231–240 of 274 posts
Patients First
Important, not Immediate
Learners before Masters
Together, not Alone
Progress before Perfection
Adaptable, not Comfortable
As a software developer this is quite nebulous. The bank protects its reputation by prioritizing risk analysis and ethics first in all its internal decisions. As an industry these qualities do not exist in any professional capacity in software. In software, just like in absolutely every employer, we do whatever we want so long as it eases hiring, everything else be damned.
Back when I worked at EA there were obviously many horrible aspects to its culture. But one thing I always thought was cool was that they had a notion of a "razor". This was a principle or guideline that was worded specifically enough to clearly slice up a set of options into whether they fit it or not. When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make t…
> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), fre…
But going further, fun is not found in any particular feature; it’s an outcome of the total system. A game can be described as fun, or a sequence of events, but you can’t say that a helicopter spawn in an FPS is fun, or not, without further diving into all of the surrounding context.
And you dig deep enough and you realize that it’s not the helicopter specifically that you’re looking for — it’s the action-space it enables, or the potential counter-play (or lack thereof), or the satisfaction in steering, or that it’s simply the act of being rewarded for skilled play, or whatever.
Fun is at best a description that the game and its mechanisms didn’t impede the mechanisms you enjoyed operating.
It’s also why you have an internet argument where someone says “this game is not good, for reasons x,y,z”, and the response is simply “but I enjoyed it”, and it blows up into a nonsensical mess — the two are talking about totally different things; fun is only marginally correlated with good
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Agreed, it's much better to be upfront about it, to avoid wasting time and money on employees that don't fit in (and, as a side effect, avoid hurting those people). The reason I believe they're showing a work environment that would be toxic to me, is that the line "> adequate performance gets a generous severance package" does not stand alone, it's only part of it, they're giving me the general vibe that I should be…
> I like to do more than is expected, but if what is expected is by definition more than what is needed [..] Do (m)any companies attempt to drive sales by describing a product as "adequate"? If your child sits a school test and the teacher describes the result as "adequate" would you be content? In the workplace why wouldn't one want to always aim to do "good" work (which is very definitely one step above "adequate")…
..asked a comment on Hacker News. Maybe 'good' would be better replaced with 'of high quality'. Maybe.
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I think claiming that "we are a family" is actually the toxic one. It's incredibly dishonest to claim that. No one gets fired from a family because the family is "right-sizing".
Even before I had a job, reading "we are like family" in advertisements just left me thinking of "well you walk out on a family at 5pm just because the event ended then".
I thought that anti-values were the true, unstated values of an organization. Some examples from pockets of my org… “The more important you are, the less you touch code/servers/things” “Lots of meetings means you’re important.” (People will frequently humblebrag “I have 13 meetings today”) “Create a problem, present a problem, let someone else solve, celebrate the solution.” There’s also many positive values that I t…
I wonder if I’ve misunderstood, but as a developer, I like being given problems, rather than solutions. I’ve also found being able to formulate a customer or business problem well enough that others can come up with a good solution is a real skill which (IMHO) should receive recognition.
I love being presented with puzzles and problems. I hate people messing up, creating crises, and pushing the mess off to other people.
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If you advise people to "move fast, break things" then obviously you consider that this is a positive. "Break things" is also obviously not to be understood in isolation. Of course breaking things for no reason is not positive. It means that you will break things if you move fast and take risk and that it is unavoidable and worth it.
I see it being like this: Value: move fast (positive) Anti-value: break things (negative) Breaking things is not positive normally, but it's the compromise for moving fast.
This mirrors Netflix's old culture slide deck[0] > adequate performance gets a generous severance package > We’re a team, not a family; We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team [0] https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/
I really like the culture deck, but surprisingly I find myself disagreeing most strongly with the expenses part, "travel as you would if it were your own money." When I travel with my own money, I'm going to fly basic economy and stay in a Holiday Inn Express. But I would be pretty outraged if a billion-dollar tech company wanted me to do either of those things while traveling on its behalf. My current employer's app…
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If your colleagues are leveraging substantial undocumented overtime, you're going to find out eventually. If you know someone is in the office 40 hours a week and they submit massive pull requests first thing in the morning, even Monday mornings, for problems you know they hadn't solved or started the night or week before, you should suspect something's up. Sooner or later, if someone's breaking their neck, they will…
Why does it matter to you whether your peers are more productive than you because they are smarter than you, or because they work more? Is the former OK, but the latter "toxic"?
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>The implication here is that you should expect to work overtime and prioritize your job over all else. I don't think that's right. The slide says: """ Hard Work — Not Relevant We don't measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office [...] Sustained B-level performance despite effort generates severance Sustained A-level performance despite minimal effort is rewarded """ The message seem…
They've chosen the best possible version of "Sustained A-level performance," that the person is capable of doing that with minimal effort. There are a handful of people that are capable of producing "Sustained A-level performance" and for them this workplace probably seems ideal. Even for the engineers that could reach this bar, it's a very high standard to apply constantly. There's another slide that gives a slight…