Ask HN: Company is growing and the culture shift is uncomfortable. What do I do?

"How is this anything but the individual's personal problem?"

It is everybody's problem. Both the company leadership and the individual. Individuals need to be self-motivating and self-regulating and self-aware. But leadership needs to respect their workers, create an enjoyable workplace, and create an atmosphere that caters to the personality types they hire.

You may take issue with the "create an enjoyable workplace" part. But I would challenge that you don't have a wide enough variety of experience yet or you've been lucky. Personally I've been in environments where I've been treated like a "code monkey", expected to be at my desk typing for 8 to 10 hours a day, and expected to never socialize with my co-workers because socializing is seen as not productive. That was not enjoyable.

On the other hand, I've been in environments where programming is seen as a creative endeadvour, socializing and brainstorming is seen as lubricant for creativity, and the purpose of the job is seen not as pumping out code but solving problems and being creative. This one was clearly enjoyable.

Now as a manager/leader, I strive to create the second type of environment and the decisions I make and policies I put in place directly affect the outcome and the attitudes of my employees.

So aving been in both sides, and now being a leader who clearly sees his behaviour affecting it, I'll re-iterate:

Culture is contributed to by Everybody and leadership/management play a huge role; and it impacts the enjoyment and meaningfulness of work directly and clearly.

Your post didn't come across as entirely positive because it sounded personally critical, though I don't think you meant it that way.

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You're right that a lot of it is up to the individual.

My point was that people already want to do work that is good—whatever that means to you. Yes, it can be sophistic bull to call it all those lofty things, but in the end I think everyone wants a good job, doing something they consider valuable, that makes them feel like their time isn't being thrown away in exchange for a wage. Whether everyone can achieve this or not is more of an economic question, but it's something almost everyone strives for. Work that is real.

And jobs, companies, and organizations start out this way too. Of course they want to get things done and achieve common goals, and most importantly make a lot of money, but I promise you they also don't want to throw their time away. Even executives want their time and their lives to be meaningful, and they usually want that for their employees, too.

And most people realize—and it has been proven—that organizations that do this right, and find meaning and value in their work, whatever it may be—are also more successful, make more profit, are more competitive in the market, and have all kinds of other positive results. So it appears to be a no-brainer.

Problem is, things get complicated in complex organizations, and no one knows how to handle it. All of that stuff about work being meaningful and worth a damn goes out the window, and people just start doing their jobs for a paycheck. That's when big-C Culture gets destroyed.

It's not that people don't want that fluffy stuff about their work being worthwhile, it's that they can't see any path for achieving it. All of the structures of organizations are put in the way. My advice was to leaders: work on stripping the company of the barriers to people finding joy and worth in the work itself. You can't give people that stuff, but it sure is easy to take away—so start by not doing that.

There's a lot that's the individual worker's responsibility to self-motivate and find meaning in their own work, if they need it—but there's a ton of stuff in modern companies that also destroys their ability to do that. You need to tackle it from both sides, both the environment (and not just at the surface, but deep, deep down) and the individual.

And my personal opinion (and you might disagree with this) is that 90% of the potential for motivated, real, meaningful work has nothing to do with individual responsibility, but is the responsibility of managers and leaders. Individuals are always going to try their hardest to self-motivate and do their best—that's the easy part. Building an organizational environment that enables them to do that is the hard part, so it's where we (leaders, managers, executives) need to put in the work.

This reminds me of a story—a consultant tried to implement some of these organizational improvement ideas at a chick hatching farm. When he was interviewing one of the workers about how the workplace could be improved, the man said "Sir, we throw all the male baby chicks into grinders. I think that says everything." So, you're right. Regardless, that consultant was still able to improve even that dismal work so that the employees could do their jobs as well as possible and not be demeaned by both poor management as well as the nature of the work.

So my response is, even supposedly horrible work can be meaningful, and it's almost always the unconscious organizational structures that get in the way, not how individual workers feel about their own job. The individual is such a small problem in comparison to the organization.

The first time I started as a developer on 1 team and evolved into a director of 6 teams, each one a new business unit. I contributed code to most of the teams I managed. I was not the one primarily responsible. I learned a lot as I went, I was very inexperienced for what was required. I learned a lot of ways NOT to do things. If I had to sum things up, I would say before I was helping "connect the dots", now I am connecting all the dots.

This time around I am purely a leader and the one primarily in charge of tech. My almost exclusive focus from the start is the people. I have to start over on most things that I evolved through previously. - I've taken on the responsibility to create and define our culture. My last job I assisted in this area. - Make sure developers have the tools to be productive. This includes reliable wifi, internet, good coffee, software, furniture, TVs for monitoring, AV system for presenting, conference rooms. - I've had to earn the trust of the existing people. Previously almost everyone was new on my teams and I hired them, so there was largely trust from the beginning. - there is churn, like you are going through. I had almost no churn on my teams previously that was not purposeful. I have to explain why the churn is ok and expected. - I have to teach developers to focus first on "why" they are building a feature, rather than "what" they are building and "how". This helps dev and product see eye to eye. - I have to teach how to interview, run meetings, do agile right, communicate. Focus on building the right things over building things right. Teach people when to be tactical and when to be strategic.

Ultimately, I have to step up and fill the gaps until I can hire and/or train people to assist in that area. Before I had help all along. For example, I've interviewed about 200 candidates in 6 months for many different roles (developer, DBA, sysadmin, product, data). Mainly because interviewing was probably the most important thing I could be doing for the company and the developers. I'd be happy to go into more detail offline.