> I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig.
The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause.
> Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.
Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there.
Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems.
> But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?
That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed.
The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:
1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next.
2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it.
What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted.
But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment.
Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do.
An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across.
An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!