Programming Your Culture

God says...

7:24 On the third day Eliab the son of Helon, prince of the children of Zebulun, did offer: 7:25 His offering was one silver charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:26 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:27 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:28 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:29 And for a sacrifice of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first year: this was the offering of Eliab the son of Helon.

----

Maybe we're supposed to laugh at the exactitude of the weight and "after the shekel of the sanctuary". "Helon" might be about telling a dog to heel.

Kinda a dud, but funny cause of exactitude.

God says... withdrawn suddenly stays stayed profess around impress arrows intently Just welcome Substance Times tardy Meanwhile variation swelling dispraised how_high found ship by_the_way let safety Now journeyed trembled birth what_do_you_want pale chilled do_I_have_to know 00END Ivy_league skin

At Google, I can think of a few points that influenced my perceptions:

- the first DMCA request we got, from the Church of Scientology

- the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape.

- when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of all user queries

- when John Battelle grilled Eric Schmidt on stage at a Web 2.0 conference and Eric declared "We would never trap user data."

All of those situations were thrust on us from the outside, and someone had to make a call. I think those kinds of decisions are critical culture-defining moments.

The decisions a company makes when everything is fine--or when you have plenty of time to plan--can set some of the company's culture. But to me, how your organization responds to a crisis is one of the best indicators of its culture.

It's probably not a good idea to hold up the "cheap door desk" as a good example; from what I've read it seems like it's turned into more of a cargo-cult-of-frugality thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401

(From a much longer thread, back when Steve Yegge accidentally posted his, uh, feelings about Amazon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 )

Except.. this doesn't actually work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...

> The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380.

> After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went ... up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.

It'll allow a false sense of entitlement; "I'm paying for it, so it's now ok to arrive late to pick up my child. It's my right".