I feel like this and all the AI productivity things could be boiled down to one simple rule: AI just amplifies whatever you already have.
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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
111–120 of 135 posts
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#112I 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
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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem. The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers. The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment…
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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Throughout my career, I’ve described this as “polite persistence is how you effect change.”
Unpolitely breaching walls and doors is also how you effect change, but I prefer the polite persistence for a better long term effect as well.
"You can just do things"
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're listing examples where there is no market
Correction: I'm listing examples where "the market" doesn't function like an ideal, healthy market. Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.
Right. So these are all examples of market forces being irrelevant. This isn't the market showing that culture doesn't matter: when the winner is predetermined, culture or anything else couldn't _possibly_ matter, as long as it is not so critical that getting it wrong kills the company in the most literal sense.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#118I 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…
> whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs I love companies like that! Everything is documented, stuff just works, CI builds... If something is broken, you just open ticket, and responsible person takes care of it! You do not have to investigate when Judy returns from holidays... With remote work I can spend more time with kids.. "Company culture" usually means you have to listen to shitty stor…
> "Company culture" usually means you have to listen to shitty stories, provide social life for some lonely people, and do unpaid emotional labour!
Yes, a company culture is about dealing with other humans. Such as having empathy and compassion for your coworkers, help each others grow and go through tough times. Removing the human aspect from companies is how you end up with soulless environments where problems aren’t address
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#119The elephant in the room nobody's willing to notice is the asinine idea of infinite growth, which absolutely throws all opposition to using any New Shiny Tech X That Multiplies Productivity X² Times out of the window. The adherents of this infinite growth seem to be bound by some kind of blood-signed obligation to use everything and anything out there that could sustain their doomed run. Fucking know your limits. Bec…
Infinite growth isn't a myth in general, the world economy does grow over time and for obvious reasons. But of course this doesn't necessarily translate to individual companies growing at the same rate all the time.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#120This is an AI written advertisement with a bunch of platitudes.