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Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

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11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#11
post #2

You haven’t articulated why those other technology categories are important to your company’s technical strategy outside of “don’t wanna miss the boat” (which in itself is rather dogmatic). Start there.

Indeed. What does the company do? It's entirely possible they don't need to be on any hype train.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#12
post #9
post #3

Start a project in your free time inside your office hours to show them they are wrong.

Is it right to invest so much time and energy in a company that isn't even yours? I can't see the point of doing work demos dressed as pet projects unless you have a performance bonus or significant equity at stake. Even then following blindly their "dogma" will make you look better, at least in the short and medium term. Besides, they may even sue you for IP violation if you use any of their data/code/business rules…

Is it right to invest so much time and energy in a company that isn't even yours? I can't see the point of doing work demos dressed as pet projects unless you have a performance bonus or significant equity at stake.

Yes it is right. A few different things will happen.

- They will see the error of thier ways, change direction, invest in your side project and give you a nice little raise/promotion/bonus for it (not likely)

- They will see the value of your idea, use it in thier business and give you a nice little pat on the head. You can use that on your resume and get another job making more money.

- They will not like your idea, but you still learned a lot and you can still leverage that to make more money somewhere else based on what you have learned.

Unless I have some great way of monetizing a side project (which I never do), I’d much rather do a side project for my employer. I get to see it out in the wild, I have a defined goal based on a real world use case, and it keeps me more disciplined from taking shortcuts because I know it will be reviewed by others and I can get thier opinions - even my managers.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#13
If you're at a startup (guessing so since it's HN) it's almost always better to commit hard to one approach, have that fail, and just pivot to something else. In any case, you'll be competing with teams who have chosen to commit hard to one thing, so diversifying is likely to win only if there are true synergies in doing these other things.

Dogma is it's own thing, and it's easy to spot because the argument in support of a dogmatic position will stop far short of making the point in terms of net revenue (future and present) or proxies like development latency. That's bad, but putting all your eggs in one basket isn't dogma necessarily. Diversification needs justification.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#14
It depends on the size of the organization. Most places will have the bulk of people working on a solid safe solution/product that gets tweeks and improvements. The cash cow. As well as this they will usually have a few skunkworks/blue sky people exploring new ideas.

It's all about risk. Keep the money coming in only until one of the research efforts proves it's case or the risk/reward allows more funding.

If you want to do something usual then get into one of the research efforts or do the hard yards (probably in your own time) and actually make a business case for some other tech.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#15
Why do you care if “your” company is behind in two years? Unless you have equity in the company, you have no interests in the long term viability of the company more than doing the best work you can while you are there.

As long as you are using marketable technologies (and you are), if that company folds tomorrow, you go out and get another job - more than likely making more money - and call it a day.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#18
Is it dogma if it is correct?

You didn't really say why your company shouldn't go all in on React Native. Maybe they're small and they would benefit from being focused on React Native for now?

I'm kinda confused on why ML and AR need to be focused on instead of or along with React Native.... kinda different things and not mutually exclusive. There's certainly some dogma out there about jumping into a laundry list of hot topics too, even when they don't fit.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#19
post #8

My company is investing heavily in ML capabilities despite having no strategy whatsoever on what to do with it. The fundamental problem is a lack of customer focus. Technologists get so far up their own butts that they think technology choices are more important than solving customer problems.

This is the correct answer. Whenever someone argues for a certain technology (e.g. for rewriting in a different language or framework), ask for the benefit to the customer.

Re: Ask HN: What to do about dogma in a company culture?

#20
post #18

Is it dogma if it is correct? You didn't really say why your company shouldn't go all in on React Native. Maybe they're small and they would benefit from being focused on React Native for now? I'm kinda confused on why ML and AR need to be focused on instead of or along with React Native.... kinda different things and not mutually exclusive. There's certainly some dogma out there about jumping into a laundry list of…

It's not about ML, AR, or react native, these are just examples you're getting distracted by. There are a ton of other examples anyone could give, but it's a distraction to focus on a specific example when the premise is ignored.
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