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What defines a great company culture?

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Re: What defines a great company culture?

#161

Post by hbarka »

ysavir wrote: post #29

This thread isn't really clarifying or defining what a "great" culture constitutes, and it strongly suffers from survivorship bias. The author is pointing out that a necessary ingredient (among others omitted) is strong culture--which is something of a tautology. Of course a company with great culture has a strong culture; if it were a weak culture, it wouldn't be pervasive or definitive of the company. A company wit…

Reminds me of the “Bullet Holes and Abraham Wald” lesson in survivorship bias https://onebiteblog.com/finding-the-missing-bullet-holes/

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#162

Post by dan-robertson »

k__ wrote: post #149

When 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…

It is an important part of the job of the CEO to say what the values of the company should be, and make sure that the company tends towards following those values. The culture then follows by that. It is allowed but insufficient for the ceo to declare that the company is to be more open or collaborative—they must also make sure that management below them are deciding things (eg distribution of work to teams, how performance is assessed) in ways which promote those values. And sometimes values do need to change quickly to change the focus of a business. Maybe VC money runs out and profitability becomes more important than growth. Setting values can distribute the work of changing a business across all its staff.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#163

Post by Uhhrrr »

cosmodisk wrote: post #53

There are lots of variations but my list is this: No hypocrisy ( you all need to work hard while I'm only working 2h/day) No superstars (high performers are fine but no high performing jerks) No gossip Fair and easy to understand reward structure Things aren't made difficult deliberately ( 6 layers approval process) Laziness and poor attitudes aren't tolerated.

Gossip is useful, though, because social networks around work usually outpace org chart changes by (ballpark guess) 10x.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#164

Post by ketzo »

plank_time wrote: post #130
triceratops wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great Please explain more. Did they change more than just sexual and other harassment reporting and handling policies? Why did any of the changes have any effect on engineering?

The engineering culture didn’t working together to succeed. It incentivized people to keep creating new services that were a little different so that they could get promotions. It caused a lot of unnecessary work and an explosion of services. It was very stupid. Blame Thuan for that. He was a terrible CTO.

Okay, but what does Susan Fowler's memo about systemic sexual harassment have to do with incentivizing engineering siloes? You seem to draw a pretty direct line.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#165

Post by yaml-ops-guy »

tharkun__ wrote: post #154
yaml-ops-guy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

QED

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#166

Post by tharkun__ »

yaml-ops-guy wrote: post #165
tharkun__ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

QED

Hehehe, self fulfilling prophecy really. And no worries I get it. 'Problem' is, I'm still on the idealistic agile train myself and thus I will predictably (and I told you it was coming) fall into that pattern. Can't do anything about it. On the interwebs it's obviously hard to impossible to distinguish this from other forms of this. E.g. the SAFe consultant who feels dissed ;)

So yeah if you see me in real life, I'm fighting for proper agile value implementation in the organization around me and living and teaching them in my teams.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#167

Post by bonestamp2 »

alex_anglin wrote: post #89
BayAreaEscapee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video once, the goal of which was to sell to Microsoft execs how to market the first Xbox. The video explained that the target market wasn't fortysomething guys wearing suits in cubicles. It was skateboarders with tattoos on their neck. (And many other demographics that varied significantly from middle-aged IT people).

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.…

You might be right, but the overall point seems to be lost. Microsoft was used to marketing microsoft products to middle aged professionals and now they needed to be aware that they may need to think very differently about a very different product from the rest of their offerings (at the time).

Also, relatively expensive luxuries (such as video game consoles) do not need to be marketed toward people who have a lot of money. They just need an emotional appeal to the people who will want them -- then those people will either direct a larger percentage of their income toward those items or they'll motivate their parents/grand parents to buy them for them.

Lastly, even if a console costs $500, many poor people consider them a very cheap form of entertainment in the long run because that $500 console will last for several years where as a trip to the movies is very expensive since it only lasts a few hours.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#168

Post by ysavir »

nullserver wrote: post #159
dustinmoris wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you reinforce that behavior or put a stop to it? That's a serious dilemma.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#169

Post by nullserver »

ysavir wrote: post #168
nullserver wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you reinforce that behavior or put a stop to it? That's a serious dilemma.

Now and then I’ll let them get away with it. Does make me smile.

But I have no qualms saying no most of the time. Immunity did take time to develop.

Today they gave their best pleading voice for chickens. All while holding baby chicks. Super cute.

Re: What defines a great company culture?

#170

Post by phil_aut »

CountDrewku wrote: post #71

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.

> How about none at all?

This is like saying I don't want to have any behavior.

Every company has a culture. The difference is whether you are aware of it and working on it or not.

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