Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

You can also exercise your voice by... talking. That might mean trying to convince leadership, it might mean trying to coordinate a bunch of people who agree with you but don't want to act on their own, or, who knows, it might mean something else. But there are quite a lot of things you can do that are short of threatening to quit or simply leaving.

(And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)

> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism?

The CEO (or at least the founder) created and cultivated the culture of the company thus far. If the culture is bad, they are the single largest reason why.

You are right in that execs won't seek out the blog article which criticizes their strategy... unless they actually want to steelman against their own position (which is a very useful activity but few people do it).

But the CEO doesn't need to find it on their own. They surround their self with a Board, investors, sales people, managers / leadership team, people from their MBA program, etc. the article just has to plant a seed which grows somewhere in that ecosystem.

That said, the article may not be right. The largest and most successful companies in the world aren't the ones with the best company culture. They simply work in industries where the money is so prolific that the people who want to work in the industry are already highly motivated. The CEO doesn't need access to this information because it isn't true; it simply tickles your cognitive biases.

This is why I strongly like on-call.

A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.

When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.

Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.

On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.

[for companies with idk 100 or less headcount] Good culture boils down to:

1. Predictability. Flavors of it: deliver features on time, roadmap stays mostly stable, on demand requests are known about ahead of time, business struggling or doing well transparent, tech debt / upkeep are first class citizens of planned work. All of this is project management and communication.

2. Org pays market rate and has good benefits. Employment is an exchange and esp for those who work hard, they deserve the recognition.

3. “People” (aka HR) is taken seriously. The team is expected to be checked in. Those who aren’t get fired. Ideally, there’s enough in place for individuals to come to their own conclusion that they should be fired. See #1. When a req is open it’s a top priority of whoever is in charge.

You can be PM-nonexistent or PM-heavy with lots of meetings and JIRA. Maybe you can accomplish all 3 above in both worlds. My experience is that process when done right moves the needle. No process leads to nonsense and process for the sake of process grinds it to a halt. It all gets better when the leaders are bought in or self aware enough to get out of the way.

If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize.

My assumption was that engineers were building an AI system to do this, not that they only made PRs from tickets - but I could be wrong.