How about none at all? I'm not joining a cult. I go to work to get paid and that's it. I don't need some weird culture shoved down my throat and I certainly don't need to be thinking about work 24/7.
You just described a culture.
What defines a great company culture?
151–160 of 176 posts
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#152When people talk about company culture, I always have to think about a new CEO that started in a company I worked for. He was there for a few months and always talked about how things we do (and did for years, since the company existed) weren part of the company culture. Like he could simply walk in and say what the culture of the company is. I understand that he wanted to turn the company around, but he talked like…
Well I've seen culture change in a day. If you have enough power and can unilaterally change an incentive structure you can get people to fall in line really quickly.
When I worked at a bank we had pretty predatory selling practices and a fitting culture. This was starting to catch the eye of the media and government so the Bank exec stepped in and said the parties over and If anyone doesn't conform to these new rules then they're out on the street. That day, the culture changed, and everyone was happy to changed because they didn't want the existential consequences to happen to them.
There's the softly softly approach over years and then there's the speeding u-turn. Both can work. The latter just takes more grit.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#153Is there any reason to think Facebook or Amazon are examples of "great company culture"? From the outside looking in, these companies seem like the two most toxic workplaces in big tech. What makes their culture great?
Came here to say the same thing. Neither company represents cultures or values that enrich the communities they are a part of.
I think parasitic capitalism is a feature not a bug. no pun intended. There's not many companies that give back these days. Look at how hard Amazon pushed back against unions.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "Agile" problem is more like a bunch of consultants and managers polarizing the population while the middle waves their hands and goes "uh, guys, you know 'agile' isn't the same as Scrum, and many more implementations exist beyond it, right?". As the consultants and managers keep insisting that if you don't want to participate in "Agile Scrum" (how in the world did we get this abomination of a word anyway?), you…
I’ve always found it ironic when coming across discussions of people’s frustration with Agile (uppercase A) only to see the “you’re doing it wrong” comment-which I’ve seen often right Here on HN, among other places. Mainly because wasn’t one of the foundational elements of agile (lowercase A) “people and tools over processes”? Lately Agile feels as ritualistic and process-heavy as a checklist for a rocket launch.
Actually, no it wasn't. The one you are referring to is:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Also "Agile" doesn't feel ritualistic and process heavy. I'm probably now doing what you refer to as the "you're doing it wrong".
Agile itself is not ritualistic and process heavy. Specific frameworks and people are. E.g. take a SAFe consultant trying to get a paycheck from a large corporation. Of course that's gonna be ritualistic and process heavy. That's the point of SAFe and even in the name. They're trying to sell a "safe" implementation of agile practices to enterprise organizations. Safe in the sense of not actually having to change all that much. Basically keep what you have but you can call yourself agile now. Comes with a rubber stamp too now!
That's way different than a company trying to actually live agile values as defined in the manifesto. E.g. throw away your issue tracking tool to build your software and put a bunch of post it notes all over the walls at the office. Talk to your peers. Build awesome software together from rough drafts on a post it. Or how a friend of mine describes working at Tesla: "Jira issues? Yeah we write those after implementation is done so that the AC match what we did". Awesome!
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#155Is there any reason to think Facebook or Amazon are examples of "great company culture"? From the outside looking in, these companies seem like the two most toxic workplaces in big tech. What makes their culture great?
At very least they are large enough to exhibit most scenarios, good and bad.
If you take IBM as an example, on the one hand you have the IBM people like to make fun of but then you also have teams inside IBM who are extremely sharp (e.g. the people working on their Silicon). That being said culture isn't technology.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#156How about none at all? I'm not joining a cult. I go to work to get paid and that's it. I don't need some weird culture shoved down my throat and I certainly don't need to be thinking about work 24/7.
That in itself is a perfectly valid culture - e.g. happy and relaxed employees who actually want to come into work in the morning are probably more useful than even extremely clever people bored out of their minds being berated by egotistical managers.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#157A great company culture is one where everyone is aligned to the mission of the company and everyone is aligned, empowered and incentivized in this exact same direction. I’ve worked at a couple of companies that had great culture and the best was Uber. Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo, was hands down the best company I’ve ever been at. Everyone was aligned together which meant that everyone was working…
No. The culture seemed great at the time, because all the skeletons were still in the closet.
Alcohol was rampant. There was all sorts of sexual harassment and execs having affairs with reports. There was politics and subterfuge and extremely non-blameless postmortems (i.e. you were fired). People were working 60 hour weeks.
Hiring was a total shit show. There was no standard practice -- managers were hiring their friends left and right. Nepotism, not meritocracy, ruled. Recruiters blatantly lied to candidates about offers. There were a few suicides.
People were spying on their ex's, celebrities, fighting and committing fraud, giving friends credits or discounts. Thousands upon thousands of borked fares where drivers or riders were respectively paid or charged incorrectly.
From a technical standpoint, it couldn't be worse. Sure it was fast and exciting, but some of the worst, biggest technical debt decisions ever were made in this time. Almost all of the engineers who made this decisions are no longer there. China, schemaless, M3, all the ops shenanigans. On call was a nightmare. Teams were competing internally by solving the same problem but not talking to each other.
You wanna know why the culture seemed great? Because they were burning money like there is tomorrow. There was no oversight. So the firehouse got turned off, the party was over.
Fowler was a symptom. Her memo didn't cause culture to implode, it was already a time bomb.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed! Microsoft is a great example of a company which had... a) many cultural shifts over time b) still is a company with many different sub team cultures ...and regardless of where they were on the spectrum they have always managed to sell Windows, Office and SQL Server very well.
> a) many cultural shifts over time MS lost a decade because of stack ranking under Ballmer. Dropping that has allowed them to get back to being more competitive with Google and Apple. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...
Other companies can be successful with stack ranking (or removing lower performers) like Goldman Sachs or big law firms. I feel like the culture issue is somewhat orthogonal: you can have a failing company with great culture (what was the culture like at Sun or Netscape? I don’t know but wouldn’t be surprised if it was good). You can also have a successful company with a bad/lacking/incohesive culture, or a culture you don’t like)
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a middle-aged IT person, that sounds like poor advice to me for two reasons: 1. Marketing to the 'cool kids' with the expectation that everyone else will follow-along... is probably not good advice in the absence some key differentiation. For Microsoft, this could have just been the massive amounts of capital they could deploy towards getting the Xbox to market. Even then, just spending money is not a strategy. 2.…
> Middle-aged IT people are likely to have more disposable income to afford a $X00 device and a library of games (where the real revenue is). This is not as relevant as many think... Good sales people know that.. - it's hard to sell expensive items to anyone, let alone middle aged people who have many other things to pay for - the best people to convince a middle age person to purchase something are their children -…
Daughters with puppy dog eyes are bad for the budget.
It was neat when I overheard the oldest coaching her sisters on how to plead in a cute tone.
Re: What defines a great company culture?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the differences between hardware and software culture?
Software people are comparatively terrible at schedules, schedule fidelity, long term planning (in terms of what needs to be considered now to satisfy anticipated requirements later), cost management, cost over time modeling, and day one quality, among other things.
Well, having worked at a hardware company I think you over estimate how accurate hardware schedules are. And day one quality is more about how you define day one I think. (Some types of hardware) you can release A01 to "internal customers" but the broader public's experience is over a year and several spins later.
No disagreement on the long term planning aspect though.