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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#41

Post by danpalmer »

CSMastermind wrote: post #32
sghiassy wrote: post #31

I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on

No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.

It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same.

I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#42

Post by esseph »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #33
newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful. Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture. Now what?

I remember the devops guys preaching about this "better culture". They talked about a no-blame culture for one. It resulted in a bunch of virtue signaling where I worked. At the end of the day, the people repeatedly causing ops related problems were canned anyway. They were still blamed of course, just behind closed doors. This "culture" went so far that there was even a company named after it called "Blameless", whi…

It's still around and in use a lot of places, but that means you actually have to have an engineering culture at the company and less of an entrenched MBA type.

https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#43

Post by esseph »

derektank wrote: post #22
sublinear wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with productivity? Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less. Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from t…

> Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.

> Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.

Wrong.

You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you.

You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door.

You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read.

It's only productive if the work produces value.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#44

Post by apical_dendrite »

CSMastermind wrote: post #32
sghiassy wrote: post #31

I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on

No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.

AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#45

Post by ghosty141 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #32
sghiassy wrote: post #31

I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on

No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.

Imo a good example are soccer teams. To be in the top 5 the team has to work as one hivemind which only works if the people making up the team (coaches and players) actually work together on both the sport side as well as on the social side of things.

Different to corporate jobs those teams spend tremendous amounts on scouting, analysis etc.. They don't just look for the best player but also one who fits as a person.

I think the core issue is that management hasn't picked this up yet and understanding team chemistry etc is totally undervalued. I'd argue this is partly due to this being hard to measure and very hard to do.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#46

Post by dolni »

shimman wrote: post #40
newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful. Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture. Now what?

Argue the need to implement workplace democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy The idea that we shouldn't be able to vote for our bosses is completely ridiculous. If we had truly collaborative workplaces it would probably unlikely another $50 trillion worth of value once you give workers the ability to exercise their voice (passionate workers want stable working environments, if executives are nev…

As a worker, you can exercise your voice... by getting another job. That is your vote.

The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring.

A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory.

I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#47

Post by derektank »

esseph wrote: post #43
derektank wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.

> Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity. Wrong. You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you. You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door. You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read. It's only productive if the work produces value.

To extend these metaphors, AI is adding supports to your tunnel, nudging your steering wheel to keep you going straight, and ensuring that the code you produce doesn't have vulns.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#48

Post by sph87 »

andrii wrote: post #35

It always felt like AI adoption should come from the bottom up, driven by people who are actually in a position to assess whether it makes any positive impact. Granted, that only works if your culture encourages agency in the first place.

Welcome to a day in the life. The company I work for prides themselves on a culture of agency and letting developers be developers. I am pushing the AI revolution but the compliance requirements and modern Luddite zeitgeist are a daily source of frustration. If the AI isn’t perfect then it’s slop. But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Fingers crossed though. Every failure brings you one step closer to an inevitable success.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#49

Post by riffic »

sghiassy wrote: post #31

I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on

Studies have been performed and they come to the conclusion the highest performing teams are the ones with greatest psychological safety:

https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#50

Post by tikhonj »

zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

Part of the value is to help the people stuck in bad cultures realize that it's the culture that's broken, not them. It's easy to lose sight of that! If you can recognize it, it's easier to do something about it whether that's changing your behavior and expectations, trying to change the culture bottom up or leaving altogether.
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