Peter and Bjorn for permission to make that call. Six minutes later Peter answered with one sentence: This is a Bjorn call, not an Engineering call. Adam stood down - I will not reach out to Russ unless I am given the green light - and Bjorn took ownership, slowing the solutioning until the actual contract terms were known. Dave Dickerson pressed the same way, asking repeatedly to see the contract. The exposure being discussed turned out to be roughly an 8 million dollar guarantee against roughly a 10 million dollar future deployment stream.
Shut down department-heads as an intake path for engineering work - I raised it to product, they will either ask for it or they will not
In a #department-heads thread about who owns and maintains the C3 RPMs and about hardware certification playbooks, Ryan Smith offered to tweak Gauntlet to run certification playbooks and asked for hardware to be sent to him. Peter cut it off directly: this channel is not how work gets in front of engineering. He restated the path he had actually used - he asked who maintains it, got back currently nobody, and took the follow-up question of whether it should be publicly visible to product, where Brady Dibble owns it. If product asks for it, it becomes a project and gets the right people and the right hardware support.
Veeam CVE-escalation response: tell the honest intentional-tradeoff story, diagnose via Dickerson first
Ahead of a 5 AM Monday call with Veeam on a roughly 1M deal Bjorn flagged as at-risk, Peter set the response strategy. Tell Veeam the honest story: CIQ made an intentional trade-off (criticals 9-plus, known-exploit CVEs, and high-8s are handled; behind on some low-7s) because it is investing in CVE automation to handle the coming flood, and this is NOT a reaction to being caught. Step one is to reach out to Dickerson first to learn Veeams actual expectations and what specifically unblocks their signature. Nathan owns the technical scanner-nuance explanation (stack-protection downgrades, scanners scoring off non-Red-Hat CVEs).
Ship CIQ kernel patch with extra fix; contribute upstream; race to be first/best on CVE response
Linux kernel CVE response: CIQ shipping 10 fixes vs CentOS Stream's 9 (CIQ found and is fixing an extra issue related to the CVE). Extra commit submitted upstream to centos-stream and acknowledged for inclusion. CIQ pushing to be first EL distro to release, with primary goal of customer reassurance and secondary goal of public proof point that CIQ contributes to security and is large enough to serve big customers. Also pushing patches to RLC kernels as fallback in case RH doesn't move quickly.
Custom Engineering Scoping Process — Nathan as Gate
Established formal process for unplanned custom engineering requests from sales: Nathan provides quick effort estimate (days/weeks/months), enabling formal prioritization. Nathan can say no, escalation goes to Peter.
New Engineering Mandate - 2x Velocity in 6 Months
Set new mandate for Justin and Nathan: top priority is building a team that can deliver twice as fast in six months. This is a shift from the previous coaching model to a performance-driven one - setting ambitious targets, holding people accountable, and replacing underperformers.
Everfox partnership requires ARR-target-level contract to proceed
Participated in technical scoping meeting with Everfox to understand feasibility of supporting their RHEL 8 to RHEL 10 migration for 100k+ hardened thin client units. Meeting was exploratory - no commitment made.
Partner/User Management Tech Debt - Accept for Speed
Explicitly acknowledged and accepted that Partner Portal, Fuzzball SaaS, and Portal Depot will have separate user/account systems rather than integrating them. Flagged the future cleanup cost but chose speed over architectural purity.
ProServe Work Prioritization Process
Established new process for handling professional services work: ProServe work will be prioritized against existing roadmap, not by dropping in-flight work. Product (Brady) owns prioritization decision, Engineering determines timing based on capacity.
Related Patterns (17)
Executive Sponsorship for Strategic Partnerships
Strategic cross-company initiatives and major client partnerships require executive-level accountability to move at the right pace and ensure proper prioritization.
Protect Engineering Capacity
When external demands threaten to overload engineering capacity, protect capacity by either requiring the demand to come with additional resources, or forcing hard prioritization choices upstream.
Lead by Example with New Tools
When championing new tools or processes, personally use them and share results rather than just advocating. Learning by doing and demonstrating value through example is more effective than mandates.
Small Circle for Sensitive Operations
When executing sensitive strategic operations, keep the circle of informed people as small as possible to prevent leaks that could accelerate hostile action or undermine the initiative.
Protect Engineering Focus Through Process
When faced with requests that would disrupt engineering focus (from sales, governance, product, or other stakeholders), establish processes that protect engineering ability to innovate while still satisfying legitimate concerns. Prefer systematic solutions over ad-hoc responses.
Reclassify to Route - Decide Who Owns It, Then Give a Criterion Not a Verdict
When a question arrives at Peter framed in one domain, he often does not answer it in that framing. He reclassifies it into the domain that actually governs the outcome, which relocates ownership to whoever owns that lane, and then hands down a decision criterion rather than a verdict. The reclassification IS the decision - it determines who decides. He does this rather than adjudicating on the merits himself, even when he was explicitly cc-ed and even when a direct report challenges him on the substance.
Purpose Is the Decision Procedure
When someone asks how a process, board, tool or artifact should handle their specific case, Peter refuses to answer on the askers terms. He re-derives the answer from what the artifact is for, states that purpose as the only decision procedure, and lets the answer fall out. Anything found to be serving a second purpose is deleted rather than debated. Tools and views are explicitly subordinate to definitions. He will accept that the askers real problem is simply not solved by this artifact rather than widen the artifact to cover it.
Route Non-Differentiating FTE Classes to Partners
When CIQ would otherwise need to staff a function whose work does not differentiate the company — compliance bureaucracy, audit/cert paperwork, ongoing regulatory attestation, etc. — Peter routes the load to a partner who already owns adjacent capability rather than adding the FTE class internally. Org-shape decision dressed as a partnership decision.
Demonstrate the Standard, Then Collect It
When a new leadership expectation has to land across multiple orgs, Peter does not write a spec. He runs a live exemplar in public with the strongest performer first, says openly that the ordering was deliberate, keeps the form of the deliverable open so the ask stays about the thinking rather than the artifact, lets the delta be self-evident to the people who will have to close it, and then collects the same from everyone else on a named rotation. He prefers showing imperfect work now over polished work later.
Decide on the Precedent, Not the Case
When a request arrives framed as a one-off, Peter does not evaluate the one-off. He evaluates the rule that granting it would write, and answers that instead. Peter generalized this himself on 2026-08-11: it is always about understanding precedent - whether it is a comp change or anything that structurally affects the company. It is therefore NOT a compensation pattern; the domain of the presenting request is incidental. The tell that this pattern is live is that the stated reason for the answer refers to future cases rather than to the merits of the present one.
Metrics Must Follow Strategy
When shifting team priorities or strategic direction, the communication alone will not drive behavior change. Engineers may acknowledge the new direction but continue existing behavior patterns without clear, explicit metrics holding them accountable.
Switch Instrument, Not Intensity
Applies when a message, rule or ask has already failed through the channel Peter is currently using - repeated advocacy that has not landed, coaching that produced defensiveness rather than improvement, exhortation that did not change behaviour, or a rule that keeps losing case by case. His response is never to restate the same thing more forcefully. He changes the instrument and usually names the switch out loud. Mined from 7 independent observations between 2026-01-06 and 2026-08-21.
Time Over Cost
Peter treats elapsed time as the scarce quantity and money as the abundant one, and will spend cash to buy schedule, clarity or optionality. Notable because he named it himself as a transferable principle on 2026-05-21 and coached the lens explicitly to a direct report, which is rare - most of his patterns are inferred rather than stated. It generalises past procurement: he will pay to convert an ambiguous dispute into a binary one, remove cost as a variable entirely when a priority has executive visibility, and reason about a commitment in terms of lead time rather than budget. Mined from 5 independent observations between 2026-02-01 and 2026-09-11.
Promise Only What Is Inside CIQ Control
Applies when someone asks CIQ to commit to an outcome whose delivery depends partly on something CIQ does not own - a lead time, a third-party publisher, a customer-provided environment, an unsigned contract. Peter does not accept or refuse the request as posed. He isolates the specific component that sits outside CIQ delivery chain, refuses that component by name, and substitutes an adjacent commitment CIQ can actually keep - then often adds a harder problem worth solving in its place, so the counterparty gets more engagement rather than less.
Measure, Commit Publicly, Then Execute
A three-beat escalation arc Peter runs when he needs a commitment from a peer or the CEO that private pressure has not produced. Beat one: measure the thing and get a number. Beat two: state the commitment in a venue where the people who matter are watching. Beat three: execute against it. The 2026-04-15 observation names the sequence explicitly and notes he does not skip steps, because each beat builds the legitimacy of the next. The venue choice is treated as a decision in its own right, separate from what the message says. Mined from 8 independent observations between 2025-12-29 and 2026-08-28. NOTE: scope this to the venue-and-sequence mechanism specifically - forcing function is a phrase that appears loosely across many unrelated decisions and should not be taken as a match on its own.
Install the Criterion Before the Argument
Applies to a contested question that has not been argued yet - a meeting about to start, a test about to run, an escalation just received, a proposal about to be written. Peter moves first to fix the criterion, the boundary or the posture, before anyone argues the substance. The consistent effect, named explicitly in the 2026-07-29 observation, is that the other party cannot win by being more persuasive on the merits, because the merits are no longer the axis. Distinct from Reclassify to Route in mechanism: that pattern reassigns who owns a question, this one controls WHEN the criterion lands relative to the debate. The two frequently co-occur. Mined from 7 independent observations between 2026-01-20 and 2026-08-31.
Conscious Tech Debt for Execution Speed
When facing time pressure, explicitly acknowledge and accept technical debt rather than blocking progress. The key is making the trade-off consciously and visibly so it can be addressed later.