Each time the ops team brought Twitter back up, they receive good beer. So it would also mean that each time Twitter goes down, they could expect to receive the beer. Without idleword's actions, they would have an incentive (good beer) for having Twitter keep going down and not doing work to improve the stability.

Under the guise of preventing the ops team from being incentivized to create outages, he was selflessly stealing all the nice beer for himself.

He took the beer because he wanted it. "Perverse incentives" are an excuse, because nobody is going to kill their production servers and all the panic that entails for like $10 worth of beer.

Sounds like the guy was bragging about his SQL skills to avoid locking the database but ended up locking the database anyway (thus, people running around)

If the ops team got beer every time the servers went down (as a reward for fixing them) then they'd have an incentive for the servers to go down.

We all understand the perverse incentives joke, I think what's confusing people here is whether there's some other hidden joke they're missing that suggests not to take OP at his word that yes, he did make off with someone else's gift, which is generally considered a dick move.

What the hell are all of you smoking, some moderately expensive alcohol is nowhere near enough reward to take down a service.

If it was a sure thing that the ops engineers were doing that, then sure, it'd be kinda funny. Otherwise it just seems like a dick move.

The alcohol was an incentive to bring the service back up quickly, but not an incentive to prevent it going down in the first place. Twitter was going down often enough on its own that nobody needed to be motivated to help it crash (except that bringing it back up sooner gives it another opportunity to crash again sooner).

Operant conditioning is a thing and it works.

While I and you would not do this I’m afraid that it would somehow find a way to work in this case too.

Ops engineers don't get paid enough to fix dev fuck ups enough as it is. No amount of beer is going to fix that.

He's taking home the special expensive beer and not telling them about it because he cares about the health and well being of his team so much, and yet they wouldn't even consider him a hero for this, how ungrateful they are!

If everytime the site was brought back up (because it had gone down), and the ops guys got free fancy beer, then the message pretty quickly turns into, "if the site goes down, I get rewarded."