Building Trust in a Room Full of Competitors
NOG meetings put engineers from directly competing companies in the same room and ask them to be candid about their own failures. The reason that works has almost nothing to do with rules.
The first NOG meeting I sat through, someone got up and walked the room through a routing incident that had knocked his network offline for most of an afternoon. He named the vendor and the exact misconfiguration, then gave rough numbers on customer impact. Two rows behind him sat an engineer from a company that competes with his for the same customers in the same region, taking notes like it was any other Tuesday. Getting used to that took longer than getting used to the technical content did.
Most industries don't run this way. You don't usually stand up at an industry event and tell your closest competitor's engineers exactly where your product broke, with enough detail that they could reproduce the failure themselves. Network operators do this constantly, in rooms full of people who spend the rest of their working hours trying to win the same contracts. The infrastructure underneath them is shared in a way most products aren't. A route leak on one network can wreck traffic on ten others. Hiding how you failed doesn't protect much of a secret; it just makes the shared thing a bit more fragile for everyone, including you.
What holds the arrangement together is a fairly strict line, and almost nobody states it out loud. Competing for customers sits in one category. Keeping the shared plumbing upright sits in another. You can ask a rival, in real detail, why their BGP session flapped for six hours. You don't ask them, in the same breath, what they're quoting a mutual prospect this quarter. Both questions are about their business. The room treats them as entirely different kinds of question anyway.
Nobody teaches this with a slide or a handout. I learned the boundary by watching what happened when someone got close to it. A newer engineer asks something slightly too pointed after a talk, technically about architecture but really fishing for something useful in a deal, and the answer comes back short and vague, and the conversation moves on within a few seconds. Nobody calls it out. Nobody needs to. You notice the temperature change and file it away. See a dozen of those moments over a couple of years and the shape of the rule becomes obvious without anyone describing it to you.
The rest of the education comes from watching how established people react to bad news. When someone admits their network did something embarrassing, the useful response is curiosity: what was the failure mode, and would they handle it differently now. That reaction gets modeled meeting after meeting until it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only reasonable way to answer.
The norm breaks occasionally. Someone hears a rival's outage story in a hallway conversation and later works a version of it into a pitch, phrased carefully enough to sound like an aside. Or someone on a sales team who was never in the room and never agreed to any of this gets fed the story secondhand and uses it against the rival in a deal. No rule gets technically broken in either case, since there's no rule written down. What gets broken is the assumption that made the original disclosure possible.
There's no committee for this, no formal sanction handed out. What happens instead is slower. People notice, and they remember. The community is smaller than it looks, and the same faces show up meeting after meeting for years. Someone who gets a reputation for turning shared information into a competitive weapon starts getting vaguer answers. They stop hearing about the dinner before the meeting. Their technical questions get the polite, empty version of a response instead of the real one. Nothing is announced. The value of showing up quietly drops for them, because that value was always the honesty, and honesty is what reputation can take away.
What strikes me now is how much weight that unwritten line carries. Real contracts and real money are on the table between these companies, year after year, and the line holds anyway, kept in place by nothing but people preferring to stay trusted over winning any single round of it.